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Dominic Lopes proposed that pictures differ from other kinds of representations in that only pictures explicitly non-commit to properties. That is to say, with pictures, the price of representing something — say someone standing in front of someone else — is not being able to represent other things, such as the features of things behind the person represented. It is argued that this is not essential or unique to depiction, even though it is common only in pictures. Moreover, explicit non-commitment is only a feature of pictures’ fleshed-out contents: it does not appear in their bare-bones contents.

With some sense of the relation between bare-bones content and fleshed-out content on the table, this chapter answers four important questions. First, why do we flesh out the contents of pictures in the way that we do? Second, what is the source of explicit non-commitment in fleshed-out content? Third, how and why do we flesh out pictures’ bare-bones contents consistently as we change the position from which we view pictures? And finally, anamorphic pictures challenge the answers offered to the first three questions, so how should the current account handle them? This completes the account of pictorial content and picture perception.

Chapters 6 and 7 describe the features of pictures’ bare-bones and fleshed-out contents, and raise important questions about how the two relate to one another. This chapter suggests that the relation between them is analogous to the relation that was supposed to exist between sense data and the objects we take ourselves to perceive. Sense data were a bad idea in the philosophy of perception, but they are a useful tool for understanding pictorial content.

This chapter considers John Haugeland’s original proposal for how bare-bones content should figure in an account of depiction. It argues that his account fails and identifies where the account fails, transparency, and the other conditions set forth in Chapters 2 and 3 step in to fill the gaps and explain Haugeland’s mistakes. The upshot is that Haugeland introduced an important (and neglected) tool for understanding pictures, but he did not use it to its fullest potential.

Transparency, when combined with repleteness, sensitivity, and richness, yields a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a representational system to be pictorial. Like the other three conditions, transparency makes no mention of picture perception. This structural account intuitively captures pictorial representation without appealing to perception, which is the main goal of Part I. The following chapters unpack some ramifications of the view. Understanding transparency requires drawing a distinction between pictures’ bare-bones contents and their fleshed-out contents (Haugeland, 1991). This distinction becomes very important in Part II as well.