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This essay was written as a contribution to a symposium in honour of the distinguished aesthetician Richard Wollheim, and begins with a sympathetic summary of his highly influential account of depiction in terms of the successfully realized intention that viewers have a certain sort ofseeing-inexperience faced with a picture depicting a given subject. While agreeing with the basic thrust of Wollheim's account, which makes a certain sort of visual experience in appropriate viewers criterial of achieved depiction, it differs with Wollheim as to whether that experience is invariably one of seeing in, given the twofold attention to subject and surface that the notion, as Wollheim conceives it, necessarily involves. An alternative account is sketched, Wollheimian in spirit, but closer than most recent proposals to the classic Gombrichian view of depiction as involving something akin to illusion. It is proposed that a picture that depicts a subject is one fashioned so as to yield an experience ofas-if seeingof its subject, but not an experience that engenders the false beliefs typical of illusion.

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.

Everyone recognizes that viewers can see things in art‐grade pictures other than their proper, pictorial subjects. Theories of depiction devise criteria by which ‘correct’ interpretation of pictures sidelines these deviant ‘things’ in favour of the true subject. This chapter looks at such phenomena from a positive angle. First, the ubiquity of openings for justified ‘separation seeing‐in’, as it is called here, is set forth. Two sources are distinguished: (1) the manner in which the pictorial design is executed; (2) the reduction of dimensions from subject to surface design. Attention then shifts to the contribution of separation seeing‐in to pictorial experience. It is argued that any adequate viewing of an art‐grade picture involves recognition of one (or more) ‘separation subjects’ and that giving due attention to that provides fuller access to the content of the picture. In consequence, the latter turns out to be a good deal stranger than is commonly imagined.

This chapter begins with an exposition and critique of Ernst Gombrich's illusionistic theory of the experience of realistic pictures. It then modulates to its main theme — a critical examination of Richard Wollheim's view of pictorial perception as a matter of seeing one thing in another — which is considered in both its early and late forms. Each of these forms is shown to be markedly deficient. The chapter then lays down guidelines for a correct theory and scouts a number of candidates. It concludes by articulating worries about Kendall Walton's ‘make-believe seeing’ conception of pictorial perception.

The aim in this chapter is to provide an intelligible conception of the notion of twofoldness that Richard Wollheim has used in his account of seeing‐in in order to describe the phenomenological character of pictorial seeing or pictorial experience. To this end, it draws on Aristotle's doctrine of the unity of matter and form in compound substances as this is expounded mainly in his Metaphysics. It then explains how Aristotle's account of this unity may give us a way to think of the complex content of a twofold act of pictorial perception, in a way that allows us to account for properties that Wollheim attributed to pictorial experience, and further, to resolve objections raised to the idea that pictorial seeing is twofold.

Some (Podro, Lopes) think that sometimes our experience of pictures is ‘inflected’. What we see in these pictures involves, somehow, an awareness of features of their design. This chapter clarifies the idea of inflection, arguing that the thought must be that what is seen in the picture is something with properties which themselves need characterizing by reference to that picture's design, conceived as such. It argues that there is at least one case of inflection, so understood. Proponents of inflection have claimed great significance for the phenomenon. But what might that significance be? Inter alia, the chapter considers Lopes's proposal that inflection solves a central problem in pictorial aesthetics concerning the value of pictures, the ‘puzzle of mimesis’. It argues that the puzzle, and the proposed solution, both turn on aspects of Lopes's conception of seeing‐in. Other accounts of seeing‐in can make no sense of either. It further argues that the phenomenon of inflection itself puts pressure on the sort of account Lopes offers. Thus, it is hard to offer a view which both holds that inflection occurs and is able to make clear sense of why it matters.

It has been argued that picture perception is sometimes, but not always, ‘inflected’. Sometimes each of the two aspects of the twofold experience of seeing‐in influences the other such that the picture's design ‘inflects’, or is ‘recruited’ into, the depicted scene. The aim of this chapter is to cash out what is meant by these metaphors. Our perceptual state is different when we see an object face to face or when we see it in a picture. But there is also a further distinction: our perceptual state is very different if we perceive objects in pictures in an inflected or uninflected manner. The question is what this difference amounts to. The answer put forward in this chapter is that it is a difference of attention. In the case of inflected, but not uninflected, picture perception, we are consciously attending to certain properties: to ‘design‐scene properties’: relational property that cannot be fully characterized without reference to both the picture's design and the depicted object. I defend this way of interpreting inflected picture perception from some important objections and emphasize the importance of this, inflected, way of perceiving pictures.

In this chapter, two theories that offer alternative characterizations of the relationship between viewers’ experiences of pictures and ordinary visual perception are explored: illusion theory and seeing-in theory. The illusion theory asserts that pictures represent by taking advantage of ambiguities or failures in visual discrimination so as to cause viewers to have visual experiences as of their subjects. On the other hand, seeing-in theory proposes that pictures’ subjects are seen in the marks, colours, and textures of pictures’ surfaces. The concept of twofoldness is also discussed. The author does not consider either theory adequate, and argues that an adequate perceptual theory must blend features of each.

Argues that pretence is one clear indication of rationality. Makes a suggestion about the kind of evidence of pretence in animals we should be looking for. This suggestion makes claims about pretence hard to justify by comparison with, say, claims about imitation; Appeals to Morgan's canon in defence of this stance. Suggests that we can learn something about pretence by connecting it with the phenomenon of seeing‐in. Finally, offers a speculation on the evolutionary history of the capacity that underlies pretence.

As the powerful and persistent impact of photojournalism shows, people respond empathically to scenes in images and to the emotions that those scenes express. Without question, looking at images contributes to the development of empathic character traits. This paper argues for a more specific thesis: images contribute in a unique manner to the development of empathic character traits. The argument is that only images afford experiences of seeing-in, seeing-in mediates unique empathic responses, and these unique empathic responses to images can enrich empathic responses in real life situations. In order to make this argument, a component-based model of the syndrome of empathic responses is introduced.

Perceiving something as an artwork usually requires a kind of ‘seeing-in’—seeing past surfaces to what is represented and/or to what is expressed. This gives artworks a kind of double identity that is matched by a kind of double consciousness on the part of the perceiver. This chapter describes the role of the imagination in sustaining this double consciousness, which is related to so-called ‘aesthetic distance’. It considers various similarities and differences between moral perception and aesthetic perception.

What is it to see something in a picture? Most accounts of pictorial experience—or, to use Richard Wollheim's term, ‘seeing-in’—seek, in various ways, to explain it in terms of how pictures somehow display the looks of things. However, some ‘things’ that we apparently see in pictures do not display any ‘look’. In particular, most pictures depict empty space, but empty space does not seem to display any ‘look’—at least not in the way material objects do. How do we see it in pictures, if we do? This chapter offers an account of pictorial perception of empty space by elaborating on Wollheim's claim that ‘seeing-in’ is permeable to thought. It ends by pointing to the aesthetic relevance of seeing—or not seeing—empty space in pictures.

This chapter argues that subjects can be in touch with things outside their immediate environment, and applies this conclusion to compassion. Three cases of being in touch with spatial properties are considered, in which subjects “see in their mind’s eye,” episodically remember, and vividly anticipate properties of objects. Though none of these states are perceptions in the familiar sense, it is argued that they share some of perception’s irreplaceable epistemic goodness. Differences in being in touch are then found to coincide with intuitive moral distinctions in cases in which agents are or are not pained by spatially distant, past, and future pains. Finally, a potential objection is addressed about agents becoming ineffective through getting caught up in some thought of distant pain.