The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. , No. 
ISSN –
October 
ART MEDIA AND THE SENSE MODALITIES:
TACTILE PICTURES
B D M.M. L
As the fact that art theory is called ‘aesthetics’ reminds us, artworks are
things perceived through the senses. Thus an understanding of art depends
in part on an understanding of sense-perception. Historians, critics and art
theorists stand to gain by the enormous progress that has been made in
recent decades in the psychology and neurobiology of perception. Indeed, it
is a lamentable fact that so few have taken advantage of the opportunity.
Few art historians or art theorists, for instance, have carried on the work
E.H. Gombrich began in Art and Illusion. On the contrary, the trend has
been to repudiate it.1 One aim of this paper is to demonstrate some of the
benefits for aesthetics of taking the empirical sciences of the mind seriously. I
shall proceed by contesting one widespread and largely unchallenged conception of the way art is grounded in perception.
This conception can be expressed in the form of two doctrines. The first
is a doctrine in aesthetics which holds that the arts comprise a collection of
art media, each of which is characteristically perceived through a different
sense modality. I call this ‘the doctrine of medium specificity’.2 This doctrine
depends on a further doctrine in the theory of perception, according to
which it is possible to distinguish the sense modalities in certain ways. Obviously we need to know how the senses differ, if we are to use their differences to individuate the art media.
E.g., Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: the Logic of the Gaze (Yale UP, ).
I borrow the term from Noël Carroll, ‘The Specificity of Media in the Arts’, The Journal of
Aesthetic Education,  (), pp. –.
1
2
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DOMINIC M.M. LOPES
I do not deny that there are different art forms, such as music, literature
and dance, or that sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell are different senses.
Rather I shall try to show that influential ways of drawing the necessary
distinctions are inadequate. Since the doctrine of medium specificity and the
doctrine concerning the sense modalities are closely related, an appreciation
of where one goes awry will help us to see problems with the other. Thus my
argument, if it is persuasive, will demonstrate how aesthetics and philosophy
of mind can learn from each other.
I. THE SPECIFICITY OF ART MEDIA
It does not seem true, at first glance, that the art media are in fact individuated in any straightforward way by the sense modalities. Difficult
questions fray the edges of the doctrine of medium specificity. What, for
instance, is the medium of opera? Is it music or drama, seen or heard?
Perhaps it is distinctively both. We might say that some art media are basic,
being perceived through one sense modality, while others are composites of
the basic media and engage multiple senses. However, there are two
difficulties with this response. One is posed by media such as literature,
which need not be perceived through any single sense modality – a novel or
a poem is normally neither essentially seen nor essentially heard. But we
may also wonder what purpose the doctrine of medium specificity is meant
to serve in the light of the existence of multimedia artworks. Many art ‘installations’ deliberately cross the boundaries of the art media as they are
traditionally defined, in order to criticize and undermine the traditional
definitions.
Despite its inexactness, the doctrine of medium specificity is largely taken
for granted by philosophers of art (Carroll is a notable exception). To understand this, we do well to consider the role the doctrine plays in aesthetics.
No doubt it is true that the doctrine serves multiple purposes. For example,
it underlies and justifies the organization of aesthetics into specialized
subdisciplines, each devoted to the study of a different art form. But I am
concerned with what might be called, for want of better terms, the conceptual or theoretic role of the doctrine – that is, the role the doctrine plays
in framing theories of the arts, rather than its role in structuring aesthetics as
an institution.
One of the tasks aesthetics has set itself at least since Lessing’s Laocoon has
been to identify the essential features of each of the artistic media, usually
with reference to features of works that can be perceived only through
specific sense modalities. Thus Lessing characterized sculpture as spatial and
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ART MEDIA AND THE SENSE MODALITIES: TACTILE PICTURES
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visual, as against music, which is temporal and aural.3 A more recent
example is Gregory Currie’s Image and Mind, which opens with an attempt to
identify the features unique to film. According to Currie, what distinguishes
film from other art forms is that films are made up of moving pictures,
visually discerned and interpreted.4
This task of characterizing each art medium is central to aesthetics
because the doctrine of medium specificity has normative implications. We
never judge a work of art aesthetically good or bad tout court, but always
good or bad as a painting, song or dance. Thus medium-specific features of
a work are features the appreciation of which is necessary for us to judge it a
good or bad work of its kind.5 It is this principle that underlies our commonsense views that a good piece of music must sound good, because music is
essentially aural, and a good picture must look good, because pictures by contrast are essentially visual.
A more sophisticated instance of this train of thought, one which has had
some impact on painting in this century, is the art critic Clement Greenberg’s pronouncement that painting should be purified through a
renunciation of the ‘illusion of the third dimension’ in favour of abstract
two-dimensional visual effects.6 Greenberg argued that since each art form is
distinguished by its physical medium, each should pursue medium-specific
effects. As pictures are the distinctively visual medium, they should pursue
purely visual effects. ‘The desire for purity’, writes Greenberg (p. ),
‘works ... to put an ever higher premium on sheer visibility and an even
lower one on the tactile and its associations’.
II. PICTURES AS VISUAL
For the remainder of this paper I shall concentrate on the case of pictures.
Pictures, unlike operas and ‘installations’, seem to fit the principle that any
art form can be individuated by reference to a sense modality in which it
must be perceived. Pictures are widely viewed as essentially and paradigmatically visual representations. While sculpture and film are also classified as
‘visual arts’, sculpture can be touched and film heard, so they are not purely
or paradigmatically visual. Depiction is the purely visual art form. Evidence
3 Cf. Malcolm Budd, Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry and Music (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
), pp. –.
4 Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science (Cambridge UP,
), pp. –.
5 Cf. Kendall Walton, ‘Categories of Art’, The Philosophical Review,  (), pp. –.
6 C. Greenberg, ‘The New Sculpture’, in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon
Press, ), pp. –.
© The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly, 
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DOMINIC M.M. LOPES
that this is an article of faith is also found in aesthetic judgements concerning pictures (for the doctrine of medium specificity has normative implications). Thus we take delight in what pictures have to offer by looking at
them – our delight in Van Gogh’s painted irises is a visual delight. A remark
that ‘A good picture does not have to look good’ appears absurd (provided,
of course, that it is an aesthetic judgement and not, say, a historical or
financial one).
If it is true that pictures are essentially visual, that we necessarily appreciate them by using our eyes, then it follows that a person bereft of sight
cannot appreciate pictures. Indeed, there is no better evidence that we do
commonly define pictures as essentially visual than the fact that it is unchallenged orthodoxy, as much among the blind as among the sighted, that
blind people cannot use or understand pictures. The suggestion that they
could sounds like a paradox. It seems absurd to deny that pictures are visual
representations.
Here is an illustration of the way this thinking pervades not only our
common-sense beliefs about pictures but also the theoretical writings of
scholars in the arts. In an essay on the American painter Jasper Johns, the
art historian and critic Leo Steinberg asks the question: what is a picture? It
is Steinberg’s way of answering this question that I wish to stress. For what
he does is imagine a conversation in which a painter tries to explain what a
picture is to a blind man. The conversation starts off thus:
Painter: A picture, you see, is a piece of cotton duck nailed to a stretcher.
Blind Man: Like this? (He holds it up with its face to the wall.)
Painter: A picture is what a painter puts whatever he has into.
Blind Man: You mean like a drawer?
Painter: Not quite; remember it’s flat.7
The premise upon which Steinberg’s reasoning is based is clear. You know
you have a good definition of a picture if you can use it to explain what a
picture is to a congenitally or early blind person. This is because pictures are
essentially visual, and so by definition inaccessible to people who have never
had vision.
III. TACTILE PICTURES AND BLIND PEOPLE
There has been a spotted history of making maps from wires and nails or
embossed paper for the use of the blind. By the early nineteenth century the
Perkins School for the Blind in the United States had assembled a small
7 Leo Steinberg, ‘Jasper Johns: the First Seven Years of his Art’, in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (Oxford UP, ), p. .
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collection of tactile atlases for its students.8 Even so, it has been a widespread
assumption, as much unchallenged among the blind as among the sighted,
that pictures can be of little use in the absence of vision. The matter was
only recently subject to serious empirical scrutiny by the psychologists John
M. Kennedy, Susanna Millar and their colleagues.9
Kennedy had completed a survey of rock art from different cultures, and
had noticed that lines are universally used to depict surface edges.10 He
reasoned that since surface edges can be detected by touch as well as sight,
pictures made up of touchable lines should depict touchable edges. To test
this hypothesis, Kennedy made raised-line outline drawings of familiar
objects and scenes (e.g., a hand, a cup, pieces of fruit, a face, an automobile
and a living-room interior). These were shown to congenitally or early blind
volunteers who had no previous experience with pictures of any kind, and
also to sighted subjects wearing blindfolds. Kennedy (Drawing and the Blind
ch. ) found that all three groups recognized the objects depicted at about
the same rate.
Before drawing any conclusions from this, it would be wise to register a
few cautions. First, the success rate for recognizing pictures by touch is
much lower than it would be for vision. Second, some pictures are more
frequently recognized than others. Third, there is also some variation from
individual to individual: while some blind people recognized many images,
others recognized few. Kennedy isolated several salient variables that
account for these three discrepancies. As to the first, the overall lower recognition rates for touch are due to its poor acuity in comparison with vision.
This makes it harder to distinguish, for instance, a picture of a fork from one
of a tulip. There is no evidence that blindness itself is a cognitive barrier to
picture recognition: blind people and sighted people wearing blindfolds
performed at the same level. As to the second, the variation in recognition
8 Billie L. Bentzen, ‘Tactile Graphic Displays in the Education of Blind Persons’, in W.
Schiff and E. Foulke (eds), Tactual Representation: a Sourcebook (Cambridge UP, ), pp. –.
9 For tactile picture recognition, see John M. Kennedy, Nathan Fox and Kathy O’Grady,
‘Can “Haptic Pictures” Help the Blind See?’, Harvard Graduate School of Education Bulletin, 
(), pp. –; and J.M. Kennedy and N. Fox, ‘Pictures to See and Pictures to Touch’, in D.
Perkins and B. Leondar (eds), The Arts and Cognition ( Johns Hopkins UP, ), pp. –. For
drawing abilities among the blind, see S. Millar, ‘Visual Experience or Translation Rules?
Drawing the Human Figure by Blind and Sighted Children’, Perception,  (), pp. –;
and J.M. Kennedy, ‘Blind People Recognizing and Making Haptic Pictures’, in M.A. Hagen
(ed.), The Perception of Pictures (New York: Academic Press, ), Vol. , pp. –. See also
J.M. Kennedy, Drawing and the Blind: Pictures to Touch (Yale UP, ), which contains an extensive bibliography.
10 J.M. Kennedy and J. Silver, ‘The Surrogate Functions of Lines in Visual Perception:
Evidence from Antipodal Rock and Cave Artwork Sources’, Perception,  (), pp. –;
and J.M. Kennedy and A.S. Ross, ‘Outline Picture Perception by the Songe of Papua’,
Perception,  (), pp. –.
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DOMINIC M.M. LOPES
rates from picture to picture depends on the amount of detail in each
picture. Additional detail decreases ambiguity and misidentification. By the
same token, putting images in the context of a story vastly improves recognition, as does depicting objects as parts of larger scenes (e.g., a tulip in a
vase will not be taken for a fork). This is significant because abundant
contextual clues help sighted people interpret images. As to the third, the
variation in recognition rates among individuals is a consequence of variable
tactile exploration skills. Those who have been taught to explore a surface
slowly and systematically have better success with raised-line drawings. We
may conclude that blind people have picture-recognition skills independent
of vision, even if they do not recognize pictures as easily as people do with
vision.
One final point concerning tactile picture recognition deserves mention.
Tactile drawings are recognized because outlines in pictures represent
touchable as well as visible edges. However, outlines in pictures often represent objects as perceived from a vantage point, and one might think this
would pose difficulties for blind picture-perceivers. This turned out not to be
the case. For example, blind people had no trouble with a picture of a
mouse showing one eye, one set of whiskers, two legs and only half a torso.
They correctly identified the picture as a ‘side view’. Likewise, blind people
grasped what was going on in pictures of complex scenes in which multiple
objects were arranged at varying depths, with nearer objects occluding more
distant ones. I shall return to this point shortly.
Having ascertained that ‘blind people do recognize the same kinds of
outline drawings of objects as sighted people’, the obvious next step is to
investigate whether they can produce these drawings (Kennedy p. ). To do
this, Millar and Kennedy used a drawing board covered with a sheet of
Mylar plastic on which a permanent raised line may be inscribed by the
pressure of a ballpoint pen. The drawing kits were given to blind people
who had no previous experience with pictures and who had received no instruction in drawing. When provided for the first time in their lives with the
means to draw their own tactile pictures, blind artists made quite recognizable, sometimes remarkably sophisticated, outline drawings (Kennedy chs
–). Kennedy’s volunteers produced, without tuition, pictures of drinking
glasses, tables, cubes and human and animal figures, and all look much like
pictures that might be drawn by sighted people.
It must be granted that pictures by novice blind artists are crude, if
frequently charming. Lines are more often than not jagged and uncertain,
failing to meet in neat junctions. But it should come as no surprise that,
having been deprived of opportunities to draw, blind people may not
manipulate the pen with the dexterity of their more practised sighted peers.
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Kennedy’s volunteers frequently expressed frustration that their pictures did
not realize their intentions, and this is itself evidence of significant pictorial
ability. We must not confuse spatial and cognitive tasks (the knowledge of
how to go about making a picture) with executive tasks (manual dexterity).
We all have a good deal of the former ability; few have much of the latter.
The challenge of drawing is to find ways to translate three-dimensional
shapes into two-dimensional ones. Sighted people employ several strategies
to accomplish the task, and Kennedy found that blind adults hit on the same
strategies, again without instruction. The simplest is to use similarity geometries, showing the rectangular top of a table, for example, by means of a
rectangle on the picture surface. Similarity geometries have a cost, though.
It is impossible to show by means of similarity geometry both the rectangularity of a table top and the fact that it has a leg fixed as perpendicular to
each of the four corners. The solution is to employ more complex vantagepoint geometries that show those features of an object that would be visible
from one viewpoint. Kennedy’s blind volunteers employed much the same
repertoire of vantage-point systems as do the sighted, including convergent
perspective. Here is Kennedy’s account (p. ) of the remarks made by one
subject as he drew a table in three ways in quick succession:
Ray said, ‘If you’re looking straight down, you’d draw a rectangle without legs,
because you won’t see them’. He proceeded to draw a rectangle. Next, he said, ‘If you
drew it directly from the side, you’d only see two legs – a rectangle with two legs’. He
then drew a rectangle with two straight appendages coming down the page. His third
drawing was ingenious. He drew a rectangle with four appendages, each one
radiating from a corner of the rectangle. He said, ‘But to do it this way, you’d have to
be under the table’.
Ray’s problem-solving and ability to articulate his intentions are remarkable, but Kennedy notes (pp. –) that ‘each of the features that his
drawings display is present in drawings by other blind informants, including
his use of vantage points’. The abilities of blind people to recognize and
produce vantage-point drawings track one another.
Convergent or vanishing-point perspective is perhaps the most advanced
method of vantage-point drawing, and Ray is among a small number of
novice blind draughtsmen who hit upon it by himself. That he did so is
remarkable; that most did not should come as no surprise. After all, convergent perspective came late in European art and is far from common in
world art. Moreover, it is one thing to invent perspective and another to
appreciate it. In a carefully designed series of studies, Kennedy (pp. –)
found that blind people generally appreciate convergent perspective in
tactile drawings and extract accurate information about the direction and
depth of objects shown in perspective.
© The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly, 
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DOMINIC M.M. LOPES
IV. MOLYNEUX’S QUESTION
If these discoveries come as a surprise it is because the categorization of
depiction as a visual art par excellence is deeply ingrained. It is difficult to conceive of pictures as anything but visual representations. The question to
consider is this: what is it about our conception of pictures as visual that has
so bewitched us as thoroughly to obscure the possibility of tactile pictures?
Part of an answer to this question will have to do with how we think
about vision. If pictures are essentially visual in the sense that they are inaccessible to touch, then the implication is that vision must be different from
touch. Moreover, this difference must run deep – it is not just the obvious
difference that we touch with our skin and see with our eyes. Vision and
touch are so fundamentally different that pictures, being allied with vision,
can have no truck with touch.
Discussions of how to go about distinguishing the sense modalities, particularly vision and touch, traditionally revolve around Molyneux’s question
to Locke:
Suppose a Man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish
between a Cube, and a Sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so
as to tell, when he felt one and t’other, which is the Cube, which the Sphere. Suppose
then the Cube and the Sphere placed on a Table, and the Blind Man to be made to
see. Quaere, Whether by his sight, before he touch’d them, he could now distinguish,
and tell, which is the Globe, which the Cube.11
It is interesting right off the bat to notice that Molyneux’s question is
couched in terms of the perceptual abilities of a blind person. There is an
uncanny parallel between Steinberg’s question ‘What is a picture?’ and
Molyneux’s question ‘What is vision?’. Just as we might suppose that what is
distinctive of the pictorial medium is evident in the inaccessibility of depiction to the blind, it is natural to suppose that what is distinctive of vision
can be seen if we consider the disability of blindness. Indeed, there is more
than a parallel here. Steinberg’s question assumes that there is something
distinctive of pictures, and that it is visual. This presupposes that vision
is distinct from the other senses.
Molyneux’s question sparked a debate among psychologists and philosophers that has persisted until the present day.12 Not surprisingly, this led to
11 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford UP,
), p. .
12 See Michael J. Morgan, Molyneux’s Question: Vision, Touch and the Philosophy of Perception
(Cambridge UP, ).
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attempts to answer the question directly, by finding out what actually
happens when sight is restored to those with long-term blindness.13 While
these cases may have given a sense of direction and precision to discussions
of Molyneux’s question, their results have been inconclusive at best. But
though couched empirically, Molyneux’s question is meant to bring to life
certain problems for theories of perception – the existence of innate ideas,
the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, visual depth perception, and the amodal character of spatial concepts. At its heart, though,
lies the question of what distinguishes vision from touch, and, by extension,
each of the senses from the others.
If one gives a negative answer to Molyneux’s question, denying that the
man born blind when restored to sight would be able at once to identify
visually objects which he knew by touch, then the reason must be that the
differences between sight and touch make the content or experience of sight
inaccessible to blind people. A great many arguments have been made along
these lines, and it is impossible to review them all here. However, two are
particularly interesting because they shed light on the relationship between
Molyneux’s question and Steinberg’s, between accounts of the distinctiveness of vision and of depiction.
V. SUCCESSION AND SIMULTANEITY
One argument purporting to show that touch and vision differ in ways that
justify a negative answer to Molyneux’s question is laid out in Max von
Senden’s book Space and Sight. Having conducted a meticulous review of all
documented cases of the restoration of sight to the blind, von Senden was
impressed by the difficulty these patients had in seeing and by the radical
conceptual adjustments the achievement of sight seemed to require. To explain this, von Senden reasoned that touch and sight have different contents:
sight but not touch represents spatial properties of the world.
The suggestion that touch does not represent spatial properties is bizarre.
It certainly reverses one traditional hierarchy of the senses, which counted
touch first among the senses precisely because it was taken to provide for
direct apprehension of space. But unlikely as von Senden’s view may
appear, it has won adherents. For example, T.G.R. Bower explains in his
 textbook of developmental psychology that ‘the congenitally blind child
13 See Max von Senden, Space and Sight: the Perception of Space and Shape in the Congenitally Blind
Before and After Operation, trans. P. Heath (London: Methuen, ); Richard Gregory, ‘Recovery from Early Blindness: a Case Study’, in his Concepts and Mechanisms of Perception (London:
Duckworth, ).
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DOMINIC M.M. LOPES
apparently never acquires a spatial framework for judgements about the
relative position of objects’.14
Von Senden’s argument is that the perception of space is the perception
of things existing simultaneously, but the small sensory field of touch means
it can represent only a succession of muscular sensations. As he puts it
(pp. –), ‘nothing is given to [the blind person] simultaneously, either by
touch or the other senses; everything is resolved into successions.... Since
nothing is given simultaneously to his senses as spatial, it must be mentally
strung together in time, which does duty for the spatiality he lacks. A spatial
line must be replaced by a temporal sequence.’ Whereas vision is simultaneous and so represents space, von Senden argues that touch is sequential
and so represents only temporal succession.
There are plenty of reasons to be sceptical of this argument. For one, it is
surely possible for anyone to have inputs from different sense-channels or
the same sense at the same time. Moreover, studies of mental imagery and
‘mirror reversal’ in blind people speak for their possessing a conception of
space.15 Finally, von Senden has failed to see that a conception of space is
implicit in any ability to move about the world in a purposive manner. In
any case, his reasoning contains an elementary, if instructive, error. It is true
that touch employs a repertoire of sequential hand and body movements,
but it cannot be inferred from this that touch represents the world only as
succession. Gareth Evans puts the criticism slightly differently: ‘it is unacceptable to argue from the successiveness of sensation to the successiveness
of perception’ (my italics).16 He goes on: ‘one can surely make sense of the idea
of a perceiving organism which uses a sequence of impressions or stimulations to build up a ... unitary representation of [its] surroundings’.
Von Senden’s mistake is an instance of a fallacy which Ruth Garrett
Millikan has dubbed ‘internalizing content’.17 This is a manœuvre made in
the hope of explaining mental states, including perceptual ones. To internalize content is to hypothesize an inner vehicle or mental intermediary with
properties mirroring those of the content of the state we hope to explain.
There is nothing amiss with postulating mental intermediaries to explain
mental states – doing so is probably essential to understanding cognition.
However, internalizing content involves not only postulating mental intermediaries but also projecting selected properties of the states to be explained
on to the mental intermediaries which are thought to explain them. This is
T.G.R. Bower, A Primer of Infant Development (San Francisco: Freeman, ), p. .
Morton A. Heller, ‘Haptic Perception in Blind People’, in M.A. Heller and W. Schiff
(eds), The Psychology of Touch (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, ), pp. –.
16 In G. Evans, ‘Molyneux’s Question’, in his Collected Papers (Oxford UP, ), p. .
17 R.G. Millikan, ‘Perceptual Content and Fregean Myth’, Mind,  (), pp. –.
14
15
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legitimate provided that there are independent reasons for thus ascribing
properties to mental intermediaries. But when content is internalized
illegitimately, without an independent defence of the ascription of selected
properties of the state to be explained to the mental intermediary, we are
mistakenly prone to take the postulated sharing of properties between
vehicle and content as an explanation of that content.
When von Senden assumes that successive representations only represent
succession and that the representation of simultaneity requires simultaneous
representation, he is internalizing content, attributing the content of representational states to properties of their mental vehicles. There is no reason to
think that succession need be represented by succession nor simultaneity by
simultaneity.
VI. THE VISUAL FIELD
Locke himself gives another argument for a negative answer to Molyneux’s
question. People born blind and then made to see would not be able to
identify through vision shapes which they had previously known by touch.
This is because it is only through touch that we directly perceive objects in
depth; vision is two-dimensional. Locke’s way of making the point confirms
the link that I have been suggesting between Molyneux’s and Steinberg’s
questions. Locke asserted (Essay p. ) that when we look around us what
we see ‘is only a Plain variously colour’d, as is evident in Painting’.
There are three obvious ways to interpret Locke’s view that the content
of vision is two-dimensional. On an extreme reading, when we look around
us we cannot tell by vision alone which objects are further away from us
than others. A more moderate reading would be that our visual impressions
of our surroundings are two-dimensional, but we unconsciously infer depth
from them. In the case of touch no such inference is necessary; depth is
directly perceived through touch. The third and weakest possibility is that
visual experience is both two- and three-dimensional. When we look around
us we directly see objects of various shapes arranged in different locations at
different depths but we also see them as if they were projected on a twodimensional plane.
For example, when you look at a coin orientated at an angle away from
you, you certainly see a circle, but you also see the same shape as you would
see if you were looking at an ellipse. Likewise, if you are looking at two trees
of equal height but located at different distances, they both look to you as if
they are the same height, but there is also a sense in which the faraway tree
looks smaller than the nearby one. These two examples appear to show that
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DOMINIC M.M. LOPES
the content of visual experience can be described as two-dimensional as well
as three-dimensional.18 They certainly do not show that vision is thoroughly
two-dimensional. We see the coin as round and we see that the trees are
both about the same height. But at one and the same time we see the coin as
elliptical in shape and the faraway tree as smaller than the nearby one.
The apparently elliptical shape of the coin and the apparently smaller size
of the faraway tree are standardly called ‘visual-field properties’.19 The
visual field is two-dimensional and thus is subject to the laws of perspectival
projection of three-dimensional shapes on to two-dimensional planes. And
this explains why vision has visual-field properties. You see a round coin as
elliptical because the round coin projects an elliptical shape on to your
visual field. Likewise, you see the faraway tree as smaller because it projects
as a smaller region of the visual field than does the nearby tree. The visual
field, together with laws regulating the behaviour of light, explains the
distinctively perspectival content of vision.
If this view of vision is correct then we have found how vision differs from
touch. Vision, unlike touch, affords us a perspectival experience of the world
– an experience of the world as projected on to the two-dimensional visual
field. By contrast, a coin always feels round to the hand, no matter how it is
orientated, and a tree will seem to our kinaesthetic sense the same size, no
matter how far away it is. This difference might explain why a congenitally
blind person made to see would be thought unable to identify the shapes he
sees: he opens his eyes for the first time and sees something that looks like
the way an ellipse feels, not the way a circle feels.
VII. PERSPECTIVE AND SPACE
If vision differs from touch because of its perspectival content, then we
should predict that a congenitally blind person would be unable to draw in
perspective. But, as we have seen, congenitally blind adults unfamiliar with
pictures certainly have an intuitive grasp of the principles of perspective
drawing, and some discovered on their own how to draw pictures in
perspective. They do all this without the benefit of a visual field.
It is not hard to explain how this can be so, provided we are willing to
give up the idea that perspective is in essence a system for projecting
shapes on to two-dimensional fields. In fact the ability to draw in perspective
18 See Christopher Peacocke, Sense and Content: Experience, Thought and their Relations (Oxford
UP, ), ch. .
19 Peacocke, Sense and Content ch. ; E.J. Lowe, ‘Experience and Its Objects’, in T. Crane
(ed.), The Contents of Experience (Cambridge UP, ).
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depends only on two principles that are grounded in any conception of
space that enables us to move around the world.
The first is the ability to track changes in the location of objects relative to
one another as we move about them. A blind artist on the New Jersey shore
might draw the Statue of Liberty to the right of the Empire State Building
but reverse the placement of the structures if asked to draw the scene as
from a viewpoint in Brooklyn. This principle is fundamental to spatial
reasoning because it is implicit in knowledge of which objects obstruct
others and how to go around them.
The second principle has been closely identified with both vision and
vanishing-point drawing. The technical way to state it is that the angle
subtended by distant points increases as one approaches them. This principle, too, is basic to any conception of space. Were a blind man standing at
the Place de la Concorde asked to trace with his hands each side of the
Champs Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe, he would start with arms stretched
apart and then gradually bring them together until they met. His arms
would converge as they point to more distant objects. Unless he can do so, he
does not know in what direction to walk in order to reach various boutiques,
restaurants and bars located along the street. Neither principle requires the
mediation of a perceptual field, visual or otherwise. In drawing a picture, a
blind artist simply marks a two-dimensional surface in accordance with
these two principles.20
The conclusion to draw here is that perspectival perception is not unique
to vision. It is part of any conception of space that enables us to move
around our environment, and will be present in experiences in any sense
modality that represents space. If perspective is spatial and not distinctively
visual, then the argument that vision differs from touch because a component of its content is perspectival, characterized as shapes and sizes on a
visual field, is unsound.
VIII. PICTURES AND VISION
We have made two mistakes. The first lies in defining pictures as essentially
visual. The picture-interpretation and drawing skills of congenitally and
early blind people show that this is mistaken. The second mistake lies in the
attempt to distinguish vision from the other senses by characterizing its
content as uniquely field-like and perspectival. The spatial perspective skills
of blind people show this is mistaken. Is it possible that the two mistakes are
linked?
20
See Kennedy, Drawing and the Blind ch. .
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DOMINIC M.M. LOPES
Anyone familiar with art history or with drawing techniques will have
noticed the close affinity between the notion of the visual field and the picture plane as it is defined in the theory of perspective drawing. Visual-field
properties are just the kind of properties that we are trained to draw on
pictures’ surfaces. Perspective was a technique, or set of techniques, for
drawing that was first given detailed and systematic expression during the
Renaissance. For example, in his textbook On Painting, Alberti advised
painters ‘to present the forms of things seen on [the picture] plane as if it
were of transparent glass’. A picture made according to this precept replicates the visual field – as Alberti puts it, ‘he who looks at a picture, done as I
have described, will see a certain cross-section of a visual pyramid’ [this is
Alberti’s term for the visual field].21
Having characterized vision as field-like and then identified the picture
surface with the visual field, it is tempting to conclude that we have discovered how pictures represent. A recent example of a long line of theorists
who have given in to this temptation is Christopher Peacocke.
Peacocke argues that pictures represent because they are experienced as
similar to their subjects in certain ways.22 Constable’s painting Salisbury
Cathedral is not similar in shape to the cathedral itself tout court – after all, the
painting is flat while the cathedral is three-dimensional. Peacocke argues
that what the painting does is present a shape in the visual field experienced
as similar to one which the cathedral itself might present. The painting
represents because the shapes on its surface replicate the cathedral’s visualfield properties. And if painting is about replicating visual-field properties,
blind people cannot paint.
Blind people can draw. Therefore something has gone wrong in the
identification of the shapes on pictures’ surfaces with visual-field properties.
I suggest that the mistake is one of internalizing content.23 Peacocke and
Alberti attribute the perspectival content shared by pictures and vision to a
similarity in the representational vehicles of each – the picture surface and
the visual field. But we have seen that similarity between visual-field shapes
and shapes on picture surfaces is not needed to explain depiction, for blind
people draw without the aid of a visual field. Moreover, the visual field is not
needed to explain our experiences of elliptical coins or the apparent
diminution of objects as they recede into the distance. Perspective is a spatial
skill rather than a merely visual one. Peacocke and Alberti first internalize
the picture surface as the visual field, and then take the resulting resemblance between pictures and the visual field to explain how pictures
Alberti, On Painting, rev. edn, trans. John R. Spencer (Yale UP, ), pp. –.
C. Peacocke, ‘Depiction’, The Philosophical Review,  (), pp. –.
23 See also my Understanding Pictures (Oxford UP, ), pp. –.
21
22
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represent. This is perhaps the last vestige of the view that we see by means
of pictures in the head – as in Locke’s ‘what we see is only a Plain, variously
colour’d, as is evident in Painting’. The error is compounded when, having
postulated pictures in the head, we then explain pictures on the canvas by
means of their alleged similarity to those postulated mental pictures.
IX. CONCLUSIONS
I began by asking why we have been so reluctant to countenance the
possibility that blind people can make pictures by touch. I suggested that we
should look for an answer in our understanding of the difference between
vision and touch. According to one influential and traditional account of this
difference, vision has a uniquely perspectival content, characterized by the
notion of the visual field. But this account is mistaken, because the content
of vision is not uniquely perspectival. I proposed that the thought that the
content of vision is uniquely perspectival depended on a fallacious view of
vision as picture-like.
Where does this leave the doctrines of medium and modality specificity? I
have not concluded that there is no difference between vision and touch,
nor have I concluded that there is no difference between depiction and
other art forms. I have merely argued that pictures are not essentially visual
and that vision is not uniquely perspectival. This is to attack claims which
congenitally and early blind people’s tactile drawing skills compel us to
doubt. But I have also tried to bring out the way unchallenged ideas about
the specificity of the pictorial medium depend on unchallenged claims
about the specificity of the visual sense modality. More generally, I have
tried to bring out a special dependence of a branch of aesthetics on accounts
of perception and mental representation. To the extent that I have
succeeded, there may be some general lessons to be learnt about the study of
the pictorial arts.
First, the doctrine of medium specificity has normative implications. It is
assumed that a work’s aesthetic properties depend in part on the category of
art to which it belongs. Thus a picture’s aesthetic properties depend upon
the kinds of properties that are definitive of pictures: if pictures are purely
visual representations, then their aesthetic properties are visual. Indeed,
there is no denying that the aesthetic appeal of pictures usually lies in how
they look. But if, as I have argued, pictures are not exclusively visual
representations, then this argument topples and there is no reason to insist
that pictures’ aesthetic properties are only visual and must be apprehended
by using our eyes. A new possibility opens up before us. Art is in the business
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DOMINIC M.M. LOPES
of exploring and expanding its own boundaries, and tactile pictures are terra
incognita. Philosophers and art critics might consider the prospects, as much
for sighted as for blind picture-makers and picture-users, in developing a
multi-sensory pictorial aesthetic that would embrace touch as well as vision.
It is true that the pictures with which we are familiar are visual ones, and
that centuries of picture-making practices have been geared to the production of visual pictures. But these facts are contingent, not necessary. They
arise out of a history of ideas which accepted a narrowly visual conception
of pictures grounded to a surprising extent on a narrowly pictorial conception of vision. The key to these interlocked conceptions of the specificity of
vision and depiction was the optical theory of perspective developed during
the Renaissance. Historians of art are mistaken to treat the visuality of
pictures as essential. Belief in the visuality of pictures is a historical matter
whose career can be traced in works of art, in picture-making practices and
in thought about art. The history of perspective and of thought about it
would be a good place to start.
University of Indiana at Kokomo
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