[50a-2] « La Pensée avec Images », Art-Language Vol. 1, No. 4, November, 1971, pp. 51-69.

Terry Atkinson – Michael Baldwin

A persistent claim of Richard Wollheim and other intellectual Luddites is that there is a general entrenchment of the physical in the context of art works. The question might be raised how far the entrenchment notion might be regarded as an indispensable normative factor in the assessment of hypothesis ‘projectability’. What in fact is suggested is the entrenchment of a Laplacean physicalism. It looks as if the reason a lot of critics want to have a Laplacean (at best) situation is that there’s no prescription to replace it.

From a logical point of view, however, this amounts to a kind of conventionalism. Someone might argue that it is a kind of virtuous conventionalism. One has what might be regarded as a projected hypothesis; and it has to be part of the theoretician’s or critic’s predicative (or rather post-predicative) experience. To choose a better entrenched predicate in a projection seems to be following an extension of the same methodological principle of ‘insufficient reason’ used in the selection of a better established hypothesis over an alternative hypothesis.

What is being suggested is that it makes no sense at all to make out that an excluding hypothesis is a statement of fact. It does amount to a tacit hypothesis – but it’s only half-way to a particular generic form. Another point is that the failure of an hypothesis does not by itself annul the predicate’s ‘success-in-projecting’ connotation. Entrenchment is an incredibly coarse measure of projectability. Generally it would seem, that predicates might be tried for success in projecting as hypotheses are tried for success as projections. An isolated, ‘confirmed’ (perhaps only in a practical sense) hypothesis is only one of a number of alternatives which are equally well supported by similar positive instances. Its entrenched predicate is only one of a great number which apply equally well to similar entities – described by the positive instances of all the hypotheses in which that predicate appears. To rely upon predicate entrenchment in the normative assessment of projectability seems just harmless.

1. What kind of Theory of Art we decide upon may depend upon practical ideological considerations. It is possible that (e.g.) the recognition of an alternation modality could in some ways influence and change our original concept; thus in the process of constructing the theory, we may change practical etc. requirements.

2. It seems that many concepts of art, until recently, remained with an ontologically coarse domain. A sophistication of the problem in the original quasi-ontological manner might be elucidated through consideration of the statements :

a) There is Art.
b) Art is a collection of objects.
a) Uses: The existential copula – i.e. expresses existence.
b) Uses: The ‘identity’ copula – i.e. expresses identity.
c) Art is Physical.
c) Uses: The subject-predicate distinction – i.e. expresses the subject-predicate relation. The identity in ‘Art is a collection of objects’ is identity between an ‘object’ named (accepting ‘art’ as a name – subject to the qualifications worked out in logic) and an object ambiguously described. An ‘object’ ambiguously described will ‘exist’ when at least one such proposition is true, i.e. when there is at least one true proposition of the form ‘x’ is a so-and-so’ where ‘x’ is a name. It is characteristic of ambiguous (as opposed to definite) descriptions that there may be any number of the propositions of the above form – engineering is a collection of objects, physics is a collection of objects, philosophy is a collection of objects, etc. with definite descriptions; on the other hand, the corresponding form of proposition, namely ‘x is the so-and-so’ (where ‘x’ is a name), can only be true for one value of ‘x’ at most. It is important here to point out one similarity concerning the definition of both an ambiguous description (‘a so-and-so’) and a definite description (‘the so-and-so’): the definition is not to be sought in a definition of the phrase in isolation, but in a definition of propositions in which it occurs. With regard to an ambiguous description this is fairly obvious; no one could suppose that ‘a collection of objects’ was a definite object, definable by itself. ‘Art is a collection of objects, engineering is a collection of objects, physics is a collection of objects’; but this does not allow us to infer that ‘a collection of objects’ means the same as ‘art’ means, and also the same as ‘engineering’ means and also the same as ‘physics’ means, since these three names have different meanings. Even having enumerated all the collections of objects in the world (and admitting the specific contextual use of ‘collection’ here), there is no quintessential entity that is just an indefinite collection without being any collection in particular.

With regard then to a Theory of Art, there are two things we can compare in this context: i) A name – which is a simple symbol, directly designating an individual which is its meaning, and having this meaning in its own right, independently of the meanings of all other words; ii) A description which consists of several words whose meanings are already fixed, and from which result whatever is to be taken as the ‘meaning’ of the description. One of the points is this: a proposition containing a description is not identical with what that proposition becomes when a name is substituted, even if the name names the same object as the description describes. ‘Art is the collection of painted and sculpted objects’ is obviously a different proposition from ‘art is art’; the first is a fact of art history (overlooking for the present any questions generated by the developments in art over the past half-century – anyway to get by such questions one simply has to open up the definitions of ‘painting’ and ‘sculpture’ sufficient to contain recent evolutions, hybrids, etc.), the second is a trivial truism; and if we put any other than art in place of ‘the collection of painted and sculpted objects’ one proposition would become false, and therefore no longer be the same proposition; but it may be said, one proposition is essentially of the same form as (say) ‘art is fine art’ in which two names are said to apply to the same collection of objects. The reply is that, if ‘art is fine art’ really means ‘the collection of objects named “art” is the collection of objects named “fine art”’, then the names are being used as descriptions: i.e. the individual, instead of being named, is being described as the collection of objects having that name. This is a way in which names are frequently used in practice, and there will be, as a rule, nothing in the phraseology to show whether they are being used in this way or as names. A further point follows: when a name is used directly, merely to indicate what we are speaking about, it is no part of the fact asserted, or of the falsehood if our assertion happens to be false; it is merely part of the symbolism by which we express our thought. On the other hand when we make a proposition about ‘the collection of painted and sculpted objects called “art” ’, the actual name ‘art’ enters into what we are asserting, and not merely into the language used in making the assertion. Our proposition will now be a different one if we substitute ‘the collection of painted and sculpted objects called “fine art” ’, but so long as we are using names as names, whether we say ‘art’ or whether we say ‘fine art’ is as irrelevant to what we are speaking as whether we speak English or French. Thus, so long as names are used as names, ‘art is fine art’ is the same trivial proposition as ‘art is art’.

Now, we may ask, what import, if any, does a construction such as the above one have for the domain of art? The point at the beginning of this section, that art remains with an ontologically coarse domain, is important, insofar as the Russellian theory of description (circa 1920) of which much of the above is constituted can perhaps inform us as to the problems involved.

2.1. The date is mentioned here for the following reasons: the 1920 model of the theory of descriptions has since been subject to modification by Russell himself, and also to much criticism and further analysis by other philosophers, it is therefore not held out as some kind of perfect example (although it may be regarded as in some senses being paradigmatic) but rather in an attempt to offer purchase on some ontological aspects of the art domain.

On taking an ontology for granted, it is a contention here that even the barest epistemological framework of the art domain will offer questions regarding its first-orderish ontology, which might be legitimately contained within the adequate framework.

But the question remains whether the genuine violation of an hypothesis which presumably suggests a new one similarly suggests a new predicate or set of them. The question is not settled by an appeal to phychological simplicity. You can argue that teleology is more complex in examination than that.

This note is not seen as a banausic criticism of Wollheim’s lecture transcript (with modifications) (Studio International December 1970).

One statement: ‘... within the (sic) concept of art under which most of the finest, certainly the boldest, works of our age have been made, the connotation of physicality moves to the fore…’ – he tells you that. But he doesn’t attempt to say what you might understand by ‘the connotation of physicality’.

One thing you could ask (internally) is what the relationship between ‘finest’ and ‘boldest’ work and the ‘connotation of physicality’ is. Perhaps ‘physicality and boldness’ are ‘experiential’ equals. The thing is that you have the perennial circumstances of someone producing what is a vague suggestion of descriptive ‘theory’ and dressing it up as prescription. It is as if no-one ever thought that there were criteria of adequacy to be considered, or that no-one had ever understood the bases in (e.g.) Leibniz for some notion of the ‘soundness’ of concepts.

Another statement which might be disjointedly considered is … ‘between them and us what has happened is that some connotations of art that were previously recessive have moved to the fore and vice-versa. It might be argued whether this is in any way informative – it seems that you were dealing with, as it were, ‘phases’ of a substance (cf. Turner and Verhoogen, Principles of Igneous Petrology, 1964. This might give you a bit of a clue as to what he must (on the grounds that to some extent he is committed to the consequences of his assertions) have in mind when he talks about ‘the physical’, etc… or how best one should understand ‘the physical’ etc.).

This ‘robustness’ is fairly accessible in an appraisal of the comparative terms ‘finest’ and ‘boldest’. One is all right with them except when one sees that the context they are situated in is one in which one needs a set of objects datur and, also, a continuant and entrenched notion of ‘art work’. What this suggests is that you keep your grading at the quasiontological level, admitting no external or metaphysically revisionary concepts and criteria to enter.

There is a harmlessness about the implications of the first-orderish consideration of relation between ‘theory’ and practice – in art. But that is not hermeneutically brought out from an understanding of ‘the physical’.

The conviction that physical reality may be regarded as a constant substantial quantity persisting through time was a persistent leitmotif of classical thought. One of the assertions of philosophers like Strawson and Quine is that the spatio-temporal continuant may be regarded as an ontological paradigm. In a theoretical context (and there is no assumption of clear boundaries here) as a leitmotif it provides a sort of Ptolemaic (rather than Copernican) twist – it seems that the physicality, connotations of … etc. must be the physicality of the Laplacean illusion in science; the formation of conservation laws, etc., might be regarded as the ceteris paribus of the fusion in naturalistic philosophers like Spencer, Ostwald, Neitzsche, Haeckel – where concepts of hermeneutical philosophical and physical substance in some way merged.

One of the results of microphysics is near this view. (It got a near latria in the l9th century, and still does presumably in many contexts of Art criticism just out of use; the corresponding notions of Quantity and Constancy fall at microphysical level.) These notions retain a certain usefulness at the middle-dimensional level, but they are still both theoretically and hence, teleologically inadequate. The basic set of commitments which Wollheim demonstrates resembles an ‘enthusiasm’ of Taine. He got excited about the law of the conservation of energy (The immutable ground of being has been attained; we have reached the permanent substance! (“Le fond immutable de l’être est atteint; en a touché la substance permanente”)). It must not be too intemperate a suggestion that the ontological paradigm principally derived from the ‘physicality which……’ (Wollheim) (in fact the recent tendencies of ‘Bold’ Art (etc.)) is as superstitious as any which might be got from ‘the universe as metallic quantity by force’ (‘Wille Zur Macht’, F. Nietzsche, Gesammelte Werke (Munich 1926) Vol. XIX p. 373).

The inapplicability of the concept of constant quantity to the basic elements or rather events of the physical world makes 20th-century prolongations, in terms of etc. Wollheim’s influential ontology, hermeneutically absurd. The concept of the quantitive constancy of things was always correlated with the concept of strict determinism. It is not absurd to talk about things having a ‘physical connotation’ but silly to assume that this is indicative of any metaphysical heterogeneity. The point is that both panphysicalism and a broadly classical notion of autonomy are practically useless.

There is no interpretational theory in the context of art which has got rid of the pictorial model. And this is so, even when people have got rid of ‘the window on the world’. The other thing is that the quasiontological systems which serve as influential metaphysics have not got rid of physical determinism and its associated commitments. Classical determinism has little pragmatical or theoretical justification. The bankruptcy of determinism is not ameliorated by the construction of ontological or epistemic hierarchies. But one of the upshots of the espousal of the pictorial model is that you have to see the questions of transubjective objects as meaningless.

The above tends to follow naturally from the conclusion that ontic indeterminacy is a theoretically important feature – and this indeterminacy is irreducible to semantic mechanisms.

It may be argued that there is a tradition of connecting reality with necessity in deterministic contexts. ‘Possibility’ is just another name for ‘ignorance’. The funny thing about the Kosuthian ‘very abstract context’ is its thorough determinacy. It seems that ‘physicality’ is identified with what William James (the Dilemma of Determinism, 1884) said was already laid down (substantial in a number of ways), and this forms an axiomatic structure. The ‘Present’ is compatible with only one totality. Ontic and theoretical/physical equivocity has to be put down as just ad hominem. The basic view which admits indeterminism is that you allow that ‘possibilities’ may be in excess of ‘actualities’ (or be in excess of quasi-syntactical or quasi-ontological entities, inasmuch as such systems face a ‘recoil of the text’). But there would also have to be another kind of indeterminism more extensive than that which James sorted out (in ‘physical art’).

This is that ontic and physical ‘equivocity’ and indeterminacy is not something which is all over at some point in time. The conflicts customary between interpretations of a principle of indeterminacy (within the ‘physical framework’) may be a lot more complex than just a special case of the ‘antagonism’ suggested by James.

The question remains for Ptolemaic critics whether the indeterminacy is to be allowed a status in some sense independent of the observer or critic. The emergence of e.g. Dilthey’s hermeneutics implies a basis for ‘novelty’ and is altogether incompatible with ‘reality’ in the rationalist framework. It is also incompatible with the art-theoretical hang-up (which is not, however, the basis of any worthwhile teleology) to hold the determinists’ ‘pre-existence’ of the future both as works and modes of enquiry.

These remarks fill in a background to what is an objection to the arbitrary carving-up of the world, part of which is inhabited by critics.

The above critique of the quasi-ontological conventionally pragmatised modes of criticism and theory would be badly served by a pure theoretical or naive justificatory appendix. It has been suggested that the reflexive axiology which Ptolemaic criticism carries along is without much foundation. This axiology is carried as far as a metatheoretical level.

You could continue a bit more of a critique of critical ‘understanding’ in more or less informal terms, and it might be remembered that this is sticking with ‘an idea of physical art’ – and trying to interpret it.

Virtually all notions of Art as ‘physical’ have been pervaded (with one possible exception – though no doubt it is an anachronistic one – Harold Rosenberg) by a substantialist ignorance. The other thing is that it has been overloaded with Cartesian dualism.

It might seem fairly obvious that spatial displacements have been displaced in ‘understanding the physical’ – just as ‘Lucretian Marbles’ have been displaced. The suggestion is, then, that ‘the operation called Verstehen’ (Theorie and Realität, H. Albert ed. Tubingen, 1964) and something like Dilthey’s ‘Erleben’ (cf. P. Winch. The Idea of Social Science Lond. 1965) is not to be discounted on the grounds of a requirement of theoretical purity. The idea of ‘introspective models’ might sound a bit silly, but it may be claimed that these are near indispensable in a context of physicalism in art. The quasi-ontological framework may as a ‘whole’ (i.e. as a framework) be accorded more historical and hermeneutical viability – may be more practical – but the problems of physicalism do not get anywhere near the prescription behind a statement like that. Many of the models which have been suggested relapse into animism or hylozoism. It would be a bit odd to put Leibniz and Whitehead epistemologically alongside pre-Socratic hylozoism.

The model is best constructed without the admission of ‘secondary qualities’ into the physical-object domain. Transcendent qualities are not just to be got rid of by refusing to recognise them, but they are going to be a bit outside the purview of the ‘art-object’ – or rather, art-physical-object range of talk and consideration. There is an important way in which you have to consider notions of ‘event’ if you want to talk about ‘physical objects’ – the old spatio-temporal continuant theory has been shown to be inadequate hermeneutically. There is one way in which ‘the physical object’ might be rehabilitated in the context of an even ‘imperceptible’ object as qualitatively specific. The ‘object’ of analysis is Whiteheadian. It can be argued that ‘physical art’ may be approached in terms of the structural relations in event or quasi-event without the prop of vicious conventionalism.

‘The texture of observed experience as illustrating the philosophical scheme is such that all related experience must exhibit the same texture’. (A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality p. 5)

In the corpuscular kinetic model (as in the rationalist model or other contexts) the only ‘manifest form’ is that of the motion of constant matter in a ‘constant space’. It must be argued that it was psychologically compatible with this that you should fail to sort out the dynamic scheme. Further to this, the categorical scheme allowed, which is the ceteris paribus of the corpuscular kinetic system, is a conceptually and theoretically immutable domain of ‘objects’. The lingua characterica was, and is, in positive criticism and neo-positivistic criticism, presupposed. (Maybe this is a more vicous form of ‘psychologism’ than that with which Frege, Husserl and Moore dispensed. (Cf. also Binet; ‘La pensée sans Images’, Revue Philosophique 1903, and in Bianshard, ‘The Nature of Thought’, Geo. Allen & Unwin, 1939, ch. VII.)

A couple of things to avoid: (i) An explicit assumption of either a Lucretian comprehensiveness or a neorealist revisionary metaphysic: (ii) A platitudinous ‘immediate empiricism’ – a curious thing about the pragmatism of 60s sculpture was this undersell of the ‘as’ in ‘experience as...’

Simple Model

If you consider quite simple polymorphic entities (and you could also include now cubistic conceptual art – and the whole Poincaré gamut of 60s sculpture) to understand and deem them ‘physical’ – i.e. to say that with some sensitivity to the ‘Geisteswissenschaft’ (or any possible ‘Verstehen’), as distinct from quasi-conventional, pseudo-quasi-syntactical or (in a Cartesian way) ‘geometric’ system – the following would still apply (vide Newman – e.g. Euclidean Abyss – not the rubbish that is written about it generally): (and this is the obvious’ and simplistic part) you have ‘a character of successiveness’ (without presupposing much of analysis or ‘character’). The paradoxes of completeness just don’t come up for the count. The ‘addition’ or, in a sense, ‘aggregation’ of this mode is ‘intensionally’ or ‘connotatively’ distinct from the arithmetical ones. Where qualitative homogeneity is in most cases quasi-ontologically presupposed, unitary ‘addition’ remains ab externo. On the other hand, ‘the physical’ is indispensably associated with a field. The ‘object’ is not ‘datur’.

The ‘quality’ of a ‘new’ element (whilst in some respects accessible as a unit class (or virtual unit class)) is ‘modified’ by the antecedent ‘context’ and then you get a ‘recoil’ (cf. Weber) in the emergence of a ‘new’ quality of that context (physical context or ‘object’). The elements are not externally related units of which the ‘object’ is additively ‘built’, neither are the units homogenized in the undifferentiated physical homogeneity of the ‘physical object’. The ‘object’ in terms of this hermeneutical construct is a successive undifferentiated ‘object’; one has a ‘zeitliche Gestalten’ (Ehrenfels: ‘Uber Gestaltqualitaten’ Z.W.P. Vol. XIV. 1890. pp. 249-292) whose duration is its ‘existential minimum’ – from at least a physicalistic point of view. But it must be added that this fill in of the background of the ‘physical’ cannot use ‘the object’ (i.e. sculpture etc.) context as any more than a ‘model’. You get rid of the sociology of ‘element’ as used. The positive significance of the faintly psychologistic and perceptually unsophisticated model is the projection of a notion of nonstatic imageless regularities and these are considered structuralistically. The cosmological afflictions of ‘the physical’ in criticism always seem to rest on the ‘well-knit’ first-order domain: – here one has not started to show how an adequate conventionality or rather categorical framework might get one away from the view that in some hermeneutic scales the ‘cubist’ pronouncement is still the locus classicus.

The fallacy of criticism lies in the assumption that ‘understanding’ is to be described in terms of an aggregate of psychological and transcendental apopoious faculties (‘mind’ is understood that ‘way’) instead of its having metaphysical syntactical (influential) basis in a conception of an active agent. (This may be one way you have always tended to have unholy conceptual and observational alliances.) It is more or less commonplace that there is no presuppositionless mode of enquiry or action and on the other hand no presupposition can be taken as absolute, unalterable, infallible or a priori and transcendental in the sense of the classical rationalists or in the sense of Kant or in the sense of dogmatic empiricism.

The point about all this is to show where the limits of a transcendental system lie in relation to art – it may be that the paradigmatic work in our aspiration uses at least an appropriate complementarity in transcendental systems.

It may be argued that the unavoidable and indispensable presuppositions of any kind of enquiry are not ‘naturally’, and in the light of the ceteris paribus provided by the foregoing, all of one type – but are always of several different types. There is a structure of interrelations aside from factual presuppositions and operational rules; there are practical and teleological ones. The problem of criticism and presumably one which afflicts art-work (at least that robust sort amenable to ‘normal’ criticism and connotions like ‘physicality’) is that of a more or less determinate set of presuppositions as a ‘contribution to so-called experience’. This is simply a way of suggesting a fact. viz: that experience (at whatever level) is not eo ipso what is expected on the basis of the presuppositions brought to it. Evaluation is not as simple as all classical, and a lot of recent theories suggest. One of the features of processing and evaluating is that it may in the long run make changes in the larger conceptual framework. These may be teleological as well as epistemological and methodological .

In a critical edifice (a theory of criticism) appropriate to a domain which will support both the ontologically indeterminate (and provisional) and the transcendental or ‘framework object’ (and among these contexts) (and traditions) one may similarly be unable to dispense with the use of a thesis of complementarity. One of the persistent problems, it may be argued, is that of the distinction which might be made (in a semantical study) between a critical (etc.) theory based on (so presumably upon some theory of it) ‘reference’ and one based upon so-called ‘meaning’ or ‘intension’; there are various ways one can get to a solution of this. What follows will be a rough account of one. The distinction is in some important ways ‘unnatural’, and particularly when the work conspires as a semantic indeterminacy. This equally well applies to semiotically well-knit contexts.

The point is to suggest inter alia that this distinction is misleading, though at some stages of criticism it pays to take account of it. It is also methodologically important. A theory based on ‘extension’ is a theory of ‘intension’ for a) simple types of critical language and for b) ‘simple’ (one might say, ‘first-order’) semiotic situations. The only entities needed in the so-called ‘theory of intension’ are those needed for an extensional grip on things (in a sense, a theory of reference, or based upon reference) for less simple and presumably, in some cases non-quasi-ontological situations.

Instead of a theory based upon ‘reference’ (extensional) and one based upon ‘meaning’ (intensional commitments) (i.e. the one based upon sorting out an ‘object’ beholding to ‘something’ like ‘a meaning’) one might look for one which will deal with quasi-ontological situations and one which will deal with (possibly transcendental) ontological situations. This, in a model context, might correspond to a set of theories, some based on theories of simple and others in those of multiple extension. The latter would begin to cater (in a way in which dogmatic empiricists might be satisfied) for the ontologically ‘provisional’ – in a convoluted way, one might hold out here for a paradigm of art (antecedent art) at least providing a means through which one can look at recent ‘work’ hermeneutically and not just epistemologically. The etymology of ‘semantics’ might be quite happy, as might large parts of an ‘intension-based’ ‘criticism’ or interpretation, if the ‘theory of art’ was to some extent based upon ‘semantical or quasi-semantical “theories” ’ for notions transcending the range of certain elementary types of concepts.

The distinctions mentioned above are frequently capable of formulation (in a ‘context of art’ they are not explicitly formulated) in terms of ‘first-order’ (i.e. pseudo-quantificational) terms.

In such a domain of interpretation, it might be argued, knowing the mere ‘extensional object’ (that, here, may be better than ‘extension’) of individual constants or ‘knowing’ (i.e. being able to ‘operate’ with) or knowing allegedly given predicational extension cannot be enough to specify ‘intension’, because the extensions of two individual constants (the ‘object’ individual (etc.) of extensional discourse – quasi-understanding) or of two predicational constants can coincide without there being any intensional identity (i.e. identity in mode of presentation); cf. the notions in Frege to support both the principle of extensionality and the sense of reference distinction. Hence it may be argued, all things being equal, a theory and interpretation based upon extension (and extensional objects – these may be the ontological ‘backbone’ of the rest) will have to be helped by one based upon intensions – and that of generating nonsense at an apophantic level. The argument is all right intuitively, but its implications at one level of analysis are not what they are usually thought to be. And this again is one of the reasons why practical issues (e.g. moral and prudential ones) are never up for the count in the positive ‘scheme of things’ (pace Lucretius). However it is set out (i.e. partially interpreted), it seems odd to try and divorce the idea of the meaning or intension from the practically assimilable data. That, ‘the work’ or ‘the theory’ can ‘provisionally’ convey or suggest. (And this may be to prescribe, or to indicate that such and such conditions obtain – etc.)

In first-orderish contexts these teleological, practical (etc.) as well as epistemological conditions cannot be divested from the ‘objects’ which are the extension of singular ‘terminological’ operands and form predicational extensions. In a sense, the epistemological feasibility value of an interpretation is a function of these extensions (one could say ‘success’) of the ‘terminological’ apparatus/operands/operanda it contains. Thus it follows that a theory and interpretation (ontology) based on extension (‘colourless’ in themselves – ‘objects’) is for first-order ‘domains’ the basis of ‘meaning’ or ‘intensional’ interpretation. And similarly, mutatis mutandis for ‘the work’ immanently.

Hence the introduction of ‘modes of presentation’ for the extensions of singular terms is perhaps useless. (Inside a ‘framework’, this would make a lot of difference to what had cognitive content; thus, in the robust world of ‘objects’ (i.e. taking into account the presumptive cosmology etc. appropriate to them), Rosenberg’s strictures in the purview of the ‘formalist’, or the formal (one never knows what to call it) might be misplaced. And formalism might amount to an unassailable paradigm even subjected to a Geisteswissenschaft analysis). In any theory (general theory) of interpretation, and hence intension, which does interpret intensionally, the ‘intensions’ are just idle.

The problem of the differences made out above (and quite a lot of others)’ appear once one gets conceptually beyond the range of first-order. One model which can be used for an element in such a conceptual range would be a concept’ of an intensional object (or ‘propositional’ object; of being, even at a prepredicative level, ‘equivalent’). (This is a bit like Russell’s ‘propositional attitude’ (B. Russell, Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, London, 1940).)

The distinctive feature of ‘intensional objects’ is that one is not just presented with one possibility. That ‘inherence’ of possibility does not necessitate anyone’s considering over-complex Leibnizian ‘possible worlds’ (though that would be good). And it is not such an eloquent installation of ‘becoming’.

A basic assumption might be that an attribution of any intensional object is an interpretation, and similarly to an aspect of one’s interpretandum which involves, or could involve, a division of all the possible ‘domains’ into two classes: compatible and incompatible with the intensional object in question. The meaning of the division (or rather pseudo-division) is, for example, taken ‘pragmatically’; i.e. where one has an easy interrogation procedure, or in terms of ‘the sciences of man’ (and one could use ‘pragmatically’ there too) then one might have to take into account a lot of ‘immanent’ data, so as to sort out the compatibilities. This does not presuppose any sort of ‘erleben’. The ranges of ‘compatibility’ may be subject to classificatory separation. In some way, here, division in terms of ‘compatibility’ may have to be based on reduction, and from this it follows that one’s ‘intensional objects’ are ‘normal’.

One relatively dignified point is that the extension of a singular ‘term’ now would depend upon ‘what course events take’. The other point is that a persistent objection to this might be that the mode of presentation of a singular ‘object’ (that which is an intension) is not what the extensional one happens to be, but rather how that object is (perhaps, intuitively) determined. But in order for this to make any difference, one has to consider a ‘multiple’ extensional one – i.e. one which is simply weakly modalised. But the one thing here, in that this is to do with getting some basis for a categorical, transcendental order, is that one has the requirement of picking one distinguished possible domain from the whole lot. And this is where the ‘practical’, the teleological and the moral emerge as ontological necessities if one wants to get out of specious rationalism and technology.

The traditional ‘theory of art’ is accessible in terms of conventionalist (semantic) mechanisms of one sort or another. Fragments of a ‘classic’ argument which one might assimilate as expositional paradigms are a bit like this. To recognize something as a real thing or event means to succeed in incorporating it into the framework of things at a particular space-time position so that it fits together with other things recognized as real, according to the rules of the framework. Panofsky says ‘the meaning thus discovered may be called the intrinsic meaning of content; it is essential, where the other two types of meaning, the primary or natural and the secondary or conventional, are phenomenal. It may be defined as a unifying principle, which underlines and explains both the visible event and its intelligible significance and determines even the form in which the visible event takes place.’

Then, for example, Panofsky has accepted the thing-language; thus there is no objection to the assertion that Panofsky has accepted the world of things. However no one here is equating this acceptance with a belief in the reality of the thing-world. To accept the thing-world means no more than to accept a certain form of language, to accept rules for forming statements and for testing, accepting or rejecting them. Thus the acceptance of the thing-language leads also to the acceptance, belief and assertion of certain statements. But the thesis of the reality of the thing-world cannot be among those statements, because it cannot be formulated in the thing-language, or, it seems, in any other theoretical language.

The purposes for which the language is intended to be used, e.g. the purpose of communicating ‘factual knowledge’, will determine which factors are relevant for the decision. Some practical considerations are decisive. And the questions concerning these considerations are of a theoretical nature. But these questions cannot be identified with the question of realism. They are not yes/no questions but questions of degree. The thing-language, in the customary form, works with a high degree of efficiency for most purposes of ‘everyday life’. However it would be wrong to describe the situation by saying: ‘The fact of the efficiency of the thing-language is confirming evidence for the reality of the thing-world’; one might instead say; ‘this fact makes it advisable to accept the thing-language’.

Having accepted the ‘thing-language’ and thereby the framework of ‘things’, one can raise and answer internal questions. The questions one asks are of the order, Is there a painting on the wall? Are unicorns real or imaginary? At present there is no need to ask what the ramifications of not accepting the ‘thing-language’ in the domain of art are. One can stay with the internal questions.

(i) Questions like “Is there a painting on the wall?” are partially answered by ‘empirical’ investigation – results of observations are evaluated according to certain rules as confirming or disconfirming evidence for possible answers. (This evaluation is usually carried out, of course, as a matter of habit, rather than a deliberate, rational procedure – it is possible, in a rational construction, to lay down explicit rules for the evaluation.) The concept of ‘reality’ occurring in these internal questions is an empirical, scientific, non-metaphysical concept. To recognize something as a ‘real’ thing means (as has already been pointed out in the first paragraph of this note) to succeed in incorporating this thing into the framework of things at a particular space-time position so that it fits together with the other things recognized as real, according to the rules of the framework.

(ii) (In contrast to the former questions which have been raised neither by ‘the man in the street’, nor by scientists, nor, in any serious way, by artists, but only by ‘philosophers’.) To be ‘real’ in the scientific sense means to be an element of the framework; hence this concept cannot be meaningfully applied to the framework itself. Those who raise the question of the reality of the thing-world itself have perhaps in mind not a theoretical, as their formulation seems to suggest, but rather a practical question, a matter of practical decision concerning the structure of one’s language. One has to make the choice whether or not to accept and use the forms of expression for the framework in question.

(iii) The decision of accepting the ‘thing-language’, although itself not of a cognitive nature, will nevertheless usually be influenced by theoretical knowledge, just like any other deliberate decision concerning the acceptance of linguistic or other rules.

I (i) The question is raised how much one makes a shift from the internal to external questions (for an early ‘specialised’ example of this, see Frameworks, Atkinson/Baldwin, Art & Language Press, 1967). A source of confusion with many artists seems to be that they get to the ‘point’ ‘for’ the external question, but remain ‘asking’ in internal context – thus the whole question becomes a non-cognitive one. If, to give a trite example, an artist asks the question: “Are there real colours?” he can mean it either internally, in which case the answer is analytical and trivial, or he may mean it externally. If one accepts a clear distinction between decision and assertion, then it is the former that is involved. Finally, it may be meant in the following sense: are our experiences such that the use of the linguistic forms in question will be expedient and fruitful?

(ii) The acceptance of a framework of new entities is represented in the language by introduction of new forms of expression to be used according to a new set of rules – besides these being new names for particular entities of the kind in question – but some such names may already occur in the language before the introduction of the new framework – the acquisition of ‘abstract entities’ may have proliferated within the ‘art apparat’ in such a way as to have disguised the need for the explicit development of ‘corresponding’ frameworks – i.e. ‘art’ if it is seen as a language may have been such that seemingly adequate semantic mechanisms already occur before the introduction of the new framework.

II One point is that criteria of adequacy can be teleological. Epistemology is not that strong.

(i) Panofsky’s tri-strata analysis introduces a ‘framework’, viz:

(a) Primary or natural subject matter (divided into factual and expressional);
(b) Secondary or conventional subject matter;
(c) Intrinsic meaning or content.

(a) is an empirical’ or ‘factual’ domain – the sentences through which one formulates the reporting of this domain are observation sentences (i.e. ‘empirical’ reports). It should be noted that Panofsky refers specifically to ‘figurative’ or ‘representational’ art. (Panofsky, with good reason, presupposes no difficulty in identifying paintings and sculptures per se.) He writes: ‘The world of pure forms thus recognised as carriers of primary or natural meaning may be called “the world of artistic motifs”.’

Here there is an introduction of a general term (‘artistic motif) which embraces the range of ‘represented’ ‘objects’ (e.g. human beings, houses, etc. (factual subject matter), meaningful poses or gestures, peaceful atmospheres, etc. (expressional subject matter)). In the art thing-language one can assume that names and/or descriptions like ‘house’, ‘pose’, etc., occurred before Panofsky introduced his new framework. These names and/or descriptions can be regarded as constants and the introduction of such constants is not to be regarded as an essential step in the introduction of the framework. The two essential steps are rather the following: first, the introduction of a general term, a practice of higher level, for the new kind of entities, permitting one to say of any particular entity that it belongs to this kind (e.g. “Red is a Property”, “Five is a number”, “Mournful pose or ‘represented’ house are artistic motifs”); second, the introduction of variables of the new type. The new entities are values of these variables; the constants (and closed expressions, if any) are substitutable for the variables. Quine’s dictum – ‘The ontology to which one’s use of language commits him comprises simply the objects that he treats as falling…… within the range of values of his variables’ (‘Notes on Existence and Necessity’, Journal of Philosophy, 40, 1943, pp. 113-127) – is a demonstration of a persistent quasi-ontological leitmotif. With the help of the variables, general sentences concerning the new entities can be formulated. After the new forms are introduced into the language, it is possible to formulate with their help internal questions and possible answers to these questions. A question of this kind may be either empirical or logical; accordingly a ‘true’ answer is either factually ‘true’ or analytic. At present one can stay with the Panofsky section (a), above. He closes his exposition on this section with the statement: ‘An enumeration of these motifs would be a pre-inconographical description’. What may be crucial for what follows immediately is the question as to whether a distinction between ‘identifying a thing’ and ‘identifying a thing as...’ is a legitimate distinction with regard to general identificatory apparatus. Panofsky states that one identifies ‘pure forms’ as (represented) ‘houses’, etc., thus presupposing one can first identify pure forms.

With regard to Panofsky’s construction ‘Primary or Natural subject matter’:

How can Panofsky be said to have ‘accepted’ (used) the thing-language, and hence to have accepted the world of things? By empirical investigations based on observations? What kinds of thing are these kinds that Panofsky is using? Firstly, Panofsky says the act is an identificatory act. What is identified and what is it identified as? First, what is identified: ‘pure forms: that is, certain configurations of line and colour, or certain peculiar shaped lumps of bronze or stone……’ second, identified as: ‘representations of natural objects such as human beings, animals, plants, houses, tools and so forth’.

The first act is one that entails an acceptance of the thing-language ;  the act is empirical based on observations. The second act presupposes the successful completion of the first act; what then is the character of the second act? It seems that the second act involves a kind of ‘mock’ run-out of the first act: it, in a sense, uses the first act as a model (possibly paradigmatic model) and proceeds to assign ‘value’ according to this scheme. The notion of ‘reality’ has a different relation to the ‘things’ singled out in the first act from the ‘things’ singled out in the second act.

The important point is this: in the first act one can see what form of language one is accepting: the thing-language in a perfectly straightforward everyday way. In a sense, in the second act one is also accepting the thing-language, but perhaps in a not-so-straightforward way. One ‘knows’ the configurations of line and colour are ‘real’ configurations of line and colour, but one also ‘knows’ the houses, etc., represented in these configurations are not ‘real’ – but that they are ‘real’ ‘ “painted” houses’. Then what kind of language is this? Is it a ‘thing’-thing-language? It seems we are not yet talking about abstract entities, but one stays with phenomenalism.

Say, for example, that any object constituted of canvas or hardboard, etc., is easily distinguished from the wall of a building, given our standard empirical procedures. The public thing-language is a necessary condition of our possessing ‘knowledge’ of such a ‘thing’ as an empirical procedure. It seems, logically, that one does not require the thing-language in order that one can ‘privately’ ‘perceive’ the distinction. But it seems that one can only ‘know’ it is the case that ‘logically one does not require the thing-language in order that one can “privately” “perceive” the distinction’, after one has developed a fairly sophisticated form of the thing-language. Thus there is a kind of paradox generated. It seems one does have private experiences, but one can only ‘know’ they are private after one possesses a means of publicly ‘testing’ (communicating) the ‘fact’ of their private character. The test for whether or not the relevant experiences are private, is public. If the ‘fact’ of private experiences could not be publicly reported one could never ‘know’ whether or not they were private. The public reporting of experience logically requires more than a private experience. One needs to bear in mind that Panofsky is making a public report. Much of the claptrap about the ‘proneness’ of the artist to having ‘valuable’ or ‘privileged’ private experiences is often generated through overlooking the point that in order to ‘know’ someone is capable of having a private experience, one has to have a means of public access to the notion of ‘private experience’; that is, in order to even agree that private experiences do take place one has to have a more or less well-formed public notion of what a private experience is.

Insofar as paintings are not found in a ‘state of nature’– at least a rough concept of a ‘painting’ would have to be formed, in some way, at some early stage of their being produced – this may entail something like the concept being formed during the making of the ‘thing’; or possibly the ‘thing’ (later called ‘painting’) being ‘completed’ but the concept ‘painting’, which provides the wherewithal to call ‘it’ ‘painting’, not being complete until the ‘thing’ is called ‘painting’. (This acknowledging the somewhat strange talk-entailments of ‘half-completed’ concepts, etc.). Perhaps the advantage of this notion is that it might legislate for ‘follow your nose’, ‘unconscious’, etc., painting-making processes at a fairly sophisticated level. But at the very simple level such a notion would only be applicable to the counterpart of Bultmann’s ‘naive reader’.

These remarks shade out some of the aspects of the matrix in which the foundations of Panofsky’s ‘Primary or natural subject matter’ notion is embedded. It appears that this notion with its pre-iconographical descriptive character rests in a perfectly straightforward way upon the ‘thing-language’. Now perhaps one should look at one scheme attempting to deal with the notion of a description.

III Consider a scheme derived from Russell (Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, chap. xvi, p. 174, Allen & Unwin, 1920) dealing with names and descriptions.

‘We have then, two things to compare: (i) a name, which is a simple symbol, directly designating an individual which is its meaning, and having this meaning in its own right, independently of the meaning of all others words; (ii) a description, which consists of several words, whose meanings are already fixed, and from which results whatever is to be taken as the “meaning” of the description’. One can fill out the above remarks a little. A name is a symbol whose meaning can only occur as a subject. And a ‘simple’ symbol is one which has no parts that are simple symbols. Thus ‘Scott’ is a simple symbol, because, though it has parts (namely seperate letters), these parts are not symbols. On the other hand ‘the author of Waverley’ is not a simple symbol, because the separate words that constitute the phrase are parts which are symbols. If, as may be the case, whatever seems to be an ‘individual’ (subject) is really capable of further analysis, one will have to content one’s self with what may be called ‘relative individuals’, which will be terms that, throughout the context in question, are never analysed and never occur otherwise than as subjects. And in that case one has to correspondingly content one’s self with ‘relative names’.

Looking back now at Panofsky’s notion of primary subject matter. He writes of ‘identifying pure forms…’, or ‘identifying their (i.e. natural objects such as houses, human beings, etc.) mutual relations as events’, of ‘perceiving such expressional qualities as the mournful character of pose or gesture…’, of recognizing ‘The world of pure forms … as carriers of primary or natural meaning…’. The notions one wants especially to examine here are those of ‘identifying’, ‘perceiving’, ‘recognizing’. (It may be the case that some of them (sometimes) are being used as interchangeable in some sense, or as equivalent, or even synonymous.) This will give us some clue as to whether Panofsky is talking of names or descriptions, and perhaps also where he is using one or the other. Panofsky, at this early stage in his theory-building, insofar as he is bound to accept certain presuppositions to make his theory work, inevitably then drags along in his theory the corresponding logical difficulties of making the presuppositions. These logical difficulties concern the logical properties of names and the logical properties of descriptions. What one has to distinguish here are two senses of the word ‘is’. One expressing the relation of subject and predicate; the other expressing identity. The ‘is’ for example in ‘Socrates is a man’ is identity between an object named (accepting ‘Socrates’ as a name (subject to qualifications)) and an object ambiguously described. An object ambiguously described will ‘exist’ when at least one such proposition is true, i.e. when there is at least one such true proposition of the form ‘x is a so-and-so’ where ‘x’ is a name. It is characteristic of ambiguous (as opposed to definite) descriptions that there may be any number of true propositions of the above form – ‘Socrates is a man’, ‘Plato is a man’, etc. Thus ‘a man exists’ follows from Socrates or Plato or anyone else. With definite descriptions on the other hand, the corresponding form of proposition, namely ‘x is the so-and-so’ (where ‘x’is a name), can only be true for one value of x at most. The ‘is’ of ‘Socrates is human’ expresses the relation of subject and predicate.

IV (i) Following Carnap:

‘We use the term “individual” not for one particular kind of entity but, rather, relative to a language system S, for those entities which are taken as the elements of the universe of discourse in S, in other words, the entities of the lowest level (we call it level zero) dealt with in S, no matter what these entities are. (With regard to Panofsky’s ‘primary subject matter’ domain the individuals are ‘physical’ things.) For one system the individuals may be physical things, for another spacetime points, or numbers, or anything else. Consequently we call the variables of level zero individual variables, the constants individual constants, and all expressions of this level, whether simple (variables and constants) or compound, individual expressions. The most important kinds of compound individual expressions are: (1) full expressions of functors (e.g. 3 + 4 where ‘+’ is a functor and ‘3’ and ‘4’ are individual constants); (within our systems, expressions of this kind occur only in S3, not in S1 or S2) (2) individual descriptions (other kinds of descriptions – (I) with predicator variables. (Il) with functor variables, (III) with sentential variables).

‘A description in S1 (which contains only individual variables) has the form ‘zx(... x ...)’; it is interpreted as ‘the one individual x such that ... x’ ... ‘(zx)’ is called an iota operator; the score ‘... x ...’ is a sentential matrix with ‘x’ as a free variable. For example, ‘(zx) (Px – Qx)’ means the same as the one individual which is P and not Q.

‘The entity for which a description stands (if there is such an entity) will be called its descriptum; here in the case of individual descriptions, the descriptum is an individual. With respect to a given description, there are two possible cases: either (1) there is exactly one individual which fulfils the condition expressed by the scope, or (2) this does not hold, that is, there are none or several such individuals.’

(ii) Following Watkins on Russell:

‘However, if the analysis is to be used to explain in what sense we can think of Homer if he did not exist then the proposition that Homer was blind must be identified with some proposition expressed by means of a denoting phrase. It might be identified with the proposition that the author of the Iliad was blind. Russell held that we can think about non-existent things or people only in such a way as this. He says that in the sentence “Homer was blind” the word “Homer” is a description and not a proper name. He sometimes says that it is not a logically proper name, meaning that it is grammatically a proper name but does not introduce an entity as subject, or other constituent of the proposition. He held that a person can understand a proposition only if he can have its constituents in mind directly. This, he thought a person can only do if he has been in some direct cognitive relation to them’. Perhaps it would be as well here to point out that in fact there are many propositions concerning human attitudes which raise difficulties for Russell’s Theory of Descriptions.

(iii) Following Frege (‘On Sense and Reference’):

‘A painter, horseman and zoologist will probably connect different ideas with the name “Bucephalus”. This constitutes an essential distinction between the idea and the sign’s sense, which may be the common property of many and therefore is not a part or mode of the individual mind. For one can hardly deny that mankind has a common store of thoughts which is transmitted one generation to another.

‘In the light of this, one need have no scruples in speaking simply of the sense, whereas in the case of the idea one must, strictly speaking, add to whom it belongs and to what time – similarly with sense – but there still remains a difference in the mode of connexion – i.e. they are not prevented from grasping the same sense: but they cannot have the same idea…… If two persons picture the same thing, each still has his own idea. It is indeed sometimes possible to establish differences in the idea or even in sensations, of different men; but an exact comparison is not possible, because we cannot have both ideas together in the same consciousness…… Without some affinity in human ideas art would certainly be impossible, but it can never be exactly determined how far the intentions of the poet are realized…… By a thought I understand not the subjective performance of thinking but the objective content, which is capable of being the common property of several thinkers’. Here then Frege makes his context rest upon some (more or less) ‘accepted’ notion of the public/private distinction. Frege also says that it is of the reference of a name that the predicate is affirmed or denied; that whoever denies the name has reference cannot apply or withhold a predicate. He maintains that the fact that we concern ourselves at all about the reference of a part of the sentence indicates that we generally recognize and expect a reference for the sentence itself.