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Imaginatively-Colored Perception: Walton on Pictorial

Experience

Alon Chasid, Bar-Ilan University

[penultimate version; forthcoming in the Southern Journal of

Philosophy]

Kendall Walton’s account of pictorial experience—the

experience we ordinarily have in looking at a picture—is part

of his general theory of make-believe. Walton, who assumes

that this theory is a workable platform for explaining

depiction, argues that a picture depicts an object by being a

prop in a visual game of make-believe. More specifically, in

looking at a picture, we imagine seeing the depicted object.

Walton sets down several conditions for imagining seeing, but

admits, probably in response to various criticisms, that “more

needs to be said” about this phenomenon (Walton 2008, 155).

This paper will develop Walton’s account. According to

Walton, the key feature of pictorial experience is that it is

imaginatively-penetrated experience. I will argue that this

idea, as put forward by Walton, has various shortcomings.

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After discussing these limitations, I suggest, on the basis of

the more general phenomenon of cognitive penetration, a

refinement of Walton’s account. I then identify the revised

account’s advantages vis-à-vis explaining various features of

pictorial experience. Specifically, I show that, given the

manner in which imaginings influence perceptual experience,

Walton can dispense with the thesis that pictorial experience

is twofold.

1. Walton’s Account of Pictorial Experience

Walton argues that pictures are props in visual games of make-

believe. He explains this claim in experiential terms:

pictures generate imaginings, which are related to visual experience

in a specific way. Together, the imaginings and the perceptual

experience to which they are related constitute pictorial

experience.

Walton’s explanation can be broken down into four theses

(set out in Walton 1990, ch. 8; 1991; 2008, chs. 7-9):

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T1: Looking at a picture that depicts, say, a garden, the

perceiver plays a game of make-believe in which it is

fictional that she sees a garden. Walton analyzes the “it is

fictional that” operator in terms of imagining, hence this

thesis amounts to the claim that the perceiver imagines that

she sees a garden. Note that on Walton’s view, imagining that

p, or as Walton puts it, “propositional imagining,” is the

simplest form of imagining; it does not necessarily entail

visualization, imagery, or any other sensory mental state.

Propositional imagining in itself is analogous, in certain

respects, to believing (see §2 below).

T2: The perceiver’s imagining that she sees a garden

constitutes a kind of imagining-experiencing. One important

feature of imaginings of this kind is that they are carried

out “from the inside.”1

T3: The perceiver’s act of seeing2 the picture’s marked

surface is the ‘object’ of her imagining: she imagines of her

actual act of seeing that it is an act of seeing a garden.

This thesis is meant to distinguish between, on the one hand,

the sort of imagining-seeing that constitutes pictorial

experience, and on the other, the calling up of a visual

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image, or visualizing, which can also be considered a sort of

imagining-seeing, but on Walton’s view is not considered

imagining in the relevant sense (1990, 13). Reading a

paragraph, for instance, may prompt one to visualize the objects

to which the paragraph refers. In this kind of experience,

however, the actual act of seeing—the seeing of the paragraph—

is not the object of the viewer’s imagining: she does not

imagine her visual experience of the text to be a visual

experience of whatever the text is referring to. By contrast,

visually experiencing a picture’s marked surface is indeed

imagined to be an experience of whatever it is that the

picture depicts.

T4: Visually experiencing the picture’s surface, and

imagining this experience to be the experience of seeing the

depicted object, are phenomenally inseparable: they are

integrated into a single experience, an experience that is

both perceptual and imaginative (1990, 295ff; 2008, 138ff).

This thesis is intended to exclude cases in which we

experience the surface and then, in a separate act, imagine our

experience to be an experience of the depicted object. Walton

rejects this scenario, arguing that pictorial experience does

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not consist only in propositional imagining, nor is it a

simultaneous occurrence of two different mental states

(perceptual experience and propositional imagining). Rather,

he maintains that the imagining and the perceptual experience

somehow become a single visual experience—the visual

experience we ordinarily have in looking at a picture.3

2. Problems Arising from Walton’s Account

Most criticism of Walton’s account is generated by T4, and by

how T3 is to be understood in light of T4.4 In what sense can

two different mental states—imagining and perceptual

experience—be considered a single state? How are two different

experiences ‘integrated’ into a single perceptual experience,

an experience with its own phenomenology and content?

Wollheim, among others, articulates this problem:

My difficulty … is how to understand … imagining one

perceptual experience to be another. For, if we succeed,

in what way does the original experience retain its

content? For, what is left of the experience of seeing

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the surface when I successfully imagine it to be some

other experience? However, if I do continue to see the

surface, or this experience retains its content, how have

I succeeded in imagining it, the experience, to be an

experience of seeing a face? (1998, 224-25)

Note that there is no general problem in imagining x to be y: in

games of make-believe, both adults and children often imagine

an object to be something other than what it is (they imagine

a glob of mud to be a pie, a banana to be a telephone, or to

use Wollheim’s example [1998, 225], their own hand-movements

to be those of a maestro.) The problem is in imagining one’s

visual experience to be another visual experience, generating a new,

‘combined’ visual experience. As Wollheim notes, imagining of

this sort has an ‘experiential’ aspect; indeed, it is “more

experiential than simply imagining that one experience is the

other” (ibid.).5

Walton is well aware of this criticism, and addresses it by

invoking a general thesis about perception: the cognitive

penetration thesis. On this thesis, perceptual states are

often “bound up” (2008, 138 and 141; cf. 1990, 295) with

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cognitive states. Surprisingly, none of Walton’s critics, to

my knowledge, have discussed this thesis, although Walton uses

it to explain what he means when he asserts that visual

experiences and imaginings can be integrated into a single

experience that is both perceptual and imaginative.

Walton deems it a commonplace that beliefs, desires,

judgments, and other cognitive states “penetrate” (his

alternative formulations include “inform” and “color”)

perceptual experiences (1990, 295ff; 2008, chs. 7-9). Assuming

that these various kinds of cognitive states partially

determine the phenomenology and content of perceptual

experience, Walton suggests that imaginings can also do so. In

the case of pictorial experience, the fact that in looking at

a picture of x we visually experience x is due to certain

imaginings that partially determine the phenomenology and

content of our visual experience, much as beliefs do in

‘ordinary’ visual experience.

By construing T4, the thesis that the perceptual and

imaginative elements of a pictorial experience are

inseparable, as falling under the more general thesis of

cognitive penetration, Walton is admitting that imagining x to

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be y where x and y are experiences differs from imagining x to

be y where x and y are not experiences. When we imagine a

banana to be a telephone, the banana does not change. But when

we imagine a perceptual experience to be another experience, the

original experience changes: it becomes an experience with a

different phenomenology and content. Despite this 1 Imagining “from the inside” is one mode of de se imagining;

see Walton’s explanation in (1990, 28ff).

2 Walton uses the terms “looking,” “observing,” “seeing,” and

“experiencing” more or less interchangeably in speaking of the

acts by which a viewer perceptually experiences the picture’s

surface and imagines her experience to be an experience of the

depicted object. As Walton explains his approach, the key

thesis pertains primarily to visual conscious mental states—

i.e., visual experience; it is on this thesis that I will focus

(see also §2 below).

3 Walton further requires that games of make-believe that take

place in looking at a picture be sufficiently “rich and vivid”

(1990, 296). This requirement, however, does not apply to the

structure of pictorial experience itself: it either describes

the circumstances under which the viewer is likely to have a

pictorial experience, or it accounts for pictorial realism (1990,

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dissimilarity, such an influence is not peculiar at all:

cognitive states routinely have the power to modify perceptual

experience, hence propositional imagining, being a cognitive

state, can do so too.

How does cognitive penetration work? Walton (1990) mentions

the phenomenon briefly, without committing to any specific

form in which it occurs. In a later article, Walton provides

more detail:

329ff)—a notion ancillary to that of ‘pictorial experience.’

Either way, this requirement is irrelevant to the problems I

discuss below, though my proposed refinement of Walton’s

theory can satisfy it.

4 Hopkins (1998, 20-22) (cf. Hopkins 2010, 169); Stock (2008);

Nanay (2004, §3); Lopes (1996, §4.4); Wollheim (1998, §9);

Budd (1992a); Howell (1996, §2).

5 Others similarly maintain that even if Walton’s idea of an

‘integrated’ experience is not self-contradictory, he provides

no general account of the integration of experiences, rendering

the idea ad hoc. See, e.g., Howell (1996, 423-24); cf. Walton

(2008, 139).

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The experience of recognizing an (actual) tree as a tree

is not a combination of a pure perception and a judgment

that what one perceives is a tree. It is rather a

perceptual experience that is also a cognitive one, one

colored by the belief that what one is experiencing is a

tree. Likewise, to see a horse in a design is to have a

perceptual experience colored by imagining one’s

perception to be of a horse, a perceptual experience that

is also an imaginative one. (2008, 138)

The experience of recognizing a tree, Walton claims, is a

perceptual experience that acquires at least some of its

content by being penetrated by a belief about what one is

experiencing. Similarly, in looking at a picture of a tree,

one’s perceptual experience of a tree acquires at least some

of its content by being penetrated by an imagining about what

one is experiencing. On this explanation, the main difference

between an ‘ordinary,’ non-pictorial, visual experience of a

tree, and a visual experience of a tree that is generated by

looking at a picture of a tree, is that the former is imbued

with beliefs, whereas the latter is imbued with imaginings.

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Walton’s explanation is problematic. Taken at face value,

the claim that beliefs determine perceptual content is

inconsistent with the commonly-held view that empirical

beliefs do not ordinarily generate perceptual experiences, but

rather are generated by them. To be precise, Walton repeatedly

states that what penetrates a visual experience of a tree is

not the belief that there is a tree over there (or that this is a

tree), but the belief that what one is experiencing is a tree.6 This

claim raises difficulties. According to Walton, the fact that

one visually experiences a tree seems to entail that one

already believes that one is experiencing a tree, for

otherwise, the visual experience of a tree could not be

penetrated by that belief, and would not take place. It thus

appears that one has the belief that one is experiencing a

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tree prior to experiencing a tree! However, given that we do

have such experiences, it follows that the experience of a

tree—viz., the experience the belief is about—occurs before one

believes that one is having the experience; otherwise, the

penetrating belief would be false. Interpreting Walton in this

way, then, seems to yield paradox, if not outright

contradiction.

It might be suggested that the paradox can be resolved as

follows: although a (false) belief about what one is

experiencing does not penetrate experience, an imagining about

what one is experiencing can do so. That is to say, if a

perceiver imagines her experience of x to be an experience of y,

her imagining may ‘come true,’ and she may have a (non-

veridical, possibly hallucinatory) visual experience of y. But6 Note that Walton’s statement that the penetrating belief is

that what one is experiencing is a tree should not be read de re: Walton

does not say that there is an x such that one is experiencing

x, and one believes that x is a tree. He clearly states that

the penetrating state, either the belief or the imagining, is

a belief or imagining about the actual perceptual experience, and

specifically, that one believes or imagines, with respect to

that experience, that it is an experience of x (T3; T1).

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recall that Walton tries to address the difficulties arising

from T4 by invoking a general thesis of cognitive penetration—a

thesis positing a range of phenomena, of which imaginative

penetration is just one instance. If Walton cannot explicate

the general thesis of cognitive penetration, he is left with

the aforementioned difficulties raised by Wollheim regarding

the ‘integration’ of imagining and perceptual experience.

Another suggestion for resolving the paradox adduces

Walton’s claim that the act of seeing is imagined (or, in ordinary

cases: believed) to be a different act of seeing (T3). In

using the term “seeing,” Walton might have been referring to

‘object-perception,’ i.e., to the state of perceiving an

object without yet attributing any properties to it. The

perceiver object-perceives a tree without perceiving it as a

tree, and then, by virtue of believing that she object-perceives

a tree, perceives it as a tree. This suggestion, however, is

likewise problematic. It cannot be that ordinarily, we

perceive an object without perceiving it as having properties,

and merely on the basis of a belief about what properties the

perceived object has, we perceive it as having these

properties. For were this the case, many of our perceptual

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experiences would be based on sheer hunch. As I will argue,

the correct model of penetration may indeed involve a

transition from one visual experience to another, but it is

highly implausible that the transition is from mere object-

perception to perception-as.

The main problem with Walton’s view is that aside from

stressing, in explaining T3 (specifically, in the paragraph

quoted above) that the ‘object’ of imagining (or believing) is

one’s perceptual experience, Walton does not say much about

cognitive penetration. Clearly, his account requires

elaboration. I maintain that with minor modifications,

Walton’s account can be rendered adequate. Walton’s

explanatory strategy, expressed in T4 (a strategy that, as I

mentioned, Walton’s critics ignore) is sound: there is a

general phenomenon of cognitive penetration in terms of which

pictorial experience can be explained.

I contend that what ordinarily penetrates visual experience

is a belief about what certain high-level properties look

like. The model of cognitive penetration I will put forward is

based on Siegel’s exposition of belief-penetrated perceptual

experience (Siegel 2006; 2010, ch. 4). On this model, a high-

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level property, such as the property of being a tree, is

represented in visual experience because beliefs associated

with recognizing that property penetrate visual experience and

determine it to be experience of a tree. More specifically, a

perceiver who has learned to recognize the property of tree-

ness has acquired beliefs to the effect that tree-ness appears

with specific combinations of colors, shapes, and other

properties (e.g., that trees are lollypop-shaped, green at the

top and brown at the bottom, etc.). These beliefs play a role

in determining the perceiver’s visual experiences of trees:

when looking at a tree, her beliefs about what trees look like

influence her visual experience to the effect that the

experience represents tree-ness. Walton’s account can be

interpreted in line with this model. In looking at a picture of

a tree, imaginings about how trees look, rather than beliefs,

penetrate the visual experience and determine it to be an

experience of tree-ness.

Before exploring how cognitive penetration works in the case

of pictorial experience, two preliminary comments about

methodology are in order. The terminology I will use is

premised on a representational theory of perception, that is,

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a theory which asserts that visual experiences are

representations. Visual experiences represent objects as

having certain properties; they have correctness conditions

(in the form of propositions), and thus can be either

veridical or non-veridical. Hallucinations, illusions, and

other sorts of non-veridical visual states will all be

considered visual experiences. I have adopted the

representational framework not only because it is consistent

with Walton’s account, but also for convenience. Other

approaches to perception, for instance the disjunctivist

approach, might also be workable, although if the

disjunctivist account is adopted, the non-veridical states at

issue would not be considered perceptual states, but rather,

inferior visual states, much like hallucinations.

It will also be assumed that experiences represent objects

as having certain properties, but I may sometimes refer to an

experience as representing a property F, or alternatively, as

representing an object x. Both these forms are abbreviations of

the rubric ‘representing x as being F’. Similarly, a picture that

depicts x always depicts it as being F, and a picture that

depicts a property F always depicts some x as being F.

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3. Cognitive Penetration

Siegel (2012) characterizes cognitive penetration as follows:

If visual experience is cognitively penetrable, then it

is nomologically possible for two subjects (or for one

subject in different counterfactual circumstances, or at

different times) to have visual experiences with

different contents while seeing and attending to the same

distal stimuli under the same external conditions, as a

result of differences in other cognitive (including

affective) states. (205-206)

A cognitively-penetrated experience is an experience that is

causally affected by cognitive states, so that its content is

partly determined by those states. But the cognitive influence

should not be inconsequential. As Siegel points out,

inconsequential cognitive influence is ubiquitous: “you can

choose to move your head to see what’s behind you, or to focus

your attention in order to see something in more detail”

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(203). In such cases, beliefs, desires, and other states

influence experience, but the influence is trivial, and does

not count as cognitive penetration in the relevant sense.

Several interesting examples of cognitive penetration have

been analyzed in the recent literature. Macpherson (2012)

focused on an experiment that demonstrates how, in seeing

cutouts of characteristically-red objects (e.g., a pair of

lips or an apple), subjects experienced the cutouts as redder

than they really were, that is, non-veridically. Macpherson

claims that these visual experiences were penetrated by the

subjects’ belief that the shapes represented

characteristically-red objects. Similarly, Lyons (2011)

adduces an experiment in which “subjects presented with a

monochrome picture of a banana will judge it to be more

yellowish than they would an identically colored square”

(302); this judgment arguably follows from the non-veridical

experience of the picture as being yellowish, an experience

that is influenced by the belief that bananas are yellow (cf.

Siegel 2012, 201). Another example is the case where A

believes that B is, say, angry at her, and this belief causes

A to visually experience B’s face as expressing anger (Siegel

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2012, 202). It has likewise been argued that beliefs regarding

the conditions under which an object is observed, such as the

way in which it is illuminated, influence perceptual

experience, e.g., rendering it indeterminate in content

(Chasid 2014b). Other phenomena have been adduced to

demonstrate that not only beliefs, but also desires and moods,

penetrate perceptual experience. Stokes (2012) notes that

hunger and various kinds of what he calls “background desires”

influence experience (cf. Siegel 2012 on how depression

impacts perception).

These examples are controversial, and the thesis of

cognitive penetrability is not accepted by all. Some theorists

deny that perceptual experience (or at least the experience of

low-level properties, such as colors and shapes) can be

influenced by beliefs in the said manner (Zeimbekis 2013; cf.

Raftopoulos 2009, ch. 8). Others try to explain specific cases

in a way that trivializes the influence of cognition on

experience (e.g., Deroy 2013; cf. Macpherson 2012). Since my

goal is to elaborate on Walton’s account, and the cognitive

penetration thesis is central to his view, I will not get into

the debate over the general soundness of this thesis.

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Moreover, for the purpose of developing Walton’s account, we

need only assume that cognitive states influence the

experience of high-level properties, and not the experience of

low-level properties; the latter claim is, as I said,

disputed.

The influence of beliefs on the experience of high-level

properties—properties other than shapes, colors, illumination,

and motion—is defended by Siegel (2006; 2010, ch. 4).7 Siegel

shows that learning to recognize a high-level property, such

as the property of being a pine tree, influences the

phenomenology and representational content of experience to

the effect that it comes to represent that property. More

precisely, in perceiving a high-level property, recognitional

beliefs impact the visual experience so that it represents the7 Siegel seeks to show that what she calls “K-properties” (“K”

for kind) are represented in experience, but her definition of

“kind” is broad: “K-properties are defined negatively by

excluding a small class of properties that include color,

shape, illumination, and motion” (2010, 99). For the purpose

of interpreting Walton’s account, the term “high-level

properties” is more appropriate, since it makes no commitment

to any specific view of kinds.

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high-level property. Recognitional beliefs with respect to a

high-level property are beliefs associated with recognizing

that property: they incorporate the fact that this property

manifests itself along with certain lower-level properties or

specific complexes of such properties (complexes that could,

perhaps, be construed as gestalt properties; see Siegel 2010,

111). In having this sort of content, such beliefs ‘expand’

the content of visual experience by enabling it to represent

high-level properties.

Walton’s idea of imaginative penetration can be elucidated

along these lines. When a perceiver looks at a picture of a tree,

that triggers, not recognitional beliefs, but rather

corresponding imaginings. These imaginings influence the visual

system to the effect that the perceiver visually experiences

the property of tree-ness. She thus ends up having a visual

experience that is manifestly non-veridical, but not, or not

only, because it represents the world incorrectly, as though

the depicted object is really there, but because it is

penetrated by imaginings rather than beliefs.

4. Imaginative Penetration

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Applying Siegel’s model to Walton’s account of pictorial

experience mandates that we characterize imaginings as having

three specific features that Walton upholds. The first is that

imaginings are either spontaneous or deliberative (Walton

1990, 13ff; 2008, 137, 151; cf. Levinson 1998, Newall 2011,

203-204). In our case, the penetrating imaginings occur

spontaneously: they are non-deliberatively called up when we

look at a picture that depicts F, much as beliefs associated

with recognizing F are called up when we look at an object

that has F.

The second feature is that although imaginings need not be

true, and we can easily imagine something we know to be false,

we can also imagine something we know to be true. Moreover, it

is widely agreed that, at least to some extent, imaginings

‘borrow’ content from beliefs, provided it is consistent with

the imaginings’ own content (see, e.g., Walton 1990, ch. 4;

cf. Nichols and Stich 2003, ch. 2; Nichols 2004; Gendler 2013,

§3). Walton brings the example of someone poor imagining that

he is rich and famous, but also “that his name is Fred, that

he prefers warm climates, that France is in Europe, and much

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else that he knows to be true” (1990, 13). In looking at a

picture, the imaginings that are called up correspond, at

least in part, to our beliefs, especially our recognitional

beliefs. For reasons to be discussed below, these imaginings,

and not recognitional beliefs, penetrate our experience to the

effect that it represents the depicted object.

The third feature is that we can imagine not only false

propositions, but also nomological, if not metaphysical,

impossibilities (Walton 1990, 32ff; 2008, 42-43). This feature

of imaginings will be invoked to explain the unique

phenomenology of pictorial experience.

A general background assumption of Walton’s account, an

assumption accepted, in one form or another, by most

imagination theorists (see, e.g., Nichols 2004 and 2006 on the

“single code hypothesis”; Gendler 2013), is that in

significant respects, imaginings are belief-like. Walton’s

account of imaginative penetration, I showed in §2, rests on

the analogy with belief penetration.

Given these features of imagining, Walton’s thesis that

imaginings penetrate experience should now be clearer. In

looking at a picture of a tree, the said imaginings appear

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non-deliberatively. The content of these imaginings may be

identical to that of recognitional beliefs, but may also

feature impossibilities. And whether or not the content of

imaginings is identical to that of recognitional beliefs,

imaginings function like recognitional beliefs, as they do in

other games of make-believe. In looking at a picture of a tree,

instead of having one’s visual system penetrated by

recognitional beliefs (specifically, the belief that tree-ness

is manifested together with certain combinations of colors,

shapes, and illumination) to the effect that one visually

experiences a tree, similar imaginings influence the visual

system to the effect that one visually experiences a tree.8

8 Walton may require that we first experience the low-level

properties of the picture’s surface, and only then do

imaginings penetrate the experience, which consequently

represents the depictum’s properties. This requirement is not

problematic, see, e.g., McGrath (2013, 236) on the

‘transition’ between experiences. Siegel is silent on this

issue. It seems plausible to me, however, that Walton would

agree that, with some practice, the imaginative experience can

occur as soon as a trained perceiver looks at the picture.

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To sum up, Walton was criticized by Wollheim and others for

not being clear about how pictorial experience ‘integrates’

our experience of the picture’s surface, and our imagining

that experience to be an experience of the depicted object. He

addressed this by arguing that ‘imagining x to be y’ in this

case indeed differs from the case where x and y are not

experiences: the original experience changes due to imagining;

it expands to represent not just the picture’s surface and its

properties, but also the depicted object and its properties.

But since Walton did not adequately explain how either

imaginative influence, or cognitive penetration in general,

works, I am suggesting that his account be interpreted along

the lines of Siegel’s model of cognitive penetration.

Although Walton’s account of imaginative penetration may now

be clearer, we must consider whether invoking it with respect

to pictures is warranted. What problems associated with

pictorial experience does it solve? Walton obviously assumes

that in looking at a picture, we have a visual experience of the

depicted object, given that his goal is to explain the

structure of that visual experience. But most accounts of

depiction—probably every account except those of Goodman

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(1976) and Kulvicki (2006)—indeed assume that pictures induce

some kind of visual experience of the depicted object, and

account for it without invoking imaginings or cognitive

penetration.

The merits of Walton’s account, then, need to be spelled

out. I will now discuss four characteristic features commonly

ascribed to pictorial experience, and show that the

imaginative penetration thesis can explain them successfully.

The fourth feature, unlike the first three, is controversial:

although Walton himself accepts it, some theorists deny it. I

will therefore argue that Walton need not accept the fourth

feature, showing that his theory is powerful enough to account

for pictorial experience without it.

The four features commonly ascribed to pictorial experience

are as follows:

C1: Pictures do not delude us into believing that the

depicted object (depictum) is in front of us, that it exists,

and so on.

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C2: Pictures do not generate in us a temptation to believe

that the depictum is in front of us, that it exists, and so

on.

C3: The experience we have, in looking at a picture, is

significantly different in phenomenology from experiencing the

depictum face-to-face.

C4: Pictorial experience is twofold: in looking at a

picture, we visually experience both the picture’s marked

surface as having certain configurational properties, and the

depictum as having certain properties, simultaneously.

C1-C4 are claimed to be true of most pictorial experiences.

Certain pictures—those that Wollheim (1980; 1987; 1998) calls

“trompe-l’oeil”—may generate pictorial experiences that lack some,

or even all, of the features in question.

Like most depiction theorists, Walton accepts C1. Looking at

a picture of a tree, we are not deluded into believing that

there is a small tree on the wall, a window through which a

tree is being viewed, or something similar. Walton’s account

has no special merit in explaining C1, as it is

straightforwardly explained by the fact that the perceiver has

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the defeating belief that she is looking at nothing but a

marked surface. Due to this belief, her experience of the

depictum does not generate the false belief that the depictum

is actually there.

Walton’s approach to C1 does, however, shed light on C2.

Consider the phenomenon of visual illusions, e.g., the Muller-

Lyer illusion. Though we know that the lines are the same 9 The distinction between ‘assertative’ and ‘non-assertative’

states, and similarly between ‘strong’ and ‘weak,’ or

‘stative’ and ‘semantic’ mental representations, refers to a

difference between two kinds of content-laden states. An

assertative state that has the propositional content p also

has ‘assertoric force,’ i.e., represents the world as being such

that p is true. A non-assertative state that has the content p does

not represent the world as being such that p is true., i.e., as

actually being that way. The distinction in question

differentiates states like believing and experiencing from

those like desiring, imagining, making assumptions, and

hypothesizing; see Gluer (2009, 306ff). My suggestion here is

that an imaginatively-penetrated experience, unlike other non-

veridical (and, a fortiori, veridical) experiences, should be

considered non-assertative.

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length, the experience of seeing them still impels us to

believe the contrary. The defeating belief does not reduce the

experience’s power to impel us to uphold the false belief. By

contrast, the experience of a depicted object does not impel

us to believe that the depicted object is there in front of

us. Why not? Why does pictorial experience lack assertoric

force, why does it not impel us to believe that the depictum

is there?9 On Walton’s account, the answer lies in the nature

of propositional imaginings, the mental states that arise when

we engage in make-believe. Ordinarily, these states do not

generate an inclination to believe their content.10 This is

also true of ‘partly-imaginative’ perceptual experiences,

i.e., experiences that are informed by propositional

imaginings: being partly determined by non-assertoric states,

these experiences, and pictorial experience in particular, are

also non-assertoric. (Note that this claim does not clash with

the widely-held thesis that perceptual experiences are

generally assertative; my claim is only that imaginatively-

penetrated experiences are non-assertative. Indeed, in this

respect these experiences are much like visualizations, which

30

despite their visual nature lack assertoric force; see note

10).

Although Walton’s thesis of imaginative penetration provides

a straightforward explanation for C2, there may be a competing

explanation for it, namely, C3. Many theorists contend that,

apart from trompe l’oeil pictures, the phenomenology of the

experience we have in looking at a picture of x differs

significantly from the phenomenology of experiencing x face-

to-face.11 This difference is due to the fact that in looking

at a non-trompe-l’oeil picture, we are ordinarily presented with

visible elements, such as ink dabs, smears and splotches of

paint, the weave of the canvas, etc., not all of which are

depictive. As these elements are patently observable, the

phenomenology of experiencing them should, presumably,

visually represent something. Yet they do not seem to

represent any property related to the depictum: with respect

to experiencing the depictum, these elements appear to be mere

phenomenal ‘noise.’ It thus might be claimed that, inasmuch as

these phenomenal aspects disclose the fact that we are not

looking at the depictum, the phenomenology of pictorial

experience, in contrast to the phenomenology of experiencing

31

the depictum face-to-face, precludes any inclination to

believe that the depictum is present.

This phenomenal ‘deviance’ is problematic for every account

which maintains that, in looking at a picture of x, we

visually experience x. For if the phenomenology of pictorial

experience differs in the said respect from that of

experiencing the depicted object face-to-face, why must we

assume that pictorial experience represents the depicted

object? One way to account for that phenomenology, it might be

claimed, is to deny that ordinarily, in looking at a picture

that depicts x, we visually experience x, and argue that we

only experience the picture’s surface as having various

configurational properties (Goodman 1976; Kulvicki 2006). Like

many other theorists, however, Walton accepts that we visually

experience the depictum, hence it is incumbent on him to

account for the deviant phenomenology.

A common explanation for C3 is C4. Endorsing Wollheim’s

twofoldness thesis (Wollheim 1980; 1987; 1998), some theorists

contend that pictorial experience (or, to use Wollheim’s term,

“seeing-in”) simultaneously represents both the marked surface’s

properties and the depicted object’s properties (see note 11).

32

In discussing Wollheim’s account, Walton accepts C4 (1990,

300ff; 2008, chs. 8-9). A pictorial experience is a visual

experience that, at one and the same time, represents the

picture’s surface as having certain configurational features

(some of which are non-depictive), and the depicted object as

having certain properties. Given that the two objects, the

surface and the depictum, and the properties they are

experienced as having, occupy the same region of the visual

field, it is no surprise that this twofold experience differs

phenomenally from a face-to-face experience of the depictum.

Indeed, C4, in accounting for the phenomenal difference

between experiencing x face-to-face and experiencing x by

looking at a picture of x, has substantial explanatory power:

what, if not discernible marks on the picture’s surface, could

make the phenomenology of experiencing the depictum unusual?

Moreover, C4 may also explain C2: if we experience the

surface’s properties and the depictum’s properties

simultaneously, the visual presence of the surface is the reason

for our disinclination to believe that the depictum is really

there.

33

Yet despite its explanatory power, C4 is problematic. Given

that the surface and the depictum are alleged to occupy the

same region of the visual field, how is it possible for a

single experience to represent the two objects as having

entirely different properties? In looking at a picture of a

flying saucer, for instance, we are required, according to C4,

to simultaneously visually experience the saucer as perfectly

round, and the picture’s configurational feature—the paint

stain on the canvas—as elliptical, with these incompatible

properties occupying the same region of our visual field. This

seems impossible: we cannot experience two incompatible

properties if they are collocated in the visual field.

Consider an ordinary, non-pictorial example. Looking at a

floodlit entity in the distance, for instance, one might

alternate between taking it to visually represent a golden-hued

shrub, and to visually represent a sunbleached boulder. Even

so, it remains impossible for a visual experience to represent

the object as having these incompatible properties

simultaneously.12

Given that visual representation of collocated incompatible

properties—if it is possible at all—cannot be a commonplace

34

phenomenon, it is highly problematic to claim that such

representation occurs in pictorial experience. Indeed,

Wollheim himself states that in being twofold, seeing-in is sui

generis (1998; cf. Walton 2008, 139). Other depiction theorists

respond to this dilemma in various ways, some by trying to

offer more viable versions of twofoldness,13 some by rejecting 10 There may be rare cases in which imaginings are considered

assertoric. Gendler (2013, §5.2), which presents a

controversial solution to the puzzle of imaginative resistance

—namely, that we resist imagining morally-deviant propositions

because were we to imagine them, we might be led to believe

them—suggests a context in which assertoric imaginings might

conceivably arise. But even on this view, imaginings do not

ordinarily generate an inclination to believe.

Other cases could be construed as involving assertoric

imaginings, though these imaginings do not seem to be the kind

of imaginings we have when engaged in make-believe. Dreaming

is one example (see Gendler 2013, §2.5). If dreams feature

propositional imaginings that have the power to impel us to

believe, these imaginings obviously differ from the imaginings

triggered by watching or reading fiction. To my knowledge, no

one has claimed that dreaming involves both imaginings and

35

C4—usually by denying that there is a visual experience of the

depictum. Walton’s own explication of twofoldness is quite

ingenious. In response to Wollheim’s criticism of Walton’s

account (see §2 above), Walton wonders, “how can the

perception of the surface ‘retain its content’ if one succeeds

in making the subject of the painting the content of one’s

beliefs that are generated by those imaginings.

The orange-cutouts experiment in Macpherson (2012) might

provide another example. A mental image interacts with the

perceptual process and yields a perceptual state which, the

experiment shows, is delusory. But here too, the imaginings in

question differ from those that occur in make-believe. Were

this not the case, we would often be misled by fiction.

Moreover, what causes the assertoricity of the experience in

Macpherson’s case is most likely not the visual imagining,

i.e., the visualization, since visualizations alone do not

ordinarily tend to delude us. (Perky effects might be taken to

demonstrate that even believing that we are visualizing is

sufficient to thwart our experience’s assertoricity). The

delusion in experiencing the orange-cutouts likely arises from

some other element, an element not present when we experience

fiction. (The same is also true of dreams, on views that

36

experience?” (2008, 155). Suggesting that his theory “goes

some way toward showing how two different intentional contents

can be combined,” Walton explains that “the duality consists

simply in the fact that one uses the picture as a prop in a

visual game. … One imagines one’s seeing of the canvas to be a

seeing of [the depictum], and this imagining is an integral

part of one’s visual experience of the canvas” (1990, 301).

Whereas Wollheim does not try to explain twofoldness, and

feels he must acquiesce in its sui generis character, Walton

offers an explanation that is based on the imaginative

consider them delusory: the assertoric force should not be

ascribed to the mental images, but to other elements).

11 See Walton (2008, 149ff); Wollheim (1987, 62), (1998,

221ff); Nanay (2010); Budd (1992b); Kulvicki (2009); Hopkins

(2003, 657), (2010); Bantinaki (2010); Newall (2011, ch. 2).

For a comprehensive discussion of C3 and its implications for

depiction, see Lopes (2005, ch. 1).

12 For a thorough discussion of problems raised by the notion

of twofold experience, see, e.g., Kulvicki (2009) on “heavenly

sight”; Chasid (2014a, §3).

13 I cannot examine other accounts of twofoldness here; see

Chasid (2014a) for a thorough treatment of this issue.

37

penetration thesis. On his view, twofoldness seems to follow

from the simultaneous influence of beliefs and imaginings on

visual experience. Note that the ‘co-existence’ of beliefs and

imaginings with different content is a basic premise of

Walton’s theory of make-believe, and is accepted, in one way

or another, by most theorists. In explaining twofoldness,

Walton takes this idea a step further: though different in

content, imaginings and beliefs can simultaneously inform visual

experience, rendering it twofold. Pictorial experience, being

informed by beliefs associated with recognizing the surface’s

configurational properties, can veridically represent the

marked surface as having those properties, while at the same

time, being informed by imaginings associated with recognizing

the depictum’s properties, non-veridically represent the

depictum as having those properties.

5. Doing without Twofoldness

We saw that the idea of imaginative penetration elucidates C4,

which explains the deviant phenomenology of pictorial

experience (C3), as well as C2 and C1.

38

I would argue, however, that Walton’s account can also

explain C3 without invoking C4. Now why would that be

advantageous? For one thing, Walton may have gone too far in

arguing that imaginings and beliefs that differ considerably

in content, even to the point of incompatibility, can

penetrate visual experience simultaneously. Whereas it is

plausible to argue that we believe that a certain combination of

low-level properties characterizes the marked surface’s

properties, while imagining that it characterizes tree-ness,

this co-existence of believing and imagining does not

straightforwardly entail that the belief and the imagining can

inform perception simultaneously, to the effect that we visually

experience both the surface’s properties and tree-ness.

Perhaps that argument can be defended, but it is no less

important to show that Walton can also reject C4, and explain

C3 by other means. For another, the twofoldness thesis is

controversial, and even those who accept it generally concede

that twofoldness is at least unusual. As I explained above, it

is highly implausible that a visual experience simultaneously

represents incompatible properties occupying the same region

of the visual field. If Walton can indeed coherently explain

39

the said difference in phenomenology without invoking

twofoldness, this increases his account’s appeal.

Let us therefore assume that we can experience only one set

of properties at a time (i.e., either the surface’s properties

or the depictum’s properties). Given that, in experiencing the

depictum as having various properties, we do not experience

the marked surface as having configurational properties, what

explains the acute phenomenal difference between experiencing

an object by looking at a (non-trompe-l’oeil) picture of it, and

experiencing it face-to-face?

The answer lies in the inherent nature of imagining, more

specifically, in the fact that nomological, if not

metaphysical, impossibilities can be imagined. In looking at a

picture of a tree and having a visual experience of tree-ness—

an experience of which C3 is true—the beliefs associated with

recognizing tree-ness do not penetrate the experience. Once we

notice the non-depictive properties of the picture’s surface—

those in virtue of which the picture is not trompe l’oeil (e.g.,

the canvas’s texture, brush strokes, a determinate hue or

shape, etc.)—we do not believe that tree-ness can manifest

itself together with the combination of properties that the

40

picture manifests (e.g., a lollypop-shape, the upper part

green and the lower brown, yet with the crisscross texture of

the canvas, the contours of the brush strokes, and so on). As

perceivers who have learned to recognize tree-ness, we may

even believe that it is impossible for tree-ness to be

manifested along with those specific properties. Holding fast

to our beliefs, we may undergo no more than the veridical

visual experience of a flat surface covered with blobs of

paint. Nevertheless, we are induced to imagine that tree-ness

can appear together with the said combination of properties.

Prompted by the surface’s properties, these imaginings penetrate

our visual experience to the effect that it represents tree-

ness.

The experience thus has an unusual phenomenology that

corresponds to the aberrant, probably impossible manner in

which the experience represents the property of tree-ness.

Though generated by the surface’s properties—properties that,

given C3, do not characterize the way the depictum really

looks—the imaginatively-penetrated experience nonetheless

represents the depictum as having certain properties. In so

doing, it does not represent the property of ‘being a mark-

41

covered surface,’ because visual experience cannot represent

incompatible properties collocated in the perceiver’s visual

field. The unusual phenomenology of experiencing the depictum

is, then, solely a matter of imagining that the depicted high-

level property is manifested together with an impossible

combination of low-level properties.

Consider a relatively clear-cut example, namely, the

experience we have in looking at a black-and-white picture of a

tree. This experience clearly differs phenomenally from any

possible face-to-face experience of tree-ness. The reason is

that such a picture has at least one salient non-depictive

property, namely, its specific grey hue, which does not depict

anything related to tree-ness (indeed, the greyness could

change, e.g., to sepia, without changing any property the tree

is depicted as having; see Chasid 2007, §2; 2014a, §4). Having

this non-depictive property, a black-and-white picture usually

depicts objects without specifying their determinate hues or

the determinate way in which they are illuminated.

By contrast, a face-to-face experience is necessarily

determinate in these respects: no visual experience represents

tree-ness, or any other visible property, without specifying

42

its hue or illumination. This disparity between pictorial and

face-to-face experience does not entail that, in looking at

the picture, we do not experience tree-ness, or that we

experience tree-ness and the surface’s properties

simultaneously. Rather, we have a visual experience of tree-

ness due to the penetration of imaginings. Despite the fact

that tree-ness cannot appear without any specification of hue

or illumination, our imaginings expand the range of ways in

which tree-ness can be visually represented to include this

impossible combination of low-level properties, namely, the

low-level properties along with which tree-ness typically

manifests itself, but no determinate hue or illumination.

Consider, likewise, a line drawing of a vase. The surface’s

specific hue and texture in this case are likely to be non-

depictive: they definitely do not depict the vase as having a

certain hue or finish, or as being illuminated in a way that

conceals the vase’s hue and finish. In looking at the drawing,

we could, again, experience only the property of ‘being a

surface marked with curved lines,’ inasmuch as we believe that

the property of ‘being a vase’ cannot be manifested without

any specification of finish, hue, or illumination. However, we

43

can imagine that ‘being a vase’ is manifested in the

indeterminate way in which the drawing presents it to us; this

imagining penetrates our visual experience to the effect that

we visually experience a vase. And here too, this pictorial

experience of a vase is radically different in phenomenology

from its face-to-face counterpart, since the latter is never

indeterminate in the said respects.

As a final example, let us consider a pictorial experience

under sub-optimal observation conditions. A picture’s surface

may be tilted, brightly illuminated, and so on. In such cases,

we readily notice the picture’s surface, and experience it

veridically as being a tilted or brightly-illuminated surface

covered with marks. If the surface is not too tilted or

illuminated, we can still make out the depicted high-level

properties and, arguably, visually experience them—without

simultaneously experiencing the property of ‘being a tilted

surface’ or the property of ‘being a brightly illuminated

surface.’ Due to the conditions under which the picture—of a

tree, say—is viewed, our experience of tree-ness is likely to

have a deviant phenomenology, a phenomenology no face-to-face

experience of tree-ness would have. Accordingly, we may

44

believe that tree-ness cannot be manifested along with the

combination of low-level properties that we perceive

(specifically those that are distorted due to the brightness

and the surface’s tilt). Yet we are still induced to imagine

that tree-ness is manifesting itself together with the

presented combination of low-level properties, and, penetrated

by this imagining, our visual experience is an experience of

tree-ness.

On Walton’s account, then, the twofoldness thesis can be

relinquished. If the broad scope of imagining can explain the

unusual phenomenology that ensues due to a picture’s non-

depictive properties, we should not relinquish an accepted

feature of visual experience, namely, that it does not

represent incompatible properties that are collocated in the

visual field at the same time. Since pictorial imaginings—like

many imaginings that arise in games of make-believe—may

feature anomalies, the experiences they penetrate may have a

deviant phenomenology. They may represent a high-level

property along with an impossible, but still imaginable,

combination of low-level properties.

45

Walton’s explanation of twofoldness relies heavily on the

premise that even if their content is incompatible, co-held

beliefs and imaginings can inform visual experience

simultaneously, rendering its content self-incompatible. I have

shown that Walton can also adopt a different line of thought,

relying on another feature of imagining, namely, its capacity

to countenance impossibilities, to explain C3 without assuming

twofoldness.

What remains to be clarified is the case of trompe-l’oeil

pictures, where there is no phenomenal difference between

pictorial and face-to-face experience of high-level

properties. Does imaginative penetration occur in this case?

The answer, I believe, depends on the viewer’s response to

such a picture. If, in looking at it, she is impelled to believe

that the depicted scene is really there (much as one is

impelled to believe, in looking at the Muller-Lyer illusion,

that the lines are of different length), but on the strength

of defeating beliefs, she resists this impulse, then her

experience should be considered a non-imaginative experience,

an experience that, despite being non-veridical, is informed

not by imaginings, but by beliefs associated with recognizing

46

the depicted properties. However, if the picture’s viewer is

not impelled to believe that the depicted object is really

there, Walton might claim that the viewer’s experience is

penetrated by imaginings. After all, propositions that are

believed can also be imagined. In the case of trompe-l’oeil

pictures, the viewer’s lack of any inclination to believe what

she experiences (C2) has a straightforward explanation: the

content of her perceptual experience has been partly

determined by imaginings, rather than recognitional beliefs;

she thus has a perceptual experience that is “both perceptual

and imaginative” (Walton 2008, 138).

6. Conclusion

Walton argues that pictorial experience consists in imagining

one’s visual experience of the surface to be an experience of

the depicted object, where ‘imagining x to be y’ is an instance

of a general form of cognitive penetration. Showing that

Walton’s account of cognitive penetration is inadequate, I

suggested that it be modified along the lines of Siegel’s

model of belief penetration. I argued that what ‘informs’ the

47

perceptual experience one has in looking at a picture is

imagining that the depicted properties can be manifested

together with certain combinations of low-level properties. I

showed how the modified account succeeds in explaining various

phenomena associated with pictures. In addition, I

demonstrated that although Walton accepts twofoldness and

offers an ingenious explanation for it, he can relinquish it

without diminishing his account’s explanatory force.

The gist of Walton’s original thesis remains unchanged: a

picture is a prop in a visual game of make-believe. It prompts

us to imagine that a high-level property can appear along with

certain combinations of low-level properties. These imaginings

generate a visual experience of an object (namely, the depicted

object) as having that high-level property. In looking at a

picture, our perception of the depicted object is thus

‘colored’ by imagination.

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