Look around; I’ll bet you can see several pictures from where you sit, or stand, right now. You may see photographs of family, or drawings in advertisements. There are little pictorialiconsfor apps on your computer desktop and your phone’s home screen. Simplified pictures of pedestrians, cars, trucks, and deer festoon our street signs.

图片是如此的无处不在，以至于它们经常淡出我们的意识体验的背景。我们把它们视为理所当然。但是图片有一种特殊的魔力。当你看到一个时，你看到的不仅仅是表面上的一些颜色，一些标记混杂在一起;you see some things—maybe bottles, people, or books that are represented—in the picture. All at once, you seeboththe marks on the surfaceandthe things represented by the picture.

有影响力的哲学家Richard Wollheimdid a lot to bring this special feature of seeing pictures into view. He called it “twofoldness.” There’s arecognitional foldof seeing something in a picture that involves seeing the objects depicted in it. But there’s also aconfigurational foldof seeing something in a picture that involves seeing the configurations of marks on its two-dimensional surface. These ‘folds’ areinseparable aspects ofseeing-in. It’s not like you have two simultaneous experiences, one of bottles, people, and books and the other of a flat surface marked by various colored shapes. These are experienced together in a special way. Whatever that combination involves, it makes a big difference to the way it feels, from the viewer’s perspective, to look at a picture and see things in it.

This brings us to a related puzzling aspect of seeing pictures: the relationship between “pictorial space” and real space. We can bring this out by considering our talk of seeing things “in”pictures.

If we take our talk of seeing things “in a picture” literally, the phenomenon starts to sound paradoxical. The things we say we seeinpictures are ordinary three-dimensional objects. But there isn’t really, actually, literallyroomfor these three-dimensional objects to fit in a picture. Pictures aren’t like little dollhouses in which you can actually place miniature bottles, people, and books. Seeing things “in” a picture actually requires knowing that you are looking at a two-dimensional surface.

It is true that pictures have their own space—“pictorial space,” as we call it; that’s the virtual space that holds and relates all the things a picture represents. When you seetheMona Lisa, for example, the subject of this portrait (Lisa) is sitting in front of a landscape in her world; her hands are folded in front of her; her smile is below her eyes.

但是，这个绘画空间与画作所在的真实空间有着复杂的关系。虽然这幅画只有30英寸高，但当你看到它的时候，你不会觉得你是通过一个小窗户在看一个更小的人。You couldn’t quantify the distance between you, the viewer, and Lisa (e.g.three meters); and even with the best technology we could produce, you could never reach through the plane of the picture and into Lisa’s space. Real space and pictorial space simply don’t combine like that. Lisa is no more inrealspace than you are inpictorialspace.

This has an important further consequence. The picture itself—that physical canvas, framed in gold, layered with glass, placed behind crowd-control barriers in the Louvre—is inrealspace. But that means Lisa is notliterally inthe picture. If she were, she would just simply be in real space as well; if anything isinsomething which is itselfin在真实空间中，那么原来的东西也一定在真实空间中。但我们已经知道丽莎不在真实的太空中。她在画报空间。So Lisa isn’t literallyin the pictureat all.

We have good reason, then, not to take “seeing things in a picture” literally. When you see something “in a picture,” you don’t see the two-dimensional surface as holding or containing three-dimensional objects; that would be absurd. Nor could real space simply contain the virtual space of the picture in any straightforward way. We should instead treat “seeing thingsina picture” as a rough manner of speaking. Things depicted aren’t reallyina picture like a doll is in a dollhouse.

The “in” here sounds more like the idiomaticinof representation, used (for instance) when we say that Pip is a characterinthe bookGreat Expectations. It’s not as though there’s a little boy literally stuck in a book, and it’s not as though Lisa is reallyina picture that is a two-dimensional surface.

There are complications here that I haven’t already mentioned. Lisa is certainlyrepresented as beingin real space, perhaps in a place in Italy you could go and visit yourself one day. What’s more, you are given apoint of viewon Lisa when you look at the picture, and that point of view is located in pictorial space. It is difficult to make out exactly what these two spatial facts come to. But we should be able to accept and explain these facts while recognizing that seeing thingsin picturesis just a manner of speaking; the things we see “in” pictures aren’t physicallyinthe two-dimensional surface that constitutes the picture, and the things “in” the picture—which is itself in real space—aren’t therebyinreal space.

We are just skimming the surface of the complications involved in twofoldness. When we recognize that “seeing in” is not to be taken literally, we can start to make progress on the philosophy of pictures.

Photo byEric TERRADEonUnsplash