Art, Representation, and Make-Believe

Essays on the Philosophy of Kendall L. Walton

Sonia Sedivy, Sonia Sedivy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000396201
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

This is the first collection of essays focused on the many-faceted work of Kendall L. Walton. Walton has shaped debate about the arts for the last 50 years. He provides a comprehensive framework for understanding arts in terms of the human capacity of make-believe that shows how different arts – visual, photographic, musical, literary, or poetic – can be explained in terms of complex structures of pretense, perception, imagining, empathy, and emotion. His groundbreaking work has been taken beyond aesthetics to address foundational issues concerning linguistic and scientific representations – for example, about the nature of scientific modelling or to explain how much of what we say is quite different from the literal meanings of our words. Contributions from a diverse group of philosophers probe Walton's detailed proposals and the themes for research they open. The essays provide an overview of important debates that have Walton's work at their core. This book will be of interest to scholars and graduate students working on aesthetics across the humanities, as well as those interested in the topic of representation and its intersection with perception, language, science, and metaphysics.

1
Introduction

The Reach of Make-Believe

Sonia Sedivy

DOI: 10.4324/9780367808662-1

Kendall Walton’s work offers a comprehensive reorientation to the representational arts while reaching well beyond them. He proposes a novel perspective that focuses on our imagination and our capacity for make-believe, and he highlights how make-believe involves props. Walton shows that focusing on make-believe explains paradigmatic representational arts such as paintings and novels, theatre and film as forms of make-believe with props. But he also shows how this novel perspective extends beyond the arts. His approach offers explanations of pictures and photographs in general not only artistic ones; stories in general as well as literary and performing arts; music; the nature of metaphor, and even the claims we make about fictional entities and existence. The cumulative effect is a framework that brings a variety of endeavours together that are representational in a new sense. Representations of this kind involve our capacity for imagination and overlap with the fictional. We will see that Walton’s framework emphasizes the socially or historically contextual nature of make-believe representation and many varieties of arts.

I.

Walton proposes that we need to focus on things that have the function of props in make-believe rather than things we co-opt as props on the fly, as children do in their make-believe games. He eases us into his approach by discussing children’s games, such as imagining tree stumps to be bears. But this is because childhood make-believe is the human capacity that lies at the root of the fact that things have the function of props for make-believe in social contex ts.

Walton shows how a complex structure comes into view if we highlight this fact. Firstly, things have the function of props for make-believe only in social contexts where there are norms or prescriptions for certain imaginings in response to features of certain objects – texts or pictures, for example. Secondly, such games involve us as participants. We are prompted by props to participate in make-believe games. We do so by engaging in prescribed imaginings about the props as well as ourselves. As participants in make-believe, we enter imaginary scenarios or ‘worlds.’ We imagine things about ourselves from the inside or experientially. Third, props have an independence from any one of us that gives them a kind of objectivity. What we are to imagine is prescribed by the prop. It follows that what is fictional is determined by props, it is not a matter of what anyone chooses to imagine.

Evidently, representations that share this structure are fictional. As Walton writes “to be fictional is, at bottom, to possess the function of serving as a prop in games of make-believe” (1990, p. 102) and a prop mandates or prescribes certain imaginings rather than others. For example, any stump in the forest where the children are playing ‘stumps are bears’ is a bear. That there is a bear covered by leaves next to the creek is a prescribed imagining in the game whether anyone sees the stump or not; it is true in the game. Analogously, a text might evoke and prescribe imagining Lizzie Bennet poking fun at an oily suitor; a picture might evoke and prescribe imagining seeing ships on the high seas.

But Walton’s approach also reconstrues the notion of the fictional. It offers a notion that “has little to do with contrasts between fiction and reality or truth and assertion” (1991, p. 380). Rather, what is fictional is what is to be imagined – as constrained and prescribed by props. Though it is sometimes said that there are fictional truths – such as the one about Lizzie Bennet mentioned earlier – Walton suggests we ‘resist’ this manner of speaking because it suggests that truth comes in varieties (1990, pp. 41−42). Instead of “fictional truth,” all we need is what his framework gives us: the notion of what a prop prescribes imagining or what is fictional or what is true in the fiction or make-believe. Yet, Walton is comfortable with continuing to say that fictionality is a property of propositions so that there are fictional propositions – as long as we don’t get hung up on the notion of a proposition and keep in mind that this too is a manner of speaking (1990, pp. 36−37). Again, all we need to countenance is that props mandate specific imaginings. This notion of fictionality as what we are to imagine is one of Walton’s distinctive contributions, and it plays a fundamental role in his framework.

Though Walton aligns the notions of make-believe representation and fiction, he distinguishes them in the following respect. Representations are “things whose function is to be props” (1990, p. 52) in games of make-believe and he emphasizes that they need not be artefacts. In contrast, fictions are works, which is to say that they are props that are always human artefacts (1990, pp. 72, 103). This difference is due to Walton’s emphasis that naturally occurring pictures or designs – such as cloud formations or constellations of stars – have the function of props for make-believe games in our societies even though they are not produced or designed for this function. Similarly, he insists that we could read and enjoy a naturally occurring story if the surface texture of a boulder traces out letters that make up words and sentences, for example.

By explaining a large range of representations in terms of uses of imagination and fictionality, Walton’s approach makes us at least pause and think about representation afresh. If he is right that many representations involve forms of make-believe, his work edges out more typical notions of representation from the core or central role they tend to occupy. These more typical notions include the idea that representations are of or about something; that there is a core notion of representation that divides into non-fictional and fictional varieties with the non-fictional being primary and the fictional derivative; or the idea that linguistic representation provides the model for explaining other kinds. His approach also makes us pause and think about the arts anew, challenging us to reconsider whether and how our responses are imaginative.

What is remarkable is how much Walton explains in these terms, about both representational arts and other representations. Like variations on a theme, each account explains a different detailed structure of make-believe distinguished by the nature of the prop and the imaginative experience it mandates. Case by case, the specific explanations Walton provides in terms of make-believe have become leading contenders in each field. They set terms of debate about pictures, photographs, fictional texts, and beyond.

To be sure, much of that debate is critical. Most of the chapters in this book examine Walton’s specific explanations critically. I will provide a preliminary outline shortly. But first, his work on the socially or historically contextual nature of the arts and make-believe needs to be brought to the forefront.

Walton offers a landmark case for the historical or contextual nature of some artworks. The argument is made in “Categories of Art” (‘Categories’ henceforth) to challenge aesthetic formalism or what has come to be considered more broadly as aesthetic empiricism. But it stands as part of the turn towards contextual or historical explanation in the arts in the second half of the twentieth century.

Walton’s stated aim is to delineate a group of aesthetic properties that fall outside of the formalist or empiricist view that aesthetic properties are restricted to what we can perceive in a work on an impoverished view of perception. He argues that there are aesthetic properties that are part of the ‘look’ or ‘sound’ or ‘felt quality’ of a work but that vary with and depend on historical or social context. Walton illustrates that properties such as the vividness of a painting – of Picasso’s Guernica for example – are both historical and perceptible in the following sense. Such aesthetic properties depend on the historical category to which the work belongs and they require trained perceptual skills whereby we perceive the work ‘in’ its historical category.

To show that the vividness of Guernica depends on the historical category to which it belongs, Walton examines its aesthetic effects in two different social contexts where it belongs to different art categories. In our world, Guernica is a painting, whereas in the hypothetical scenario it is a guernica. These are bas-relief type works whose raised surfaces have the colours and shapes of Guernica but in different mouldings so that different parts of the surfaces of each guernica “are molded to protrude from the wall like relief maps of different kinds of terrain” (Walton, 1970, p. 347). There are no paintings in this hypothetical context.

The example illustrates how changing the social context and thereby the category to which the work belongs changes some of its aesthetic properties:

We do not pay attention to or take note of Guernica’s flatness; this is a feature we take for granted for paintings, as it were. But for the other society this is Guernica’s most striking and noteworthy characteristic—what is expressive about it. Conversely, Guernica’s color patches, which we find noteworthy and expressive, are insignificant to them.

It seems violent, dynamic, vital, disturbing to us. But I imagine it would strike them as cold, stark, lifeless, or serene and restful, or perhaps bland, dull, boring—but in any case not violent, dynamic, and vital.

(Walton, 1970, p. 347, order reversed)

The example shows that aesthetic properties such as vividness do not depend on the non-aesthetic properties simpliciter of a work but on properties that play a normative role for categories of art such as painting or guernica. Guernica has the non-aesthetic property of being flat in both contexts, but it is vivid or dynamic in our context and not in the other. Walton argues that what changes across the two contexts is that flatness is standard and colours and contours are variable for the category or comparison group of paintings, whereas three-dimensional moulding along with the one arrangement of colours and contours are standard for the category or comparison group of guernicas. In our context, the flatness that is standard for paintings makes the markings of the surface which are variable for painting – in this case Guernica’s sharp angles, edges, shapes, and black and white colours – stand out so that Guernica is dynamic or vital or violent. In the hypothetical context, bas-relief moulding of the markings is standard for guernicas, so that its flatness would stand out and Guernica would be bland or serene. As Walton puts the point, it is not (only) the work’s non-aesthetic properties such as colours or contours that determine aesthetic impact but also “which of its non-aesthetic properties are ‘standard,’ which ‘variable,’ and which ‘contra-standard’” (Walton, 1970, p. 338).¹ In short, aesthetic properties like being dynamic or dull depend on the prescriptive or normative properties for categories such as painting or guernica to which a work belongs.

But are categories such as painting or guernica both historical and perceptible? This is key for Walton’s argument. He needs to do two things: to show that such categories are historical and that they are perceptible, we can learn to perceive items ‘in’ them.

First, Walton restricts the categories only to those where it can be plausibly argued that we could come to distinguish members of these categories through ‘trained’ perceptual skills:

It is no use just immersing ourselves in a particular work, even with the knowledge of what categories it is correctly perceived in for that alone will not enable us to perceive it in those categories. … [P]erceiving a work in a certain category or set of categories is a skill that must be acquired by training, and exposure to a great many other works of the category or categories in question is ordinarily, I believe, an essential part of this training.

(Walton, 1970, p. 366)²

Second, he argues for the historical nature of categories such as painting or guernica by proposing that category membership is determined by four conditions, two of which are historical. A work belongs in a category if it has “a relatively large number of features standard with respect to the category” and “[t]he fact, if it is one, that [the work] is better, or more interesting, or… when perceived in the category than it is when perceived in alternative ways” (Walton, 1970, pp. 357−358). In addition, there are two historical conditions. A work belongs in a category if (i) the category is “well established in and recognized by the society in which [the work] was produced” and (ii) the artist “intended or expected” their work “to be perceived” in the specific category or “thought of it” as being in that category (Walton, 1970, pp. 357−358). There may be numerous cases that are borderline or even undecidable on these criteria – such as innovative works that challenge existing categories and open new ones. But Walton’s point is that typically at least one of the two historical conditions applies so the categories he delineates are objective and historical.

These considerations support his conclusion that aesthetic properties that depend on the normative or prescriptive properties for historical, perceptible categories of art can be perceived but only in a way that involves skilled perceptual understanding of the relevant historical category (or categories). These are properties that it is correct to perceive in a work. The significance of this view extends beyond its counter to formalism or aesthetic empiricism to our understanding that some artworks and some of their properties depend on historical facts and categories – that is why it stands as a landmark work in the historical turn in aesthetics in the second half of the twentieth century.

But the contextual nature of art is an integral part of the make-believe framework, not just a strand in Walton’s early thought on aesthetic properties.³ Mimesis as Make-Believe (Mimesis henceforth) argues that things can have the function of props in games of make-believe only in social contexts, as we noted earlier. This does not suggest that props require explicit conventions or that we follow explicit rules. Rather, Walton proposes the more subtle view that there are norms or prescriptions to imagine in that such prescriptions might be enforced – if questions arise. And as he puts it, “there must be social context to enforce the norms.” This entails that all forms of make-believe representation with functional props depend on specific historical context.

Together, Categories and Mimesis hold that many works of art are multiply dependent on social context. Let’s continue with painting as our example. A painting is a picture and accord...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• 1 Introduction: The Reach of Make-Believe
• Part I Fiction and the Verbal Arts
• Part II Visual Art, Photography, and Music
• Part III Themes in Aesthetics: Agency, Appearances, and Norms
• Part IV Beyond Aesthetics: Meaning, Metaphysics, and Science
• Part V Walton in Conversation
• List of Contributors
• Index