Abstract
Vagueness, as imprecision or fuzziness, concerns many practices and many values. Epistemic and aesthetic practices are in the case of images, as well as of words, inseparable, e.g., in relation to the value of depiction or representation. Then out of such common ground we may easily see that the goals or norms that inform the uses of production, interpretation and uses of images might be equally entangled yet still differ. In the cases I turn to in this section those values and standards involving the treatment of visual fuzziness are made explicit, and aesthetic discussions yield epistemic insights about perceptual cognition.
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Notes
- 1.
The problem of the relation of experience to knowledge has often been framed as a problem about the relation between precise cognition by construction, after the model of mathematics, and imprecise experience in intuition; notable examples include works such as Moritz Schlick’s General Theory of Knowledge.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
Niepce [4], 39.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
See, for instance, Gottfried Spiegler’s Physikalische Grundlagen der Röntgendiagnostik (Thieme 1957), cited in Gombrich [9], 183–184.
- 8.
Gombrich [10].
- 9.
Obviously, among the viewers are the makers themselves, with the rare exception of blind artists. A number of different conditions impairing an artist’s eyesight may play a role in the making of pictures driving a wedge between the standards of production and appreciation.
- 10.
The original conception of pattern and model can be traced to these kinds of practices. Outside workshops and art schools, pattern books became popular in the teaching and practice of all sorts of crafts.
- 11.
Like Popper, Gombrich aimed to naturalize through empirical models the philosophical standard of universal and necessary categories in Kant’s constructive metaphysics of empirical knowledge.
- 12.
On the role of the artist in the depiction of archetypes see Daston and Galison [11].
- 13.
- 14.
See Kemp [12].
- 15.
Gombrich [10].
- 16.
The French philosopher Pierre Duhem made a similar point about the relation between the quantitative representations in measurement, or theoretical facts, and qualitative empirical facts, or practical facts; he concluded that physical laws were neither true not false, only approximate; see Duhem [13].
- 17.
Ibid., 110.
- 18.
Ibid., 88–9.
- 19.
Ibid., 208.
- 20.
Ibid., 219.
- 21.
Ibid., 221.
- 22.
Kemp [14].
- 23.
Modern Painters, vol. 1, cited in Gombrich [9], 209.
- 24.
This aspect relates to holistic aspects of pictorial depiction and violates the phenomenon violates the Fodor-Sober compositionality condition on images.
- 25.
Hamilton [15].
- 26.
Richter [16].
- 27.
Richter mentions Einstein, ‘Notes, 1962’, ibid., 15.
- 28.
Ibid.
- 29.
‘Notes, 1964-65’, ibid., 30–3.
- 30.
The English edition uses both words for the German expression ‘Unschärfe’ in the German edition.
- 31.
Ibid., 55.
- 32.
Wollheim and Hopkins have stressed his point; see below.
- 33.
Ibid., 33.
- 34.
Ibid., 87. Richter’s reference reflects Heisenberg’s German cultural prestige free from ideological perspectives. In the original German texts, Richter refers to the precision of photographs typically as ‘Genauigkeit’ and to blur as ‘Unschärfe’, and in the interview from 1974 Richter speaks of the way the concept of Unschärfe (translated as ‘the term ‘fuzziness’’) is used in physics with a similar meaning—“In der Physik gibt es, glaube ich, den Begriff der Unschärfe in einem vergleichbaren Zusammenhang” (ibid., 88). The editors’ note refers to Heisenberg’s well-known quantum indeterminacy principle as ‘Heisenbergsche Unschärfenprinzip’, the standard German term used at least since 1930 by Schrödinger, along with ‘Unschärfenrelation’; originally in 1927 Heisenberg had used the terms ‘Genauigkeit’ (‘determinacy’), ‘Ungenauigkeit’ (‘indeterminacy’), ‘”schärfere” Bestimmung’ (‘”sharp” determination’) and in an endnote also ‘Unsicherheit’ (‘uncertainty’); it is the last term that is the source of the term ‘uncertainty’ established in the English expression ‘uncertainty principle’ by the translation of his 1930 book, The Physical Principles of Quantum Theory. The term ‘uncertainty’ has become also part of the more epistemic vocabulary of fuzzy set theory and logic. In fact, around the same time fuzzy set theory was being applied to modeling quantum indeterminacy, see, for instance, Ali and Doebner [17].
- 35.
Viewers do not favor the medical look of high-definition displays of skin and its blemishes.
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Cat, J. (2017). The Cognitive Values of Imprecision: Towards a Scientific Epistemology, Aesthetics and Pragmatics of Fuzziness; Contextual Lessons from the History of Picture-Making Practices. In: Fuzzy Pictures as Philosophical Problem and Scientific Practice. Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing, vol 348. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47190-7_11
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