The artifactual theory of depiction: from paintings and sculptures to virtual reality

Abstract This paper proposes a new account of depiction, namely the ‘artifactual theory’, which aims to supplement the so-called “experiential accounts”. The latter characterize pictures as eliciting a perceptual experience of what is represented. Drawing on philosophical accounts of technical artifacts and on their notions of structure and function, the artifactual theory casts the generation of a peculiar perceptual experience as the function that pictures perform in virtue of their structure. The paper argues that the artifactual theory leads us to a compelling taxonomy of pictorial kinds that accounts for not only paradigmatic two-dimensional pictures such as paintings but also “threedimensional pictures” such as statues, and even “immaterial pictures” such as those of virtual reality. Specifically, the artifactual theory enables us to individuate the three basic pictorial kinds thereby situating virtual reality, statues and paintings in the pictorial realm in an effective and insightful way that captures both what they have in common and what makes each of them special.