Philosophy 1020 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Nominalism
Document Summary
Statements may be true or false he adds accounts but pictures cannot be either. They may, however, be more or less faithful. And there are interesting cases in between eg maps. A faithful reproduction/recording of a piece of art, but we do not say that is truthful, we say it is faithful. Maps: not an account, not a description (ie a series of sentences), but we do not say it is a drawing but we do say it is an accurate representation of the landscape. Representation is a kind of analogue of correspondence. Just as we might ask whether a statement corresponds to the way the world is and so is true. We might ask how well a painting represents it object (and so how realistic it is). Realism is the language used in the context of the discussion of the arts (ie photo realism paintings that are so realistic that they look almost like photographs)