ANNOUNCEMENTS

• Please fill out this sign-up sheet for preparing questions and images for class.
• Inspiration for the final project:
  • An interactive website by Sophie Galowitz (for a class on counterfactuals)
  • A video-essay on film semantics by Koby Leff
  • Some books by Edward Tufte:
    • The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
    • Visual Explanations
    • Beautiful Evidence
    • The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint

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SYLLABUS

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1. Iconic and Symbolic
Th 4/9

Handout  [w/ notes]
Read

• Iconic/Symbolic 0 & 1
• Giardino and Greenberg (2015) "Varieties of Iconicity"
• Shimojina (2001) "The Graphic-Linguistic Distinction"​

Of interest

• Noth (1990) "Iconic and Iconicity"
• Shimojima (1996) "On the Efficacy of Representation" [excerpt]
• Allwein & Barwise (1996) Logical Reasoning with Diagrams
  [classic book collection with essays by Barwise and Etchemendy, Shin, Shimojima, and others]

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2. Composition
Th 4/16

Handout​​ ​[w/ notes]
Read

• Iconic/Symbolic 2
• Camp (2007) "Thinking with Maps"
• McCloud (1993) Understanding Comics, Ch. 2: "The Vocabulary of Comics"

Of interest

• Camp (2018) "Why Maps are not Propositional"
• Chandler (2017) "Analysing Structures"
• McCloud (1993) Understanding Comics, Ch. 3: "Blood in the Gutter"
• Wittgenstein (1922) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, selections on picture theory of meaning

For reference

• Kendall 2019 "The processing of cartoony and photographic faces" [dissertaiton]

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3. Accuracy
Th 4/23

Handout [w/ notes]
Read

• Iconic/Symbolic 3 [forthcoming]
• Fodor (2008) LOT 2, Ch. 6: "Preconceptual Representation"​
• Noth (1995) "Can Pictures Lie?"

Of interest

• Fodor (1975) The Language of Thought, Ch. 4: "The Structure of the Internal Code" (excerpt)

Reading Guide

On Thursday 4/23, the main question we will discuss is this: do icons express truth-conditions in the same way that sentences do? (i.e. are icons capable of truth and falsity? i.e. can you lie with an icon?)

Fodor (2008) argues for a negative answer.  Here there are two main things to watch for: (1) Fodor's proposal for how to distinguish discursive and iconic representations; and (2) his arguments that iconic representations don't have truth-conditions.  Most of the action is on pp. 169-179.

Noth (1995) anticipates a range of possible objections, while defending a qualified positive answer.

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​4. Structuralism
Th 4/30

Handout [w/ notes]
​Read

• Iconic/Symbolic 4
• Peirce (1894) "What is a sign?"
• Goodman (1968) "Languages of Art" Ch 1: "Reality Remade" (section 1,2, and 9 only) and Ch 6.1 "Pictures and Paragraphs"
• Kulvicki (2006) "Pictorial Representation"
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Of interest
On resemblance theory:

• Borges (1946) "On Exactitude in Science"
• Bierman (1962) "That there are no iconic signs"​​
• Greenberg (2013) "Beyond Resemblance"

On Fodor's Parts principle):

• Kulvicki (2015) "Analog Representation and the Parts Principle"

On experiential theories of depiction:

• Wollheim (1984) "Painting as an Art" (excerpt)
• Wollheim (1998) "On Pictorial Representation"

Reading Guide

For Thursday 4/30 we will be discussing "structuralist" approaches to iconicity, in particular theories which define iconic representation in terms of similarity or isomorphism.

Peirce (1894) is a difficult and rich text, and worth spending some time with, independent of Peirce's early defense of the resemblance theory.  How does Peirce's conception of the iconic/symbolic/indexical distinction compare to our own?

Goodman (1968) contains a famous attack on the resemblance theory, and it nearly killed the idea in philosophical circles for decades.  Goodman also defends a positive, quasi-conventionalist view of the picture/language contrast; it's not a resemblance theory, but still has a "structuralist" flavor, reminiscent of the old analog/digital distinction.

Focusing on pictures, Kulvicki (2006) provides a short and lucid review of structuralist theories in the modern philosophical landscape--- including a helpful synopsis of Goodman's positive position.

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5. Symbolic Semantics
Th 5/7

Handout
Read​

• Iconic/Symbolic 5
• Greenberg (handout) "Introduction to Formal Semantics"
• Portner (2005) What is Meaning?, Ch 1: "The Fundamental Question", Ch 2 (through 2.4): "Putting a Meaning Together from Pieces", and Ch. 3.6: "Modeling Properties with Sets and Functions"

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6. Iconic Semantics
Th 5/14

Handout
Read

• Iconic/Symbolic 5
• Shin (1994) The Logical Status of Diagrams, Chs 2.1-2.2: "Euler Diagrams" and "Venn Diagrams", Ch. 3.1 "Venn I: Preliminaries"
• Greenberg (MS) "Semantics of Pictorial Space" Sections 1-5. (Focus on sections 1+2 if you're short on time.)

Of interest

• Schlenker (2018) "What is Super Semantics?"
• Euler (1761) Letters to a German Princess, Letters CII + CIII
• Pratt (1993) "Map Semantics"
• Casati and Varzi (1999) Parts and Places, Ch. 11: "Maps"

Reading Guide

Iconic semantics...

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7. Representation
Th 5/21

Handout
Read

• Iconic/Symbolic 6
• ​​Saussure (1922) Course in General Linguistics, Part One, Ch 1: "Nature of the Linguistic Sign", Ch 2: "The Immutability and Mutability of the Sign"
• Chandler (2017) Semiotics: The Basics, Ch 1: "Models of the sign" sections on: "Arbitrariness," "Sign Relations," "Symbolicity," "Iconicity," Indexicality," "Mixed Modes"​
• Focus on Saussure Ch.1, and Chandler "Arbitrariness".

Recommended

• ​Shin (1994) The Logical Status of Diagrams, Ch 6: "Diagrammatic versus Linguistic Representation"

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8. Information
​Th 5/28

Handout
Read

• Iconic/Symbolic 7
• Gallistel (2001) "Mental Representation"
• Shea (2018) Representation in Cognitive Science, Ch. 1.1-1.4: "Introduction"

Recommended

• Neander (2017) A Mark of the Mental, Ch. 5: "Simple Minds"
• Gallistel and King (2010) Memory and the Computational Brain, Ch. 4: "Representations"
• Shea (2018) Representation in Cognitive Science, Ch. 4.1-4.3: "Correlational Information", Ch. 5.1-5.6: "Structural Correspondence" 

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9. World > Icon > Symbol
​​Th 6/4

Handout
Read

• ​Iconic/Symbolic 8-10
• Palmer (2009) "Vision Science" (excerpts)