Practice question · Put in order
Arrange these steps of asking how an image refers, in the order they are useful.
- State what a verbal description of it would lose
- Ask whether a viewer without the conventions could read it
- Ask which of its elements are purely conventional
- Ask what the image resembles
- Ask whether it was physically caused by what it shows
Hints
- Resemblance is the first thing anyone notices.
- The question about what description loses comes last.
Show the answer
- Ask what the image resembles
- Ask whether it was physically caused by what it shows
- Ask which of its elements are purely conventional
- Ask whether a viewer without the conventions could read it
- State what a verbal description of it would lose
Why
The last step is the one that keeps the analogy honest. Having worked out how an image refers, naming what a description of it cannot carry is what stops the account from being mistaken for the work.
Practise Is Art a Language?
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Art History I is free to start.
More questions on Is Art a Language?
- Why does Goodman conclude that painting cannot be a notation?
- Sort each art by whether it is AUTOGRAPHIC or ALLOGRAPHIC in Goodman's sense.
- An image can express negation as directly as a sentence can.
- Which respects does the language analogy genuinely capture?
- Complete the vocabulary of the lesson.
- How many modes of reference does Peirce's trichotomy distinguish?
- Match each mode of reference to how it works.
- If art functions strictly as an allographic language, what follows for the art historian confronted with a…
- A halo conveys sanctity by resemblance rather than by convention.