Book review in Mind

The view developed in this book is that when looking at a representational
painting we see a ‘real likeness’: something that is worked in paint, that really
exists, that resembles what is depicted, and that, in virtue of that resemblance, counts as the same kind of thing as what is depicted. This Real
Likeness view is applied not only to representation in painting, but also
representation in photography and in novels. For each of these three artforms, the Real Likeness view is presented as the best solution to a problem.
A constraint on any plausible solution to that problem is ‘the NonDistraction Thesis’:
(ND) Attending to the medium of a representational work cannot inevitably be a
distraction from attending to its content, or vice versa. (p. 21)
In this review, I present and discuss the problem, (ND) and the real likeness
view in three consecutive sections. My focus will be Morris’s discussion of
paintings, which constitutes the first part of the book and which is used when
applying the view to photography and novels.