Page 256 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Reference
horse, one must make or otherwise present a visual design which can (by the relevant person(s)) 'be seen as a man on a horse.' And further, to eliminate cases of sheer coincidence, the agent must 'intend' that it be by his composition or presentation of this iconic design that he perform the action of indicating the state of affairs of a man's riding a horse.
3. Walton's Account
Walton's account, presented in his 1990 book, Mimesis as Make-Believe, is a 'social practice' theory of representation. The theory makes essential use of the concept of 'imagining.' Walton first articulates a theory of mimesis, or representation, in general. His claim is that something is a representation in case its function is to serve as a prop in games of make-believe authorized for it. Games of make-believe are 'games' whose rules specify that so-and-so is to be imagined. And an object is a 'prop' in a game of make-believe if, in that game, it plays an essential role in bringing it about that such-and-such imaginings are mandated for the players of the game. Often an object will have the 'function' of serving as a prop in some game of mandated imagining rather than just doing so in ad hoc fashion; one may then speak of the game as 'authorized' for that object.
What remains is to specify which, of all the objects that are representations by the above account, are 'pictorial' representations. The core of Walton's
answer is this: an object is a pictorial representation of something, say, of a man riding a horse, just in case, if one looks at it, one is mandated to imagine that one's perceptual act of looking at it is one's seeing a man riding a horse.
A symbol theory of representation, an agent-action theory, and a social practice theory—those are the main contenders on the scene in the 1990s. No con- sensus has emerged as to which approach is the most promising. But in the articulation of these theories, and in their polemics with each other, the nature of pictorial representation has been probed much more profoundly than ever before; and consensus has at least emerged on certain of the data which any theory must recognize and give an account of if it is to be satisfactory—for example, that one can represent, or compose a representation of, something without there existing something which one has represented or of which a representation has been composed.
Bibliography
Austin J L 1962 How to Do Things with Words. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Goodman N 1968 Languages of Art: An Approach to a The- ory of Symbols. Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, IN
Walton K. 1974 Are representations symbols? The Monist 58: 236-54
Walton K. 1990 Mimesis as Make-Believe. Harvard Uni- versity Press, Cambridge, MA
Wolterstorff N 1980 Works and Worlds of An. Clarendon Press, Oxford
The problem of reference—in the broadest terms, that of how words relate to the world—is fundamentalin semantics and the philosophy of language. Analytic philosophy, particularly in the pioneering work of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Witt- genstein, places reference and truth at the center of philosophical analyses of language, treating as sem- antic or meaning paradigms, on the one hand, the relation between a name and an object and, on the other, the relation between a sentence and a state of the world. In theoretical linguistics problems about reference, naming, and truth have figured both in the development of semantic theory and in pragmatic theories of speech acts. This article, which presents central philosophical issues concerning reference through the perspective of a certain broad-based pro-
gram in the philosophy of language, should be read in conjunction with the articles on Names and De- scriptions and Indexicals, which complement the treat- ment here by focusing on specific modes of reference.
1. Philosophical Theories of Language
We talk and think about the world, or so it seems. Whole utterances tell us how a speaker believes, or wants, the world to be. They represent some state or aspect of the world; in the favored jargon, whole sentences specify 'states of affairs.' Thus, if Max says Times are tough he speaks the truth only if the econ- omic life of his society is in recession. But it is not just whole sentences that are about the world; parts of sentences also have representational functions. Those chunks from which utterances are built refer to indi-
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Reference: Philosophical Issues K. Sterelny