著者

清塚 邦彦

出版者

山形大学

雑誌

山形大学紀要. 人文科学 = Bulletin of Yamagata University. Humanities

巻号頁・発行日

vol.15, no.2, pp.19(302)-50(271), 2003-02-17

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In a series of papers, Kendall L. Walton argued that photographs are like mirrors, glasses, telescopes and microscopes, in that they function as ”aids to vision” and that, in this respect, they are sharply contrasted with hand-made pictures, such as drawings and paintings. Walton expressed this point by saying that photographs are ”transparent pictures” while hand-made pictures are not. This I call ”transparency thesis”. This is an elaborated form of a widely held opinion that photographs are intrinsically realistic because of their mechanical origin. In this paper, I examine objections raised against Walton's thesis and argue that the thesis is still a promising hypothesis about the nature of photographs as well as the concept of perception in general.