tailieunhanh - RESEMBLANCE AS REPLETENESS: A SOLUTION TO GOODMAN’S PROBLEM

Accompanied by guitar music composed by the Argentine Gustavo Santaolalla – who is known for his film scores for Alejandro González Iñárritu – it sets a quiet pace with a dreamlike quality. This quality is further enhanced by the lack of any sounds from the environments shown in the images. As I have noted elsewhere (Flückiger, 2001: 397) this absence of environmental sounds marks a detachment of the character from the world he or she inhabits, be it euphoric (as is often the case in American montage sequences) or dysphoric (as in nightmares or borderline experiences) | POSTGRADUATE Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 3 NO. 2 August 2006 Resemblance as Repleteness a Solution to Goodman s problem Daniel Barnes university of Nottingham Abstract In this paper I consider the view that Goodman altogether rejects the notion of resemblance in depiction. I argue that although Goodman s case seems to be a decisive challenge he can in fact hold a positive view of resemblance if we weaken the standard usage of the word resemblance . The result of this is that Goodman s commitment to the notion of repleteness enables him to say that pictures can and do resemble their subjects as resemblance relies on the relative complexity of the depiction. Right at the beginning of Languages of Art Goodman plainly denies that resemblance is a sufficient condition for depiction on several grounds. Firstly because An object resembles itself to the maximum degree but rarely represents itself resemblance unlike representation is reflexive 1976 4 . Secondly resemblance is symmetric in the sense that A resembles B as much as B resembles A but a picture of the Duke of Wellington may represent the Duke without the Duke representing the picture. Thirdly whilst any given pair of objects resemble one another in some way like cars off an assembly line neither of them represents one another. And finally against a resemblance condition there is the fact that a constable picture of Marlborough castle is more like other pictures than it is like the castle but it still only represents the castle and not other pictures. Another reason why Goodman rejects the necessity and sufficiency of resemblance is that the object before me is a man a swarm of atoms a complex of cells a fiddler a friend a fool and much cannot copy all these at once and the more nearly I 59 DANIEL Barnes succeed the less would the result be a realistic picture 1976 6-7 . That is what we copy is only ever an aspect of the object rather than all its aspects which is the idea behind representation-as we .