Digital Pictures, Sampling, and Vagueness: The Ontology of Digital Pictures
John Zeimbekis · Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism · 2012
Digital pictures appear to challenge Nelson Goodman's theory that pictures are autographic, that is, that two pictures cannot be type identical representations. If the challenge turns out to be successful, it should be possible for digital pictures to be phenomenal replicas of one another, and digital pictures may be defined as types. Any defense of the value of certain tokens over others (if applicable to such pictures) would have to restrict itself to pointing out differences in the historical properties of distinct tokens, since each copy would token exactly the same representational properties. Pictures would thus be split into two categories, autographic and allographic.1 Yet, granting digital pictures allographic status would have an unexpected consequence. It sounds reasonable to hold that digital pictures are allographic, whereas agentive or film‐based pictures are autographic. But if digital pictures are replicable (and knowably so), picture replication will no longer be a “logically and mathematically grounded impossibility,” to borrow Goodman's phrase.2 In that case, the lack of technologies for replicating agentive and film‐based pictures could be contingent and defeasible; so on what grounds would we maintain that such pictures are nonreplicable, or autographic? As Gregory Currie has pointed out, the fact that we think of paintings as singular does not mean that they are singular.3 It may turn out that all pictures form a single, allographic representational kind, in a way we could not imagine was possible before recent digital imaging technology was developed.