Painted Things

This chapter first explains what has to be done in order to take the Paradox of Painting seriously, and then proposes a way of trying to make sense of it. First, we don’t have to introduce entities of any very unusual kind, or embrace an odd ontology. But secondly, we need to find a way of allowing that a painted face, for example, is in some serious way a face, even if it’s not a real face. This involves engaging with issues in linguistics (for example, the work of Partee) and in the nature of our response to paintings. It is proposed that the face we see in a painting is what I call a real likeness, a unified whole made of paint, which counts as being, in a way, a face, because it resembles a real face.