Dove e quando

Talk by Rose Ryan Flinn (Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge)

ABSTRACT
Richard Wollheim famously thought that depictive understanding - the state of understanding a picture’s depicted content - is a single unified state, that does not resolve into discrete psychological components. In this respect, he took it to differ from the state of understanding a bit of language, which he assumed to be conjunctive (or more specifically, inferential) in character. In this talk, I question whether that is the case. I present a conception of depictive and linguistic understanding on which they are structurally identical, and argue that this way of construing the latter is plausibly motivated by Gottlob Frege’s famous puzzle about the potential informativeness of identity statements.