Pictorial Experience and Seeing

This paper proposes that pictorial experience, the experience that pictures give rise to when we

understand them, involves the non-veridical experience of seeing the picture’s subject matter. Using

phenomenological analysis and material from philosophy of mind and perceptual psychology, it

argues that both pictorial experience lacking awareness of the picture surface, such as illusion, and

pictorial experience that includes this awareness, i.e. seeing-in, should be understood in this way.