Ben Blumson

Ben Blumson

Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore.

Visit Ben Blumson’s website. An overview of his papers can be found here.

Presentation:

Depiction and Composition
Thursday 7 July 2011
16:00-18:00 at Stewart House, Room 275

Traditionally, the structure of a language is revealed by constructing an appropriate theory of meaning for that language, which exhibits how – or whether – the meaning of sentences in the language depends upon the meaning of their parts. In this paper, I argue that whether – and how – what pictures represent depends on what their parts represent should likewise by revealed by the construction of appropriate theories of meaning for the symbol system of those pictures. This generalisation, I argue, reveals that the structure of pictures, like language, is compositional.