RT Journal Article
T1 Caricatures and Prop Oriented Make-Believe
A1 Caldarola, Elisa
A1 Plebani, Matteo
AB A caricature can reveal an aspect of its subject that a more faithful representation would fail to render: by depicting a slow and clumsy person as a monkey one can point out such qualities of the depicted subject, and by depicting a person with quite big ears as a person with enormous ears one can point out that the depicted person has rather big ears. How can a form of representation that is by definition inaccurate be so representationally powerful? Figurative language raises a similar puzzle. Metaphors, taken at face value, are usually false: men are not wolves. The same goes for hyperbolic talk: Putnam did not change his position one billion times in his career. Still, figurative language is expressively powerful: by saying that human beings are wolves or that Putnam changed his position one billion times in his career one conveys, in a very vivid way, some true information about the world (something concerning the facts that human beings are cruel and that Putnam frequently changed opinion). Kendall Walton (1993) provides an elegant explanation of the expressive utility of figurative language by linking metaphor and prop oriented make-believe. We explore the hypothesis that the theory of prop oriented make-believe can also explain the representational efficacy of caricatures.
PB Michigan Publishing
SN 2330-4014
YR 2016
FD 2016
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10347/22205
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10347/22205
LA eng
NO Caldarola, E., & Plebani, M. (2016). Caricatures and Prop Oriented Make-Believe. Ergo, An Open Access Journal Of Philosophy, 3(20200427). https://doi.org/10.3998/ergo.12405314.0003.015
NO Elisa Caldarola acknowledges financial support of her work by the University of Padova through the project: Disagreement. A Pluralist Approach (2015–2017).Matteo Plebani acknowledges financial support of his work by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and FEDER through the project: TheExplanatory Function of Abstract Objects: Their Nature and Cognoscibility, FFI2013-41415-P
DS Minerva
RD 24 abr 2026