A Plea for Picturistics: Why Do We still not Understand Pictures?

Given that pictures are now at least as central to our lives as words, it is surprising that there is no specific discipline of ‘picturistics’ staffed by ‘picturists’ who specialise in the study of depictions, their origins, their grammar, their societal function, and their cognitive apprehension. Instead, we have a tradition in which scholars from all corners of the sciences and humanities—vision scientists, philosophers, psychologists, computer scientists, art historians and others—have investigated the nature of pictures, and especially the depiction of depth and space. Prominent examples of continuing relevance include Ernst Gombrich, Maurice Pirenne, Richard Wollheim, Margaret Hagen, James Gibson, Richard Gregory, Margaret Livingstone, Nelson Goodman, and Martin Kemp. Fascinating and important as these contributions have been, they do not amount to a collective research programme or body of establish theory of the kind provided by linguistics; our understanding of pictures remains rather sparse.