![]() ![]() ![]() All this provides the background against which to assess claims that digital photography differs from traditional in certain key ways. This distinctive feature can be used to explain what is epistemically special about photographs, and also to give an account of the distinctive phenomenology of looking at a photograph rather than a handmade picture. ) photographs differ from handmade pictures, and from other information-preserving tools, such as the readings on a geiger counter. More precisely, photographs are designed to sustain factive pictorial experience, and that experience is what we have when, in the photographic system as a whole, everything works as it is supposed to. Further, that experience is factive: if suchandsuch is seen in a photograph, then suchandsuch obtained when the photo was taken. Photographs sustain pictorial experience: we see things in them. What is special about photographs? Traditional photography is, I argue, a system that sustains factive pictorial experience. Thus it is hard to offer a view which both holds that inflection occurs and is able to make clear sense of why it matters. I further argue that the phenomenon of inflection itself puts pressure on the sort of account Lopes offers. Other accounts of seeing-in can make no sense of either. I argue that the puzzle, and the proposed solution, both turn on aspects of Lopes’s conception of seeing-in. But what might that significance be? Inter alia, I consider Lopes’s proposal that inflection solves a central problem in pictorial aesthetics, the ‘puzzle of mimesis’. I argue that there is at least one case of inflection, so understood. I clarify the idea of inflection, arguing that the thought must be that what is seen in the picture is something with properties which themselves need characterising by reference to that picture’s design, conceived as such. What we see in these pictures involves, somehow, an awareness of features of their design. Some (Podro, Lopes) think that sometimes our experience of pictures is ‘inflected’. However, while appeal to this requirement forms the most plausible pessimist view, it is another question whether pessimism is correct. This demand is one testimony cannot meet, and that claim holds whatever account we offer of the epistemology of testimony. But what is the norm rendering moral testimonial knowledge unusable? I suggest it lies in the requirement that we grasp for ourselves the moral reasons behind a moral view. I then argue that any such view will fail. I consider and reject five Unavailability accounts. I suggest that Unusability accounts provide the strongest form of pessimist (. On Unusability accounts, although moral testimony can make knowledge available, some further norm renders it illegitimate to make use of the knowledge thus offered. On the Unavailability view, moral testimony never makes knowledge available to the recipient. But what is the source of the difficulty? Here pessimists have a choice. Is it legitimate to acquire one’s moral beliefs on the testimony of others? The pessimist about moral testimony says not. ![]()
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