Abstract: Resemblance comes in, not when we are answering the question — What is representation? — but rather when we address How does this or that representation represent, and how does it succeed? The various modes of representation here distinguished include imaging, picturing, and scaling. Imaging is representation that is effected through resemblance; picturing is imaging that carries the hallmarks of perspectivity. Mathematical representation of nature includes much imagery, and has so far always involved some features that, in retrospect, with hindsight, were seen as necessary failures in resemblance. Such representations can fall short through idealization, but can also achieve their success through systematic distortion.

Keywords: representation, resemblance, picture, imagery, mathematical model, scale model, distortion,