Transparency, when combined with repleteness, sensitivity, and richness, yields a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a representational system to be pictorial. Like the other three conditions, transparency makes no mention of picture perception. This structural account intuitively captures pictorial representation without appealing to perception, which is the main goal of Part I. The following chapters unpack some ramifications of the view. Understanding transparency requires drawing a distinction between pictures’ bare-bones contents and their fleshed-out contents (Haugeland, 1991). This distinction becomes very important in Part II as well.
Keywords: transparency, syntactic identity, bare-bones content, linear perspective, projection, Haugeland