Dominic Lopes proposed that pictures differ from other kinds of representations in that only pictures explicitly non-commit to properties. That is to say, with pictures, the price of representing something — say someone standing in front of someone else — is not being able to represent other things, such as the features of things behind the person represented. It is argued that this is not essential or unique to depiction, even though it is common only in pictures. Moreover, explicit non-commitment is only a feature of pictures’ fleshed-out contents: it does not appear in their bare-bones contents.
Keywords: commitments, explicit, inexplicit, implicit, non-commitments, Lopes, bare-bones content, fleshed-out content, conflicting commitments