Chapters 6 and 7 describe the features of pictures’ bare-bones and fleshed-out contents, and raise important questions about how the two relate to one another. This chapter suggests that the relation between them is analogous to the relation that was supposed to exist between sense data and the objects we take ourselves to perceive. Sense data were a bad idea in the philosophy of perception, but they are a useful tool for understanding pictorial content.
Keywords: sense data, bare-bones content, immediate perception, privileged access, viewpoint independence, conflicting commitments