<研究論文(原著論文)>図像的フィクショナルキャラクターの問題

Abstract

The subject I focus on is ctional pictorial characters. Fictional pictorial characters are characters that appear in comics, animations, and illustrations of novels, who are presented by pictures and have ctional properties in stories. This paper examines the relation between ctional characters and pictures as media. I explore the problem of aesthetic judgments of ctional pictorial characters. I argue that ctive pictures are often indeterminate in terms of gurative properties (properties related to appearance such as shapes, colors, and textures). This means that we cannot know many of the gurative properties of ctional characters. We don’t know exactly what ctional characters look like, even if we have pictures of them. In the case of deformations, caricatures, and omissions of bodily parts, pictures are implicitly non- committal about many gurative properties. I offer two arguments to defend this idea. First, it is meta ctional to describe in works some of the contents of pictures, such as huge eyes or the omission of noses. Secondly, if pictures of characters were always determinate of all gurative properties, according to the plausible analysis of pictorial realism, every ctive picture must be realistic, and this is quite implausible. On the other hand, it is possible to make aesthetic judgments of the ctional charac- ters portrayed in pictures. We say that characters are pretty or that they look friendly or horrifying. As aesthetic judgments require knowledge of the subject's gurative properties, this leads to inconsistency. In order to make aesthetic judgments about ctional charac- ters, we must know exactly what they look like. However, pictures of characters are often indeterminate. I resolve this inconsistency by arguing that pictures have two kinds of content: pictorial content and separation content (seeing-in content). The former is the indeterminate content that pictures really depict and the later is the determinate content that it is permissible to see. In ction, separation content is involved in aesthetic judgments. I analyze how pictures represent ctional characters in a complex way.