Pictorial Experience, Imagining from the Inside, and Imaginative Penetration[Experiencia pictórica, imaginando desde el interior y penetración imaginativa]

In pictorial experience, we are normally aware of the visible features of two distinct sets of objects: the depicting surface and the depicted entities. Imagination-based accounts of pictorial experience maintain that our awareness of the depicted (e.g., of a landscape or a man) is essentially imaginative. My main aim in this paper is to provide a specific objection to imagination-based accounts. More specifically, I argue that they are unable to account for the fact that the kind of awareness, which is exemplified by our awareness of the depicted scene involved in our non-illusionistic pictorial experience of a two-dimensional picture, could not be instantiated without the simultaneous perceptual awareness of some marked surface.