Art and Experience, Utrecht, © 1996. All rights reserved

Conventions may work on a general level only--as is the case in depiction or exemplification--or they may work on the level of particular instantiations as well--as is the case in discourse. Not all aspects of pictures are conventional, as Goodman alleges: their reproductive aspect isn't. Specifically, reproduction is an effect of resemblance-a (or the other way around, depending on the belief about pictorial realism adhered to), which is based in natural embodied perception and presupposes no imaginative activities for their awareness. (In music reproductive elements are more or less banned (VII:7)). Pre-perceptual, spontaneous imagination is activated by non-natural means of style, editing, and ellipsis. Being irreducible to normal perception, however, doesn't turn these non-natural means into conventions. Conventions presuppose some systematic regulations--an elaborate syntax and semantics, but these are absent from the arts (with the evident exception of discursive language, which is conventional throughout (I:7)). (Obviously symbolic systems such as the medieval pictorial one form no paradigm). Cf. Goodman's conventionalism (I).