I

Among animals, there is no reporting of sensory experience. Among humans, there is no reportable experience that is not culture-laden—interpreted. There is, therefore, no reportable comparison between sub- or de-cultured and culturized perception.4 That is part of what it means to be a "Kantian." Hence, those glib disputes about the natural and conventional status of linear perspective and so-called naturalistic painting—made prominent by the disagreement between E. H. Gombrich and Nelson Goodman—are somewhat mismanaged on both sides. The independence of the natural world, its "objective structure," is a dependent (but reasonable) posit posited within a "world" whose own assignable structure is already Intentionally symbiotized. This is our Kantian heritage, provided we eschew altogether the noumena and the fixed disjunctive contribution of mind and brute world Kant could never completely abandon.

I believe we escape the untenable Kantian themes by way of two assumptions that Kant could not accept: one, that human experience is inherently "historied" (horizoned), tacitly restricted by the same particular cultural resources by which it is empowered to affirm and support truth-claims; the other, that cognitively apt persons or selves are socially constituted as such in historically diverse ways. This means that there can be no a priori assurance that the conditions of perception, understanding, and reason are invariant in any species-wide sense. The new "Kantian" orientation includes a commitment to (i) symbiosis, (ii) intransparency, (iii) historicity, and (iv) social construction; that commitment entails that all cognitional powers are inherently interpretive.5

To put things this way is to prepare the ground for a favorable reception of Intentional complexities. I will not pretend that the conceptual connection between nature and culture is not a strenuous one. But to address the matter in the attenuated "Kantian" way I have is to ensure the initial pertinence of all forms of intentionality. There are well-known philosophical efforts to disallow altogether the bare admission that there are any real phenomena that are irreducibly intentional.6 I am not concerned to quarrel about that sort of reductionism here. My purpose is much more modest. The complexities of interpretation I have already discussed—and those I mean to introduce shortly—would make no sense without also admitting: (a) that the cultural world is real, and (b) that the cultural = the Intentional. What we must look at more carefully are the distinctive complexities of the Intentional world of art. I shall take (a) and (b) for granted; but I shall also suppose that a demonstration of just how deeply entrenched the Intentional idiom is in the artworld must inevitably bear on the prospects of reductionism.

Once the cultural world is placed, provisionally, on an equal ontological footing with the physical and the natural, the objective standing of interpretive judgments makes sense. The entire theory of art—in particular, the prospects of the theory of representational art and naturalistic painting—are affected. I have, then, by the expedient of retreating to the least disputable commonplaces of our age, postponed an inevitable question.7 But I have so far only promised an economy.

Even so, an advantage suggests itself. If, for instance, we make the easy concession of construing Brunelleschi's great dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore as an undeniable artwork, we thereby grasp at once that art is, actually exists, whether or not it represents anything; that it cannot represent anything if it is not real; that it need not represent

anything despite being real in the way of an artwork; and that it may yet have curious properties (as an artwork, as a cultural entity) that, whether they include representational properties or not, are not likely to be characterizable in physical terms alone. One may indeed wonder whether it is not true (it is true) that the same generic puzzle arises in different ways in pairing sound and language, stones and cathedrals, nature and culture, movement and action, time and history, the biology of perception and perspectival drawing, Homo sapiens and persons. (I infer from this that what I have to say about intra- and intercultural forms of art holds with equal force for intra- and inter-cultural interpretations of human life and history. I see no principled difference between anthropological and art-historical inquiries, though I am obliged to confine myself to an economy of sorts.)

If the pairings mentioned hold, then it must dawn on us that the local puzzles of pictorial representation offer an easy entry into the master puzzle of all philosophy and science. Opposing Sartre's extravagance, then, opposing physicalism, reformulating the dispute between Gombrich and Goodman, viewing these options as versions of the same fundamental philosophical decision, we may suppose that an oblique issue like that of natural perspective offers more than meets the eye. We need to be aware of what the predicative resources of the Intentional idiom are, before seriously entertaining philosophical economies that would preclude them. That, at any rate, is the intended benefit of my proposal.

A Sartrean might be misled by the following thought: if language is "about" the world, then it represents the world and is either not real in the sense in which the world is real (language being "about" it, but not belonging to it), or it exhibits some order of reality other than that of the real world it makes reference to. Both conclusions are extravagantly untrue; both arguments are non sequiturs; and both disorders are entirely in accord with Sartre's characterization of art. Sartre's motive seems to have been to elevate art by treating it as "unreal," that is, as superior to the (merely) perceivable world. Others have sought to eliminate language altogether—together with the whole of culture—lest they seriously complicate the high work of genuine science.8 I mean to steer a middle course.

If we say (as I have urged) that the cultural is the Intentional and the Intentional, the cultural,9 we should perhaps add that, among the arts, the representational is a commonplace instance of the Intentional. But what that means is hardly clear. The "Intentional" signifies a semi-

otic or linguistic or intensional property ranging smoothly over the collective practices of human societies—over the specifically purposive and conscious features of personal life. It cannot be easily dismissed and it cannot be captured by the (global) representational idiom of the pre-Kantian empiricists or Kant himself.

What is essential to a metaphysics of culture rests with recognizing that the Intentional is: (a) real, (b) not in any obvious way reducible to nonintentional or nonintensional elements of any sort, (c) symbiotically implicated in whatever we take to be the discernible features of the world, (d) inclusive of whatever is intrinsically significative as a result of cultural work, (e) apt for that reason for interpretation, (f) public and objective in a consensual or collective sense, and (g) inherently historicized. These distinctions form an intuitively reasonable and appealing set, but there can be no doubt that their admission has seemed to many theorists to be subversive of the best instincts of a rigorous science. (At any rate, there is no convincing a priori model of what a science is.)

Brunelleschi's dome is certainly Intentional in at least this sense: its properties invite interpretation. But there is no reason to suppose that it is specifically representational in addition to being, say, expressive of, or endowed with or originally used in accord with, the gathering spirit of Brunelleschi's perception of the Florentine world; and even if it were representational—in the same general sense, say, in which one speaks of the drive in the Gothic vault to achieve or represent the divinely infinite—no one such (Intentional) function could reasonably supplant every nonrepresentational but still semiotized function.

All this (I say) is put at serious risk in saying—insouciantly enough— that art and language are "about" the world. We assume we know what that means, but, quite honestly, it is not always clear. "About-ness" may be a near-synonym for my "Intentionality." But if it is, then "aboutness" is not, in the logical sense, transitive; is not, in the grammatical sense, necessarily relational; and is not, in the global metaphysical sense aptly fitted to the world of culture, necessarily or invariably representational.10 It is also obviously not restricted to the mental; and it cannot be discounted as unreal. Vermeer's Lady Reading a Letter at an Open Window—- undoubtedly "about" the seventeenth-century Dutch world already so altered from Rembrandt's, and understandably offered as a specimen of representational painting—does not in any obvious sense represent that world, the actual Dutch world (reference to which does indeed facilitate our recognizing it as a cultural

artifact of the Dutch world and our recognizing in it what is represented there ). It's true that there is represented in it a young woman, a casement, a letter, a table, a carpet, a drape, a chair. These, represented, need not be taken to denote anything belonging to the actual world. But what is represented in the painting is represented only on the sufferance of the larger "aboumess" or Intentionality of the painting itself. One of Kandinsky's familiar Improvisations represents nothing, neither denotatively nor nondenotatively (as we say), though it "discloses" an artifactually visible (entirely Intentional) "world." It is significant in this sense, it is "about" that world, it is Intentionally so structured. In that respect, there is no difference between the Vermeer and the Kandinsky; but what we mean by "that respect" remains a palpable puzzle.