Beyond Mimesis and Nominalism: Representation in Art and Science

Two-day conference in London, 22-23 June 2006

Deadline for Submissions: 1 March 2006

Keynote speakers: Catherine Elgin (Harvard University) and James Elkins (School
of the Art Institute of Chicago/University College Cork, Ireland)

Organisers: Roman Frigg (LSE) and Matthew Hunter (Courtauld Institute of
Art/University of Chicago)

Programme committee: Peter Ainsworth (LSE), Roman Frigg (LSE), Matthew Hunter
(Courtauld Institute of Art/University of Chicago), Elisabeth Schellekens
(King's College London), Christine Stevenson (Courtauld Institute of Art), and
Sabine Wieber (Birkbeck College London)

Springer Publishers has shown interest, and by agreement with individual
authors, the conference organizers will be submitting edited versions of
selected papers for possible publication in Springer's philosophy programme.

Representations play a critical role in both science and art. Perceived as
different in kind, artistic and scientific representations have been studied as
objects of distinct disciplinary and intellectual traditions. However, recent
work in both the philosophy of science and studies of the visual arts suggests
that these apparently different representational traditions may be related in
challenging and provocative ways. "Beyond Mimesis and Nominalism," a conference
co-sponsored by the Courtauld Institute of Art Research Forum, the London School
of Economics, and the Institute of Philosophy of the University of London, seeks
to open conversations between and beyond these compartmentalized traditions of
thinking about representation. 

According to dominant accounts, scientific representation is explained by appeal
to mimetic relationships such as similarity or formal relations like
isomorphism. As these views have been subjected to increasing criticisms, recent
approaches to scientific representation have begun to draw upon analogies with
artistic representation. Significantly, parts of this emergent literature have
turned to a "nominalist" position, not unlike that advocated by Nelson Goodman
in his writings on representation in art. 

But, a similar turn is already apparent within studies of visual art, where
scientific representations are increasingly integrated into the analysis of art.
Like their colleagues in the philosophy of science, recent scholars in the
visual arts have seen Goodman's work as an important point of engagement. His
pioneering work on the visual has informed recent efforts to expand semantic
taxonomies and to analyze the increasing field of images that fall outside
classification as "art." As this work has received important contribution from
scholars concerned with scientific imaging, the project of rethinking
representation is one of growing general importance to art-historical studies,
whose interpretative scope has expanded dramatically outward in recent decades.

In order to press this emergent interdisciplinary conversation, scholars from
all disciplines are invited to submit papers to this two-day international
conference. We particularly seek submissions that explore the "how" of
representation-papers that can enrich our understanding of the techniques
employed in scientific representation and/or address their semantic structures
or historical convergences with artistic practices - and vice versa. Also
especially encouraged are papers that critique, historicize or defend the
conference's central terms of mimesis and nominalism, or offer approaches to
representations that navigate a middle course between them. 

Please send extended abstracts of up to 1000 words to ph-artandscience@lse.ac.uk
by 1 March 2006. Decisions will be made by 1 April. 

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