Family, Resemblance

Here you see a photograph of my grandmother, Edith Hunter, giving a talk at a luncheon for Vermont Public Radio (VPR) commentators. After a celebrated career -- and after a celebrated career as a commentator -- my grandmother "retired" from VPR several years ago. She's struggled with her health especially in the past year. But, feisty as ever, she began to stage a remarkable recovery over the course of the past fall. She took up her commentating again and, less than a month ago, had hip surgery. So, here she is, post-operation, giving a speech to an audience of fellow commentators.

But, how do you know that this is really my grandmother and not just some photograph I picked up on the street or found on the internet? Do you want to say that there is some kind of family resemblance to Old Ken? If you are committed to saying this, I think my grandmother may wish to have words with you. (Be forewarned!) Alternately, if you know my grandmother, you could appeal to your knowledge of her or perhaps to other images of her and then assess (presumably using criteria of resemblance) whether or not this particular picture likely also designates her. For usually, we like to think, photographs do designate particular persons.



But, what about images like these?



Which one better resembles a unicorn? As philosopher Nelson Goodman pointed out over forty years ago, this is a nonsensical question. There is no such thing as a unicorn, so a picture can't resemble one. But it is no problem to say that there is a certain category of "unicorn pictures" that visualize unicorns or other mythological beasts; the history of art is full of them. And, Goodman argues, so too it goes for portraits. It's easy enough to distinguish between a man-portrait from a woman-portrait -- or a portrait from a landscape -- without having any knowledge of whom these portraits might designate. Or, indeed, if they designate anyone at all. Plenty of those can also be found in the history of art.



Take this portrait of the stern looking fellow before which my grandmother was speaking at the VPR commentators event. Does it designate someone (as we know that man-portraits need not do any more than landscape-pictures need designate some particular piece of real estate)? And if it does designate someone, who is it? I put the latter question to my grandmother and here is her response: "Don't you recognize Daniel Webster!!!! 'It is a small college but there are those who love it!!!' Shame on you."



"So much for Old Ken's fancy-dancy mumbo jumbo," you may be saying. Clearly, he should be spending a little more time studying the Great Men of nineteenth century American History and a less time with those funny ideas about images. But, hang on. What's this? It's a follow-up from my grandmother on this very topic:

"I cannot let Daniel Webster rest until I have explained to you why Daniel Webster is so important to Dartmouth College. In 1819 a group tried to take over Dartmouth and turn it into a state run college. The group that wanted to keep it private hired Daniel Webster to represent them and argue their case. It was at the beginning of his
career, I think. He ended his argument with these now famous lines: 'It is a small college, but there are those who love it.' I was talking with John Wright who graduated from Dartmouth and he said he did a lot of research on Webster, and nowhere are these lines actually written down in his writings."

So, in addition to our range of Daniel-Webster-pictures that we have to trust actually resemble Daniel Webster (trust, because even if we could exhume his body, it would not provide any interesting evidence regarding his physical appearance in the nineteenth century), we also now have a class of Daniel-Webster-statements, which we want to associate with him and his ideas even though we don't have textual evidence to prove it. The historian's dilemma!