tore nordenstam explanation and understanding in the history of art

Towards the and of the 1950s, a number of philosophers like Anscombe, Dray,
Hampshire, Skjervheim and Winch began to articulate a critique of the current
philosophical approaches to social phenomena like meaning, intention and action. 38 In
the course of those critical activities, an alternative to the deductive-nomological model
of explanation was proposed by William H. Dray.
2.3. The intentionalist pattern
When we want to explain a natural event, we can do so by seeing it as the effect of a
combination of precedings events, which are the causes of the event. Similarly, when we
want to explain a feature of a human work or an action, we can do so by seeing it as the
result of certain reasons. Richard Wollheim notices in his lecture “On Drawing an
Object” that the word “contour” is used both to refer to the lines in a drawing and to the
edges of perceived objects, and comments “’Contour is not in this context a homonym.
There is a reason for this double usage, and the reason surely is this: that, though the
contours in a drawing aren’t themselves edges, when we look at a drawing as a
representation we see the contours as edges.” 39 Wollheim refers to this as an
“explanation” of the ambiguity of the word. Similarly, Picasso’s drawing of the large foot
and Mondrian’s letting the black stripes stop shortly before the edges of the paintings can
be explained by indicating the reasons that the painters might have had for making their
pictures in the ways they did. Explanations of this kind clarify the point of something:
features of works, or actions, or games, or rules and institutions. “The game”, as
Wittgenstein remarked, “has not only rules but also a point.” 40
38 G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1957; W. H. Dray, Laws and Explanation in
History, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1957; S. Hampshire, Thought and Action, Chatto and Windus,
London 1959; H. Skjervehim, Objectivism and the Study of Man, Universitetsforlaget, oslo 1959, reprinted
in Inquiry1974; P. Winch, The Idea of a Social Science, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1958.
39 R. Wollheim, On Art and the Mind, Allen Lane, London 1973, p. 22.
40 “Das Spiel, möchte man sagen, hat nicht nur Regeln, sondern auch einen Witz.“ L. Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1953, § 564. Cf. §§ 62, 142, 545, 567, and pp. 179-
180.