Issue #47

Abstract: The article discusses the problem of believability, especially with regard to „showing“ as a semantic relation distinct from saying. The cognitive foundations of believability are discussed. The author suggests that there is something that can be the semantics of the unsayable, and that showing has no bearing on the description of how things are in the world if a certain proposition is true. According to the author, the genuine semantics of showing may give us some hint as to the justification for distinguishing what we call genuine art from what we do not recognize as such. The article discusses concepts that are related to the languages of the arts, such as exemplification, the distinction between notational and dense languages, and autographic and allographic arts. The text also briefly describes the distinction between type and token and discusses issues related to the meaning of signs in artistic languages.