An obvious, and correct, answer to the question
“What makes the port
rait the
port
rait of so-and-so?” is that it
is the
intention. But if we wish to know what
it means “intending this to be a
port
rait of so-and-so”
let's see what actually happens when we intend
this. Remember the occasion when we talked of what
happened when we expect someone from
four to
four-thirty. To intend a picture to be the portrait of
so-and-so (on the part of the painter,
e.g.) is neither a particular state of
mind nor a particular mental process. But there are a
great many combinations of actions and states of mind which we
should call “intending … ” It might have
been that he was told to paint a portrait of N, and sat down
before N, going through certain actions which we call
“copying N's face”. One
might object to this by saying that the essence of copying is the
intention to copy. I should answer that there are
a great many different processes which we call “copying
something”. Take an instance. I
draw an ellipse on a sheet of paper and ask you to copy it.
What characterises the process of copying? For it
is clear that it isn't the
53.
fact that you draw a
similar ellipse. You might have tried to copy it and not
succeeded; or you might have drawn an ellipse with a totally
different intention, and it happened to be like the one you should
have copied. So what do you do when you try to copy the
ellipse? Well, you look at it, draw something on
a piece of paper, perhaps measure what you have drawn, perhaps you
curse if you find that it doesn't agree with the model or
perhaps you say “I am going to copy this
ellipse” and just draw an ellipse like it.
There are an endless variety of actions and words, having a
family likeness to each other, which we call “trying to
copy”.