Logical Reference

Vienna, 1893, a countess glances at a robin and decides to paint it. A few days later, her terrible painting of a robin is put up in one of the many corridors in her palace, where it remains for half a century. The countess had not signed her painting, with anything other than the year, and so when her painting was found by the Nazis, they thought that it must be valuable because of where it was. These Nazis were from the Ruhr, so they took the painting to be a bad painting of a fat goldfinch. And because they could see that it would make Hitler's paintings look relatively good, they sent it to Berlin. In Berlin, it was catalogued as Der Fette Stieglitz and put with all the other paintings that the Nazis thought were terrible. After the war, it was taken to Moscow, where it remained for half a century until it was sold to an American, who thought it a fine example of early modern art. He hung it in his dining room.

New York, dinnertime, the owner of the painting points to it and says “that bird was very well fed,” starting a conversation that slowly moves on to who the unknown artist might have been a student of. The owner of the painting and the other diners all assumed that “that bird” referred to an imaginary goldfinch dreamt up by some sadly forgotten genius. But we know that it referred to a European robin, do we not? After all, imagine that we are looking through a warped and dirty window at a robin in bad light: if I thought that it was a fat goldfinch, and I pointed to it and said “that bird is fat,” would I be wrong? Maybe not, but I would certainly be talking about a robin, and it might not be a fat robin. And if we had been looking at a very bad photograph of a robin, or at a mediocre painting of a robin, or even at a terrible painting that we did not understand, what difference would that make?