Abstract
The Issue. Can diagrams have epistemic value? Can reasoning with diagrams confer knowledge or justify belief? These fundamental questions have been little studied outside the area of logical diagrams, in which the formal syntax of an adequately specified given system rules out the possibility that correctly interpreted diagrams can mislead the user. In Euclid’s geometry, however the paradigm case of a body of exact knowledge until the mid-19th century precisely this possibility seems to exist. And there is the further problem of generality: how reasoning with a single diagram can justify knowledge of a general mathematical claim.
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Norman, J. (2004). Can Diagrams Have Epistemic Value? The Case of Euclid. In: Blackwell, A.F., Marriott, K., Shimojima, A. (eds) Diagrammatic Representation and Inference. Diagrams 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2980. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-25931-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-25931-2_2
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