Chapter 4 “The epistemic status of scientific visualisations” of “Visual Representations in Science – Concept and Epistemology” (Routledge 2018, pp. 209-332) is available as open access file: Please follow this link!
DOI: 10.18154/RWTH-2018-224527
Licence: CC-BY 4.0
This chapter is about the epistemic status of visual representations. Here, the epistemic capacities of visualisations will be analysed and compared to the ones of other representational means; the focus is on a comparison to the epistemic potentials of verbal statements and of numerical data in particular. The following questions will be tackled: Can visual representations transmit knowledge? Can they be proper parts of scientific arguments? What kind of knowledge – propositional or non-propositional – can they transmit and why? In what sense can they facilitate scientific understanding?
This open access publication has been made possible by a grant of the German Research Foundation (DFG). They provided the funding for my project Visualisierungen in den Wissenschaften – eine wissenschaftstheoretische Analyse (MO 2343/1-1), pursued at the Department of Philosophy at RWTH Aachen University. I would like to thank the DFG for their financial support.