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Knowing with Images: Medium and Message

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

John Kulvicki
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Abstract

Problems concerning scientists’ uses of representations have received quite a bit of attention recently. The focus has been on how such representations get their contents and on just what those contents are. Less attention has been paid to what makes certain kinds of scientific representations different from one another and thus well suited to this or that epistemic end. This article considers the latter question with particular focus on the distinction between images and graphs on the one hand and descriptions and related representations on the other.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 77 , Issue 2 , April 2010 , pp. 295 - 313
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

Versions of this article were presented in 2006 at Michael Dietrich's Leslie Humanities Seminar “Pedagogy in the Life Sciences” at Dartmouth, the Pacific American Philosophical Association conference in San Francisco, the “Beyond Mimesis and Nominalism” conference at London School of Economics, and the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique Summer School on scientific images in Roscoff, Brittany. I thank the participants for their helpful comments. I also thank Adina Roskies for comments on an early draft of this article. Work for this article was supported by a grant from the Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College.

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