TY - CHAP
T1 - The Iconic Moment. Towards a Peircean Theory of Diagrammatic Imagination
AU - Pietarinen, Ahti Veikko
AU - Bellucci, Francesco
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgments Research supported by Estonian Research Council Project PUT267 and the Academy of Finland project no. 12786, Diagrammatic Mind: Logical and Communicative Aspects of Iconicity, Principal Investigator Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen. The second author is the main author of Sect. 21.4, the first the main author of other sections. The paper was completed thanks to the 2014–2015 Foreign Experts Program of China at Xiamen University. Early version of the paper, bearing the title “On the Possibility of the Logic of Real Discovery”, was presented as a keynote to the International Symposium of Epistemology Logic and Language, organized by the Centre for Philosophy of Science at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, in October 2012. We thank the editors, organizers and the audience for comments and discussion.
Funding Information:
Research supported by Estonian Research Council Project PUT267 and the Academy of Finland project no. 12786, Diagrammatic Mind: Logical and Communicative Aspects of Iconicity, Principal Investigator Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen. The second author is the main author of Sect. 21.4, the first the main author of other sections. The paper was completed thanks to the 2014?2015 Foreign Experts Program of China at Xiamen University. Early version of the paper, bearing the title ?On the Possibility of the Logic of Real Discovery?, was presented as a keynote to the International Symposium of Epistemology Logic and Language, organized by the Centre for Philosophy of Science at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, in October 2012. We thank the editors, organizers and the audience for comments and discussion.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016, Springer International Publishing Switzerland.
PY - 2016/4/29
Y1 - 2016/4/29
N2 - Einstein famously said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge”. But how to study imagination and how to represent and communicate what the content of imagination may be in the context of scientific discovery? In 1908 Peirce stated that deduction consists of “two sub-stages”, logical analysis and mathematical reasoning. Mathematical reasoning is further divisible into “corollarial and theorematic reasoning”, the latter concerning an invention of a new icon, or “imaginary object diagram”, while the former results from “previous logical analyses and mathematically reasoned conclusions”. The iconic moment is clearly stated here, as well as the imaginative character of theorematic reasoning. But translating propositions into a suitable diagrammatic language is also needed: A diagram is for Peirce “a concrete but possibly changing mental image of such a thing as it represents”. “A model”, he held, “may be employed to aid the imagination; but the essential thing to be performed is the act of imagining” (MS 616, 1906). Peirce had observed that the importance of imagination in scientific investigation is in supplying an inquirer, not with any fiction but, in quite stark contrast to what fiction is, with “an inkling of truth”. Since Peirce’s limit notion of truth precludes gaining any direct insight into the truth, in rational inquiry the question of what the truth may be or what it could be needs to be tackled by imagination. This imaginative faculty is aided by diagrams which are iconic in nature. The inquirers who imagine the truth “dream of explanations and laws”. Imagination becomes a crucial part of the method for attaining truth, that is, of the logic of science and scientific inquiry, so much so that Peirce took it that “next after the passion to learn there is no quality so indispensable to the successful prosecution of science as imagination”. In this paper we investigate aspects of scientific reasoning and discovery that seem irreplaceably dependent on a Peircean understanding of imagination, abductive reasoning and diagrammatic representations.
AB - Einstein famously said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge”. But how to study imagination and how to represent and communicate what the content of imagination may be in the context of scientific discovery? In 1908 Peirce stated that deduction consists of “two sub-stages”, logical analysis and mathematical reasoning. Mathematical reasoning is further divisible into “corollarial and theorematic reasoning”, the latter concerning an invention of a new icon, or “imaginary object diagram”, while the former results from “previous logical analyses and mathematically reasoned conclusions”. The iconic moment is clearly stated here, as well as the imaginative character of theorematic reasoning. But translating propositions into a suitable diagrammatic language is also needed: A diagram is for Peirce “a concrete but possibly changing mental image of such a thing as it represents”. “A model”, he held, “may be employed to aid the imagination; but the essential thing to be performed is the act of imagining” (MS 616, 1906). Peirce had observed that the importance of imagination in scientific investigation is in supplying an inquirer, not with any fiction but, in quite stark contrast to what fiction is, with “an inkling of truth”. Since Peirce’s limit notion of truth precludes gaining any direct insight into the truth, in rational inquiry the question of what the truth may be or what it could be needs to be tackled by imagination. This imaginative faculty is aided by diagrams which are iconic in nature. The inquirers who imagine the truth “dream of explanations and laws”. Imagination becomes a crucial part of the method for attaining truth, that is, of the logic of science and scientific inquiry, so much so that Peirce took it that “next after the passion to learn there is no quality so indispensable to the successful prosecution of science as imagination”. In this paper we investigate aspects of scientific reasoning and discovery that seem irreplaceably dependent on a Peircean understanding of imagination, abductive reasoning and diagrammatic representations.
KW - Abduction
KW - Diagrams
KW - Discovery
KW - Imagination
KW - Peirce
KW - Scientific Reasoning
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85106050990&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-26506-3_21
DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-26506-3_21
M3 - Chapter
AN - SCOPUS:85106050990
SN - 9783319265049
SN - 9783319799643
T3 - Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science
SP - 463
EP - 481
BT - Epistemology, Knowledge and the Impact of Interaction
A2 - Redmond, Juan
A2 - Martins, Olga Pombo
A2 - Fernández, Ángel Nepomuceno
PB - Springer Cham
ER -