Visual Representations in Science: Concept and Epistemology (History and Philosophy of Technoscience)

Visual representations (photographs, diagrams, etc.) play crucial roles in scientific processes. They help, for example, to communicate research results and hypotheses to scientific peers as well as to the lay audience. In genuine research activities they are used as evidence or as surrogates for research objects which are otherwise cognitively inaccessible. Despite their important functional roles in scientific practices, philosophers of science have more or less neglected visual representations in their analyses of epistemic methods and tools of reasoning in science. This book is meant to fill this gap. It presents a detailed investigation into central conceptual issues and into the epistemology of visual representations in science.

Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

Nicola Mößner currently holds a position as a lecturer at the Department of Philosophy at the RWTH Aachen University, Germany. Between 2015 and 2016, she was a Junior Fellow at the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald, Germany. In the philosophy of science her main interests of research comprise, on the one hand, Ludwik Fleck’s theory of social dynamics and infl uences on epistemic processes in science and, on the other, the epistemic status of visual representations in processes of scientifi c reasoning and communication. She edited (together with Alfred Nordmann) Reasoning in Measurement (2017) and (together with Dimitri Liebsch) Visualisierung und Erkenntnis – Bildverstehen und Bildverwenden in Natur- und Geisteswissenschaften (2012). Another area of her specialisation is social epistemology. In this context she worked on the epistemology of testimony and published Wissen aus dem Zeugnis anderer – der Sonderfall medialer Berichterstattung (2010).