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Human diagrammatic reasoning and seeing-as

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Abstract

The paper addresses the issue of human diagrammatic reasoning in the context of Euclidean geometry. It develops several philosophical categories which are useful for a description and an analysis of our experience while reasoning with diagrams. In particular, it draws the attention to the role of seeing-as; it analyzes its implications for proofs in Euclidean geometry and ventures the hypothesis that geometrical judgments are analytic and a priori, after all.

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Correspondence to Annalisa Coliva.

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Coliva, A. Human diagrammatic reasoning and seeing-as. Synthese 186, 121–148 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-011-9982-9

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