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Visual Information and Scientific Understanding

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Abstract

Without doubt, there is a widespread usage of visualisations in science. However, what exactly the epistemic status of these visual representations in science may be remains an open question. In the following, I will argue that at least some scientific visualisations are indispensible for our cognitive processes. My thesis will be that, with regard to the activity of learning, visual representations are of relevance in the sense of contributing to the aim of scientific understanding. Taking into account that understanding can be regarded as an epistemic desideratum in its own right, I will argue that, at least in some instances, no understanding can be achieved without the aid of visualisations. Consequently, they are of crucial importance in this process. Moreover, to support this thesis we will make use of some findings in educational psychology.

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Notes

  1. In the following, I will use the terms ‘visualisation’ and ‘visual representation’ interchangeably.

  2. “Norton’s basic idea is that thought experiments are just arguments; they are derivations from given premises which employ strictly irrelevant, though perhaps usefully picturesque, elements” (Brown 2011, p. 44).

  3. A “genuine contribution” would mean introducing a new idea, that is a new theory or argument. It does not mean only visualising what philosophers already have discussed in a certain debate. Moreover, this contribution has to be made with filmic methods only (see Wartenberg 2007, 2011).

  4. Concerning the problem to deal with visual representations in analytic philosophy see also (Steinbrenner 2009, p. 284ff.).

  5. Visualisations may also be the object of investigation itself. In gestalt psychology, for example, visual representations determine the experimental set-up as scientists want to find out something about human visual perception. A similar role can be ascribed to scientific visualisations in experimental phenomenology (see e.g. Albertazzi 2013). I owe this point to an anonymous reviewer.

  6. Of course there may also be a practical part involved, that is, the acquisition of certain skills.

  7. Jakob Steinbrenner claims that the struggle to deal with the pictorial might partly be explained by the dominance of linguistic representations as the main object of research in the tradition of analytic philosophy (see Steinbrenner 2009, p. 284).

  8. Laura Perini critically analyses this thesis and puts forward a contrary argument, namely that visual representations can indeed be truth-bearers (see Perini 2012b).

  9. Usually, it is admitted that there are factive and non-factive usages of the term ‘understanding’.

  10. Oliver R. Scholz also discusses the question of what is meant if we claim to understand a picture (see Scholz 1993, 2009, ch. 5.4). However, he does not relate this to the problem of factivity.

  11. What is of importance in these cases is the spatial ordering of information.

  12. This multiple processing and encoding of visual information is also suggested by some of the case studies presented by the neuropsychologist Oliver Sacks (see Sacks 2010). In his essay “The Mind’s Eye” (see ibid., 202ff.), for example, he discusses the medical histories of different people who went blind in the course of their lives. Interestingly, some of them kept their ability to construct mental images, that is to visualise objects, etc. in their mind, whereas others totally lost this ability. These latter patients were nonetheless able to learn empirical facts about their environments with the aid of their other senses. In this sense, these medical case studies speak in favour of the thesis that there are at least two different cognitive subsystems for processing and encoding information, which can also be used separately if one of the systems is damaged or takes on new tasks from other parts of the brain.

  13. A critical discussion of the question whether there might be visual arguments in a philosophical sense is offered by Mößner (2013).

  14. Neurath (1991) was especially interested in this aspect and suggested some design features to improve students’ and laymen’s abilities to perceptually grasp such visually presented differences.

  15. This aspect about the immediacy of the availability of information in visual representations is also noted by Kulvicki (2010). He argues that our immediate access to information presented visually depends on the following three features, extractability and perceptual salience, that is, syntactic and semantic salience of the information presented (see ibid., 299ff.).

  16. Laura Perini also highlights the fact that images might give us access to scientific phenomena even though we lack the relevant concepts to describe them (see Perini 2005, p. 921).

  17. Peacocke calls this feature of pictorial representations “analogous content” (see Peacocke 1986, p. 395; Peacocke 1987). The thesis that visual representations possess this feature is also defended by Lopes (2006, p. 71).

  18. That this is not always the case and that some visual representations presuppose a lot of interpretative work to be of use in the scientific context is shown by Perini (2012a).

  19. An introduction to this debate is offered by Lyre (2010).

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) in the context of the project ‘‘Visualisierungen in den Wissenschaften—eine wissenschaftstheoretische Untersuchung’’. For helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper I thank an anonymous reviewer and the participants of the symposium “On the Indispensability of Visual Information in Science” at the conference “Philosophy of Science in the twenty-first century—Challenges and Tasks” at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal. For linguistic revision I thank Janet Carter-Sigglow.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, RWTH Aachen University, Eilfschornsteinstraße 16, 52062, Aachen, Germany

    Nicola Mößner

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Mößner, N. Visual Information and Scientific Understanding. Axiomathes 25, 167–179 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-014-9246-7

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