Diagrams as Physical Models to Assist in Reasoning
B. Chandrasekaran · 2006
Diagrams serve a variety of roles in applied reasoning. At times, they are best viewed as \sentences in a 2-D language, with specialized rules of inference that provide new diagrams. Other times, however, they are best understood as providing a physical model, much like an architectural model of a building or a 3-D molecular model of a chemical compound, for a state of afiairs. In this paper, I discuss the notion of a physical model for a logical sentence, and the role played by the causal structure of the physical medium in making the given sentence as well as a set of implied sentences true. When the physical model is prototypical, it supports the inference of certain other sentences for which it provides a model as well. I also informally discuss a proposal that diagrams and similar physical models help to explicate a certain sense of relevance in inference, an intuition that so-called Relevance Logics attempt to capture.