ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the explanatory context of science, the context of information transmission and the role of visual representations therein. It presents the questions: are visual representations a suitable means in this epistemic context at all, and are there epistemic purposes that visual representations are particularly suitable to serve in comparison with competing modes of representation? To find answers to these questions, the chapter proceeds as follows: firstly, an examination is needed concerning the basic philosophical problem that underlies the discussion of the epistemic status of scientific images. The discussion will include a comparison of the three different representational modes, namely the visual, the linguistic and the numerical. The chapter analyses whether visual representations possess a cognitive content of some kind, i.e. a content that can be transmitted via images in communicative contexts. It investigates the precise nature of such a presumed content.
