ABSTRACT

The epigraphs suggest some natural questions about the use(s) of diagrams-broadly understood to include ‘figures’ of all sortsin mathematics and, especially, mathematical modeling.

• Can such diagrams (sometimes) be part of “reasoning”—the dialectical part (to use the classical term recalled in Chap. 2) of a “process of persuasion”—or must they (always) contribute only to the rhetorical part of such a process?