Resumen de La lógica de las imágenes: retórica y argumentación en las prácticas científicas representacionales
Our aim is to identify good practices in the use of scientific images, resorting primarily to articles recently appeared in The Astrophysical Journal. We claim that the explicit description of the methodology employed in the elaboration of a published image will not suffice, and that it should be accompanied by an assessment of the epistemic role played by the image in the argumentation, or in the rhetoric, of the article of which it is part. We propose to identify four distinct epistemic fields involving the production of scientific images: (1) phenomenological images, close to the observational practices, (2) heuristic images, associated with the statistical analysis of empirical data, (3) modelled images, coming from numerical simulations, and (4) analytic images, derived from the theoretical realm. The clear identification of the epistemic scope for each image type facilitates a dialogue between different scientific cultures around a common vocabulary. We think that this epistemological analysis can be extended to other natural sciences.
