Epistemological roleof illustrations on historical geology,evolutive view

Abstract

The main goal of the present work is to highlight the epistemological role that the illustrations frequently have in the production of scientific knowledge. For this purpose,we use a set of historical samples from the scientific area of geology, in particular from the domains of paleontology, stratigraphy and geohistory. In this view the present paper is organized in two parts: a first one more theoretical and generalist, giving the necessary conceptual context, and a second one where we discuss a set of examples concerning the processes of ordination/classification of natural entities and the inferential processes which aims to reconstruct entities that lived in the past.