Abstract
Plato’s words are aimed, not at conveying a static description of how things are, but at creating cognitive stimulations for his readers. I will present the way in which I have chosen to respond to this Platonic request for collaboration. I am going to analyze the importance of visualization for cognitive development. This analysis allows to realize the role of diagrams as heuristic devices. Diagrams facilitate problem-solving inferences. Mental models will make us understand the mental processes that occur in deductive inference. Via mental models we will begin to turn our rational attention to a superior phase of epistemic development. The intellectual progress in this cognitive phase is facilitated by ante rem structuralism, in which numbers are treated as positions in structures.
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Saracco, S. (2023). Introduction. In: Plato, Diagrammatic Reasoning and Mental Models. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27658-3_1
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