Abstract

D'AMORE, Bruno; PINILLA, Martha Fandiño; IORI, Maura  and  MATTEUZZI, Maurizio. Analysis of the historical and philosophical antecedents of "Duval's cognitive paradox". Relime [online]. 2015, vol.18, n.2, pp.177-212. ISSN 2007-6819.  https://doi.org/10.12802/relime.13.1822.

In a famous article published in 1993, Raymond Duval highlighted a simple fact: the student may confuse the mathematical object O he is trying to build cognitively with one of its semiotic representations R(O). Duval explained that this confusion was due to a sort of inevitable paradox: only someone who has already built O, can recognize R(O) as a representation of O and not as an object in itself. Thereafter, this thought has been extremely influential for researchers. However, even if in different terms, many scholars of semiotics have emphasized the same phenomenon. In this paper we propose to remind some of them.

Keywords : Duval's cognitive paradox; Semiosis and noesis; Cognitive construction of mathematical objects; Semiotic representations of a mathematical object.