Reasoning with Diagrams Only

Reasoning with Diagrammatic Representations

Volume

Reasoning with Diagrammatic Representations

Contents

Traditional deductive systems work with sentences of symbols. Even in newer systems that also reason from diagrams sentential representations still play a major role. The work here explores deductive systems that use only picture-like representations. Machinery functionally equivalent to variables, quantifiers, substitution, unification, and binding are defined based on a model of deductive chaining as the composition of mappings, where pictures themselves are used to specify the mappings.