Indispensability and Effectiveness of Diagrams in Molecular Biology

Abstract: In this paper I aim to defend a twofold thesis. On one hand, I will support, against Perini (2005), the indispensability of diagrams when structurally complex biomolecules are concerned, since it is not possible to satisfactorily use linguistic-sentential representations at that domain. On the other hand, even when diagrams are dispensable I will defend than they will generally be more effective than other representations in encoding biomolecular knowledge, relying on Kulvicki-Shimojima’s diagrammatic effectiveness thesis. Finally, I will ground many epistemic virtues of biomolecular diagrams (understandability, explanatory power, prediction and hypothesis evaluation) on their cognitive-computational indispensability and their semantic-epistemic effectiveness. Keywords: Molecular Biology, Diagrammatic Representation, Representational Indispensability.