Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

10 The Good, the Beautiful and the Literate: Making Statistics Accessible for Action 149
economic and social life according to rational principles. The scientific world-conception
serves life, and life receives it. (Neurath & Cohen, 1973, pp. 317–318)
It is quite striking that reference is made to ‘earliest times’; we hear the echo of a
long lost past where man and the world surrounding him were united. It is the challenge
for philosopher and scientist alike to restore this situation to its original form,
‘according to rational principles’. Notably, Otto Neurath, one of the three authors,
tried extremely hard to realise this plan through the development of a universal
pictorial language.
It is a strange phenomenon that the graphical language developed by Otto
Neurath is hardly known. 4 The number of papers and books on the topic has to be
considered marginal given the number of publications on the Wiener Kreis. There
is a possible explanation for this: examples of ISOTYPE were known, but no (full)
text of Neurath (providing an explanation of the whole enterprise) seems to exist.
What was known, however, is that Neurath had written on the subject. 5 This was
confirmed with the appearance of three manuscripts. Nemeth and Stadler (1996)
include one of these manuscripts, entitled Visual Education – Humanisation versus
Popularisation in their book.
At first sight there seems to be nothing special about ISOTYPE. The idea that
a graphical-visual language might better succeed in transmitting ideas, concepts,
theories and the like, is an old and venerable idea (whether correct or not). However,
an important element in Neurath’s view is that one should avoid the temptation
to look for an isomorphy between ordinary language and the visual language one
if searching for. The easiest way to make this distinction clear is to contrast the
following two images. 6
The meaning of the image on the left is clear: someone is walking through a door. 7
We see the elements of the sentence in the picture – there is a door, there is a figure
representing a person, etc. However, the picture on the right shows what happens if
the structure of the sentence ‘A person walks through the door’ is isomorphically
translated (up to and including a curious sign for ‘a’). In this case it is as if we have
been given a riddle to solve. The puzzling aspect of this derives from the isomorphy
the sameness of form, proving how difficult it is to see the same (abstract) form
in two different representations. In contrast, the picture on the left almost ‘shows’
its’ meaning. As such, the diagram offers the possibility of seeing everything ‘at a
glance’, allowing possible perspectives and transformation processes which are not
necessarily linear or successive, but which can be seen in something resembling an
‘aha’ experience.