This article offers an analysis of the cognitive role of diagrammatic movements in the theater. Based on the recognition of a theatrical work’s inherent ability to provide new insights concerning reality, the article concentrates on the way by which actors’ movements on stage create spatial diagrams that can provide new insights into the spectators’ world. The suggested model of theater’s epistemology results from a combination of Charles S. Peirce’s doctrine of diagrammatic reasoning and David Lewis’s theoretical account of the truth value of counterfactual conditionals. I argue that in several theatrical works – in particular those whose central image is dominated by movements – the relation of what Lewis names “comparative overall similarity” between the fictional and the actual world is based on diagrammatic homology. The cognitive process involved in deciphering them is, hence, based on diagrammatic reasoning. The main emphasis of the analysis is on the previously unnoticed but important cognitive role of observation in the theater: the idea that observation takes an active role in the reasoning process that enables the spectators to form new knowledge about their actual world. Samuel Beckett’s plays Quad and Come and Go serve here as case studies.

中文翻译：

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剧院中的空间图和几何推理

本文对剧院中图解运动的认知作用进行了分析。基于对戏剧作品固有的提供有关现实的新见解的内在能力的认可，本文着重于演员在舞台上的动作创建空间图的方式，这些图可以为观众的世界提供新的见解。剧院认识论的建议模型是由查尔斯·皮尔斯的图解推理理论和戴维·刘易斯对反事实条件的真值的理论解释相结合得出的。我认为，在几部戏剧作品中，尤其是那些以运动为中心的戏剧作品中，刘易斯所称的虚构世界与现实世界之间的“比较整体相似性”之间的关系是基于图解的同源性。因此，解密它们的认知过程是基于图解推理的。分析的主要重点是观察在剧院中以前没有注意到的但很重要的认知作用：观察在推理过程中起着积极作用，这种想法使观众能够形成有关其现实世界的新知识。塞缪尔·贝克特（Samuel Beckett）的剧作《 Quad and Come and Go》将作为案例研究。