Chapter 3: Signifying Relative Motion: Time, Space and the Semiotics of Cartesian Graphs

Kant was perhaps the first to have realized how entrenched our knowledge of the world is in the way we experience it through space and time. Since all our acts, even the most mundane, presuppose a temporal and a spatial dimension, space and time, Kant reasoned, constitute the very conditions of knowledge: they are in us and precede all experience whence knowledge results—to use Kant’s terminology, space and time are pure intuitions. While agreeing with Kant’s emphasis on the importance of space and time in the experience we make of the world, current research on epistemology, anthropology, and the arts suggests, however, that space and time are neither apriori conceptual categories, nor the constructs of the allegedly Piagetian universal logico-mathematical structures. Space and time are rather cultural conceptual categories. The culture in which we happen to live not only provides us with the general theoretical framework in which to temporally and spatially experience our world but also insinuates paths to reflect about it, both at a practical and a theoretical level.