Pure science and logical tales: when logic seems stranger than fiction. A framework for an illustrative interpretation of Lewis Carroll’s logic

This research is motivated by the desire to establish a bridge between logical tales and pure science, sciences and visual arts, and to determine a link between rationality and fantasy, two a priori antagonistic universes. In the context of children’s illustration, it has two aims. The first is to illustrate what seems to be non-illustratable, such as abstract concepts and complex reasoning. The second objective is to investigate whether visual arts can be elevated to the status of metalanguage that can help illustrate scientific languages and participate in discoveries in this field. Pedagogically, the difficult issue is not to employ artistic language to teach children to read, write and count but rather to think, question and reason. My "practice-based research" method is centred on the image/text ratio in educational books and games. By adding reasoning to this ratio, I propose a methodology for using creative artwork to express scientific concepts. The comprehension of the text is essential and is combined with eight criteria, including aesthetics and ethics. For this purpose, I use puzzles, counters, cards and instruction manuals. The study begins with Lewis Carroll’s two works, the Game of Logic and Symbolic Logic. As a storyteller, logician and mathematician, he created a universe of discourse to teach children the rules of argumentation both amusingly and entertainingly. Then, I focus my attention on ancient and modern logic which proceeds from Aristotle and the Stoics to computational thinking. As a result, I have created several pop-up games that show how abstract concepts can be used into practice. Other researchers might well be able to apply this method to other reasoning models, for example, the inductive and analogical models of experimental sciences.