Alcune riflessioni storico-critiche sul cosiddetto “paradosso di Duval”

In 1993 a famous article by Raymond Duval highlighted a simple fact: students confuse the mathematical object O, that they are trying to build cognitively, with one of its semiotic representations R(O); he explained that this confusion was due to a sort of inevitable paradox: only someone who has already built O, can recognize R(O) as a representation of O and not as an object in itself. This idea has been extremely influential for researchers in the following years. However, many scholars of semiotics have emphasized the same phenomenon, even if in not quite the same words; in this paper we are going to mention some of them.