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

In 1993 a famous article by Raymond Duval highlighted a simple fact: the student can be confusing the mathematical object O, which is cognitively trying to build, with one of its semiotic representations R(O); and 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 discussion has subsequently been extremely influential for researchers. However, even if in different terms, many scholar of semiotics have emphasized the same phenomenon and in this paper we propose to recall some of them.