Philosophical Lenses on Data Visualization

Abstract

Data visualization treats visual insight as its fundamental research object, drawing on computer science, perceptual studies, and cognition. But producing insight means producing truth and knowledge, which philosophy has studied for millennia. Despite this, only a fraction of work at IEEE VIS and TVCG draws explicitly on philosophical sources. In his 2025 VIS keynote, Hans-Christian Hege argued that elevating visualization to a science requires a philosophical foundation. We note that philosophical commitments already permeate VIS papers implicitly. Some of these commitments are revealed by the language these papers use. As an exploratory study, we build a lexicon for the five primary branches of philosophy from the Internet Philosophy Ontology (InPhO) and score every IEEE VIS abstract from 1990 to 2024 using BM25. We then examine the distribution of papers across the branches split by VIS submission area and its progression year by year. Metaphysics leads and aesthetics follows, though largely through borrowed data-modeling vocabulary, and over three decades the field drifts toward epistemology and ethics.