The Inferential-Expressive Trade-Off: A Case Study of Tabular Representations

Many graphical systems (e.g., Euler diagrams, maps, pictorial images, and even tables) support efficient inferences or rich presentation of information apparently at the expense of expressive flexibility. This association of inferential efficiency, expressive richness, and expressive inflexibility in a graphical system has been pointed out by various researchers (e.g., Sloman [1], Stenning and Oberlander [2]). This paper investigates the semantic mechanism of the association by closely examining a particular system of tabular representations, which, despite its simplicity, clearly exhibits all those opposing functional traits. Using a semantic framework of channel theory (Barwise and Seligman [3]), we will show that the common mechanism is a parallelism between abstraction relations in represented properties and in representing properties.