Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
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W03.1: Similarity after Carnap - Perspectives from Philosophy and Cognitive Science Location: 23.21 U1.75 In his Aufbau programme, Carnap sought to provide a formally rigorous account of how property concepts—and ultimately scientific theories—can be constructed on the basis of similarity, particularly through a procedure he called quasi-analysis. Goodman famously challenged the viability of this method, later even claiming that the appeal to similarity is inherently problematic. This workshop aims to bring together scholars from both philosophical and psychological traditions to debate the role of similarity in constituting categorization, analogical reasoning, and belief systems—and to explore the continuing relevance of Carnap’s work in this debate. | |
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Similarity, Direct Measurements, Conceptual Spaces and Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity for scientific theory selection and induction Accenture, Switzerland I review the works of Gärdenfors (1990) and Scorzato (2013) and show that their combination provides an elegant solution of Goodman’s new riddle of induction. The solution is based on two main ideas: (1) Clarifying what is expected from a solution: understanding that philosophy of science is a science itself, with the same limitations and strenghts as the other scientific disciplines. (2) Understainding that the concept of complexity of a model’s assumptions and the concept of direct measurements must be characterized together. Direct measurements are the context where the concept of similarity becomes essential. I argue that conceptual spaces are part of the solution, but I emphasise that a concept of epistemic complexity must also be part of it, to remediate to the limitations of conceptual spaces. In particular, the fact that conceptual spaces are more robust for single-domain concepts (Strößner 2022) is not a serious limitation if their application is needed only for direct measurements. | |