Conference Agenda
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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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What Carnap’s Aufbau can do for conceptual spaces (online) University of the Basque Country, Spain As Sznajder (2016) argued, there are resemblances between Carnap’s attribute spaces and the conceptual spaces introduced by Gärdenfors (2000,2014). This connection keeps leading to interesting results, e.g. (Douven,Verheyen,Elqayam,Gärdenfors,Osta-Vélez,2025). Earlier in his Aufbau (1923,1928), Carnap sketched a theory of constructional systems of concepts based on the method of quasi-analysis, which reconstructs concepts as sets of similar objects, see (Richardson,1998), (Del Sordo; Mormann, 2022). But Carnap’s quasi-analysis faced Goodman’s (1953) companionship and imperfect community objections. These were discussed by Proust (1986), Brockhaus (1963), Mormann (1994,2009) and Leitgeb (2007,2011). Independently, Rumfitt (2015) and Mormann (2020,2021) developed polar spaces as an application of conceptual spaces to vagueness. Then, Belastegui (2022) showed that polar spaces are mathematically equivalent to the similarity structures of Carnap (1923), and that these avoid Goodman’s objections because they require the existence of objects that behave like prototypes (Rosch,1975). Unless one constrains the convex regions in a conceptual space, imperfect communities can arise. Nevertheless, these cannot arise when concepts are represented as Voronoi cells, because Voronoi tessellations are Carnapian similarities. Thus, using Voronoi tessellations avoids Goodman’s objections justifiably because it appeals to the prototype theory of concepts. Providing this justification is, I claim, what Carnap’s Aufbau can do for conceptual spaces. | |