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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Sameness and Similarity (online) Umeå University, Sweden The literature is abundant with similarity conceptions: qualitative similarity, structural similarity, set similarity, a.s.o. Do these similarity conceptions have anything in common, in virtue of which they are all similarity conceptions? I will propose that they can all be related to the concept of sameness, although in three different ways, corresponding to three different types of similarity conceptions: commonality conceptions, closeness conceptions and hybrid conceptions. These conceptions can be used to answer three different questions, relating similarity to sameness (where “sameness” should be understood as “full property-overlap”, not as “numerical identity”). The commonality conception can be used to answer the question: in what ways are A and B (partially) the same? The similarity of A and B is regarded as their commonality. The closeness conception can be used to answer the question: what changes would make A and B the same? The similarity of A and B is regarded as their closeness, the opposite of their distance. The hybrid conception tries to answer both questions. Examples of commonality conceptions are partial identity and number of shared properties. Examples of closeness conceptions are metric similarity and transformations. Tversky’s contrast similarity is an example of the hybrid type. | |