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 and probability in generalisation Radboud University, Netherlands, The Using multidimensional scaling, Roger Shepard explained accurate generalisation across contexts by appealing to both geometric similarity representations and probabilistic inference. However, such an explanation would be more complex than if one appealed to either principle alone. There is currently no widespread agreement on whether similarity is more fundamental than probability, or vice versa, or how exactly the two relate. A different notion of similarity – structural similarity – highlights the action-relevance (‘exploitability’) of internal representations and requires these to map onto the environment statistics relevant to explain accuracy or adaptive success. I provide a new systematisation according to which the different notions of probability and similarity complement one another in explaining the possibility of accurate generalization based on learned concepts. | |