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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W03.2: 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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Minds and Machines Learning Convex and Connected Concepts 1: Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands, The; 2: CNRS, Université Paris-Sorbonne (Joint work with Igor Douven.) In the conceptual spaces framework, natural concepts are often modeled as convex regions within a similarity space—an assumption motivated by the principle of cognitive economy. Convexity is thought to enhance learnability, making such concepts easier to acquire than those that are represented by regions that satisfy topological criteria that are less stringent. In this talk, I critically examine this hypothesis by comparing the learnability of convex concepts to that of merely connected ones. I will present findings from both computational studies using neural networks that are supposed to approximate human concept learning and behavioral experiments with human participants. All studies were conducted within a shape-based similarity space designed to represent various types of containers | |