Conference Agenda
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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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Inductive Logic and Analogies (online) New York University, United States of America Johnson (1932) and Carnap (1950) independently derived formal versions of enumerative induction that allow for different initial priors and arbitrary sensitivity to new evidence. Though this achievement was monumental for inductive logic, the Johnson-Carnap system could not account for the effects of analogical influences on inductive inferences. The most notable criticism of the system with respect to analogical influences comes from Achinstein (1963). The contribution of my paper is twofold: first, I provide a conceptual mapping of the treatment of analogy in the inductive logic tradition, from Hosiasson-Lindenbaum (1941) and Carnap (1945; 1980) to modern commentators. In particular, I distinguish three kinds of extensions of Carnap’s inductive logic system with respect to analogies: axiomatic (e.g. Huttegger 2019), parametric (e.g. Romeijn 2006), and geometrical approaches (e.g. Sznajder 2021). The second contribution of this paper is to argue that the literature was operating on a productive but fundamental mistake: the extensions of the Johnson-Carnap system did not capture the analogical influence Achinstein had in mind. A recent paper by Huttegger (2019) captures this kind of influence but does not highlight it. | |