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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The Role of Similarity in Carnap's Program of an Inductive Logic University of Cologne, Germany Similarity plays a crucial role in Rudolf Carnap's work on inductive logic. Carnap challenged the traditional view that inductive methods contradict empiricism due to their reliance on a synthetic a priori uniformity assumption. Carnap proposed a logical alternative to frequentist probability, advocating for a probabilistic uniformity assumption. He aimed to categorize all probabilistic statements as analytical and part of an inductive logic. In doing so, he faced several challenges. Two of which turned out to be particularly persistent. First, the challenge of an adequate logical probabilistic treatment of universal statements. Second, the challenge of adequately characterising so-called “analogical inferences”. Both, universal statements and analogical inferences, make up for an important core component of scientific theorising. Regarding the former, Carnap saw a solution in transforming the philosophy of science dealing with universal statements towards one of dealing with their inferential role. Regarding the latter, Carnap modified his systems of an inductive logic, adding more and more free parameters and specifying increasingly sophisticated notions and measures of similarity to account for such inferences. In this talk, we will outline the historio-systematic context and cornerstones of Carnap’s programme and detail the development of different notions of similarity involved in it. | |