7-8 May 2010
Paris, France
The Institut Jean-Nicod/Paris and the Center for Logic and Analytic Philosophy/University of Leuven present the upcoming workshop: Vagueness and Similarity Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris May 7- 8, 2010 Location: May 7, 2010: ENS Salle Jules Ferry, 29 rue dUlm Paris. May 8, 2010: ENS Salle des Actes, 45 rue dUlm Paris. Organization: Richard Dietz, Igor Douven, Paul Egré, David Ripley. Contact (Local Committee): paulegre AT gmail DOT com or davewripley AT gmai l DOT com The difficulty of drawing sharp boundaries for vague concepts is often refe rred to the following principle of similarity, according to which if a concept P can be applied to an object x, then it is also applicable to any object y that is only slightly different from x in the relevant respects. While this princip le accounts for the plasticity of most of our concepts, it also leads to parad ox, thereby suggesting that the notion of similarity actually obeys further or alternative constraints in relation to categorization. The aim of this work shop will be to discuss aspects of the psychology and semantics of similarity an d comparison in relation to vagueness. The following issues will be addressed and of special interest during the workshop: relation between vagueness and categorical perception; referential consensus in color categories; clarity, borderliness and distance to prototypes in conceptual space; static and dyn amic constraints on comparison in classification tasks; logic of vagueness in relation to similarity. The present workshop is coorganized by the Institut Jean-Nicod and the Center for Logic and Analytic Philosophy in Leuven, as p art of an ongoing collaboration. Speakers: Sam Alxatib (MIT) Pablo Cobreros (University of Navarra) Lieven Decock (University of Amsterdam) Richard Dietz (Leuven) Igor Douven (Leuven) Paul Egré (IJN) Peter Gärdenfors (Lund) James Hampton (London) Yasmina Jraissati (IJN) David Ripley (IJN) Robert van Rooij (ILLC, Amsterdam) Program: http://paulegre.free.fr/similarity/program.html