Distances between formal theories

DOI10.1017/S1755020319000558MaRDI QIDQ5117596zbMATH OpenFDO

Authors Mohamed Khaled, Gergely Székely, Koen Lefever, Michèle Friend

Publication date 26 August 2020

Published in The Review of Symbolic Logic (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.01501

zbMATH Keywords

conceptual distancedegrees of nonequivalencenetwork of theoriesrelativistic and classical kinematics

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Logic in the philosophy of science (03A10) Cylindric and polyadic algebras; relation algebras (03G15) Other applications of logic (03B80)

Abstract: In the literature, there have been several methods and definitions for working out if two theories are "equivalent" (essentially the same) or not. In this article, we do something subtler. We provide means to measure distances (and explore connections) between formal theories. We introduce two main notions for such distances. The first one is that of extit{axiomatic distance}, but we argue that it might be of limited interest. The more interesting and widely applicable notion is that of extit{conceptual distance} which measures the minimum number of concepts that distinguish two theories. For instance, we use conceptual distance to show that relativistic and classical kinematics are distinguished by one concept only. We also develop further notions of distance, and we include a number of suggestions for applying and extending our project.

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Cited in

(9)

• TWO-VARIABLE LOGIC HAS WEAK, BUT NOT STRONG, BETH DEFINABILITY
• On generalization of definitional equivalence to non-disjoint languages
• On the networks of large embeddings
• Modal logics that are both monotone and antitone: Makinson's extension results and affinities between logics
• In the Footsteps of Hilbert: The Andréka-Németi Group’s Logical Foundations of Theories in Physics
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1954130 (Why is no real title available?)
• From geometry to conceptual relativity
• Distance between physical theories based on information theory
• Distances, diameters and verisimilitude of theories

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