Bio:
I am a PhD student and assistant at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Salzburg, where I previously studied mathematics, psychology and philosophy. My main areas of interest lie in formal philosophy of science, ontology, logic and philosophy of mathematics. In my dissertation, I develop category theoretic explications of reduction concepts and investigate ontological aspects of theory reductions.
Dates of Visit:
September 2015 - December 2015
Project Title:
Reduction and Representation.
Project Description:
At the CPNSS, I will study how theory reduction is related to representation. According to the Nagelian model, reductions can be viewed as translations that preserve derivability. In mathematics, preservation of derivability is indeed enough for successful reductions (examples are the reductions of number theory to set theory). In empirical sciences, however, successful reductions should satisfy additional constraints. I think that they should preserve representation. In order to make this idea precise, I work on an explication of reduction that is Nagelian in spirit, but takes categories of models rather than sets of sentences as the relata of reduction.