8 May 2012, Logic Tea, Marion Haemmerli

Abstract

The human cognitive system represents space in a way which is highly relevant for a successful interaction with the physical environment. In recent years, this insight has brought philosophers and computer scientists alike to study the formal structure underlying human thinking of space. In my talk, I will develop the outlines of a formal theory for representing perspective-dependent locations and I will show how perspective-dependent spatial concepts relate to the framework of detached, absolute locational concepts. To this aim, I first present a modified version of Varzi's and Casati's theory of spatial representation, thus setting up a suitable background theory for the extension towards perspectival concepts. In a second step, I present a new piece of formalism which does justice to the variety of perspective-dependent expressions we use to structure our experience of space.

The Logic Tea homepage can be found at http://www.illc.uva.nl/logic_tea/. For more information, please contact Umberto Grandi (u.grandi at uva.nl), Tong Wang (tongwang01 at gmail.com), or Matthijs Westera (M.Westera at uva.nl).