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Donald Davidson

philosopher · 6 mentions across 1 reading

In this course

Donald Davidson appears in these readings primarily through his concept of "conceptual schemes"—the idea that different systems of categories organize experience differently—which the course material uses to ground discussions of levels of abstraction and observation in computational and cybernetic systems. The excerpts suggest that Davidson's framework is being invoked to argue against anthropocentric approaches to knowledge representation, enabling the authors to extend notions of perspective and interpretation beyond human cognition to machines and other observational systems. His work on the relativity of conceptual frameworks thus becomes essential scaffolding for thinking about how AI systems might operate at different levels of abstraction without privileging human categorical schemes.

Mentioned in 1 reading

Luciano Floridi

The Method of Levels of Abstraction

 6
Second, the method is anti-metaphysical, again in a Kantian sense. Metaphysics is—when used as a negative label—what is done by sloppy reasoning when it pretends to develop a theory without taking into consideration, at least implicitly, th…The tripartite approaches of Marr, Pylyshyn and Dennett share three important features. First, they are each readily formalised in terms of GoAs with three LoAs. Second, they do not distinguish between LoO, LoE and LoA; and this because (th…(1) CSs are clusters or networks of (possibly acquired) categories. “Conceptual schemes, we are told, are ways of organizing experience; they are systems of categories that give form to the data of sensation; they are points of view from wh…

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Appears alongside

People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.

Daniel Dennett 2David Marr 2Zenon Pylyshyn 2Immanuel Kant 1Akos Egyed 1Carl F. Craver 1Daniel C. Dennett 1Harold Chapman Brown 1James E. Tomberlin 1Karsten Engelhardt 1Luciano Floridi 1Ned Block 1Nenad Medvidovic 1Richard P. Feynman 1Tom Mailbaum 1Willem-Paul de Roever 1

Pandaemonium Architecture 6.0 — ATEK-639/439 — Fall 2025