CPS Lunch Forum: Guendalina Righetti

This talk explores how concepts evolve over time and how we can capture their continuity despite change. Building on Kit Fine’s notion of variable embodiments, I propose to treat concepts themselves as variable embodiments and address the question of how to understand the principle of variable embodiment in the case of concepts. To this end, I propose to use a specific notion of conceptual coherence, which constrains the principle of variable embodiments by requiring that concepts preserve some shared informational core across time. Conceptual coherence is thus defined as an overlap in topic, specifically captured through the intersection of possible generalisations of a concept at different points in time.