Laurenz Hudetz (London School of Economics)
This talk addresses the question what it is to interpret a formalism. First, I explicate the notion of an uninterpreted formalism and explain how uninterpreted formalisms can be extended to pre-interpreted formalisms. Second, I show how pre-interpreted formalisms can be connected to data. For this purpose, I draw on the theory of relational databases to clarify what data collections and data schemas are. This leads to an explication of the notion of empirically interpreted formalisms. Third, I introduce the notion of an ontological conceptual schema in order to explain how empirically interpreted frameworks can be extended to ontologically interpreted frameworks.
