Ilge Interference Patterns In

Semantics and Epistemology

Peruzzi, A. Axiomathes (2002) 13: 39-64.
https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016595806778
DOI https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016595806778

Publisher Name Kluwer Academic Publishers

Print ISSN 1122-1151

Online ISSN 1572-8390

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1016595806778

ABSTRACT

The issue as to whether an atomistic or holistic view of knowledge and meaning is

correct relies on the way part/whole relationships is analysed, exactly as the issue as to
whether a constructive or realistic view of knowledge and meaning is correct relies on the way
internal/external relationships is analysed.
Both the principle of compositionality and the context principle depend on how finely
the constituents, the nature and the size of the context are identified; both the notion of
meaning and the notion of truth depend on the resources of internalisation/externalisation.
Thus the spectrum of semantic and epistemological theories varies from (global) atomism to
(global) holism, and from minimal to maximal internalisation. Are compositional theories
necessarily extensional? Does formal semantics necessarily rely on set theory?Does the
domain-specific character of the notions of element, part and whole prevent any general,
non-trivial account?
The aim of the present paper is to provide a negative answer to these questions by
exploring some of the features a theory covering the phenomenology of part and whole
should have. This phenomenology will only be sketched through a few paradigmatic
examples, showing how the reference of notions of part and whole varies and which are the
constraints inherent in such variation.
Category theory provides the tools for fashioning this framework, since it allows
describing any coherent collection of objects (with actions defined over them) and (action
preserving) maps between the objects, as well as the variation of such collections in terms of
suitable functors, coding the ways parts and wholes undergo co-variation. The main thesis is
that there are interference patterns between the two pairs Local/Global and Internal/
External, only in terms of which the above phenomenology can be properly described.