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CATEGORICAL HARMONY AND PATH INDUCTION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2017

PATRICK WALSH
PATRICK WALSH*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University
*
*DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY PITTSBURGH, PA 15213, USA E-mail: pwalsh@andrew.cmu.edu
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Abstract

This paper responds to recent work in the philosophy of Homotopy Type Theory by James Ladyman and Stuart Presnell. They consider one of the rules for identity, path induction, and justify it along ‘pre-mathematical’ lines. I give an alternate justification based on the philosophical framework of inferentialism. Accordingly, I construct a notion of harmony that allows the inferentialist to say when a connective or concept is meaning-bearing and this conception unifies most of the prominent conceptions of harmony through category theory. This categorical harmony is stated in terms of adjoints and says that any concept definable by iterated adjoints from general categorical operations is harmonious. Moreover, it has been shown that identity in a categorical setting is determined by an adjoint in the relevant way. Furthermore, path induction as a rule comes from this definition. Thus we arrive at an account of how path induction, as a rule of inference governing identity, can be justified on mathematically motivated grounds.

Keywords

03A05philosophy of logichomotopy type theorycategory theoryharmony
Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Symbolic Logic , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , June 2017 , pp. 301 - 321
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Symbolic Logic 2017 

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