{"pk":29256,"title":"Five aspects of compositionality and a universal principle","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Compositionality supposedly explains structure-sensitive features of cognition, such as productivity and systematicity.However, the nature of compositionality is still controversial: e.g., symbolic versus subsymbolic. Category theory—a formal theory of structure—provides an explanation for systematicity in terms of universal morphisms: the optimalfactorization of cognitive components (Phillips & Wilson, 2010). We survey five aspects of compositionality as they relateto formal properties of universal morphisms. The emerging view is a unified (universal) principle for compositionality.This category theoretical view affords a novel perspective on the emergence of symbol systems, i.e. as the construction ofuniversal morphisms, which is illustrated in regard to some empirical data.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Member Abstracts","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7t10p9q3","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Steven","middle_name":"","last_name":"Phillips","name_suffix":"","institution":"National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/29256/galley/19127/download/"}]}