English

Behavioral Mereology (Proofs and Properties)

Logic 2020-07-06 v2 Category Theory

Abstract

Mereology is the study of parts and the relationships that hold between them. We introduce a behavioral approach to mereology, in which systems and their parts are known only by the types of behavior they can exhibit. Our discussion is formally topos-theoretic, and agnostic to the topos, providing maximal generality; however, by using only its internal logic we can hide the details and readers may assume a completely elementary set-theoretic discussion. We consider the relationship between various parts of a whole in terms of how behavioral constraints are passed between them, and give an inter-modal logic that generalizes the usual alethic modalities in the setting of symmetric accessibility.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1811.00420,
  title  = {Behavioral Mereology (Proofs and Properties)},
  author = {Brendan Fong and David Jaz Myers and David I. Spivak},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.00420},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

18 pages, Extended version of version accepted for publication for the ACT 2020 conference

R2 v1 2026-06-23T05:00:46.305Z