English

Behavioral Mereology: A Modal Logic for Passing Constraints

Logic in Computer Science 2021-01-27 v1

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2101.10490,
  title  = {Behavioral Mereology: A Modal Logic for Passing Constraints},
  author = {Brendan Fong and David Jaz Myers and David I. Spivak},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.10490},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

In Proceedings ACT 2020, arXiv:2101.07888. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1811.00420

R2 v1 2026-06-23T22:31:33.218Z