The Geometrization of Meaning

TL;DR

This paper explores how category theory provides a mathematical framework for understanding the relationship between syntax and semantics in formal theories, offering new philosophical insights into the nature of meaning.

Contribution

It introduces a categorical perspective on the syntax-semantics dualism, linking it to algebra-geometry duality and analyzing its philosophical implications.

Findings

Syntax-semantics dualism corresponds to algebra-geometry duality.

Adjoint functors characterize the interaction between syntax and semantics.

The approach offers a new criterion to distinguish formal from empirical theories.

Abstract

One of the greatest problems in philosophy is that of meaning. The turning point in thinking on meaning was Tarski's definition of truth, and the rapid development of logical semantics and model theory was a consequence of this achievement. Perhaps less well-known among classical logicians and philosophers is that it is category theory that provides adequate mathematical tools to study the relationship between the syntax of formalized theories and their semantics. The aim of this article is to change this situation and make a preliminary philosophical analysis of the results obtained so far. They concern formalized algebraic theories with axioms in the form of equational laws, theories based on propositional logic and coherent Boolean logic, as well as decidable logic which is not necessarily Boolean. The syntactic-semantics relation for these theories takes the form of dualisms between the respective syntactic and semantic categories. These dualisms are given by the appropriate adjoint functors. In all the considered cases, the syntax--semantics dualism corresponds to the algebra-geometry dualism. We analyze the philosophical significance of these results. They allow us to look at the problem of meaning in a new light and formulate a criterion distinguishing formal theories from empirical theories. The disputes that were once fought over Tarski's definition of truth are transferred to a new context. The polemics as to whether Tarski actually succeeded in reducing the problem of meaning to purely syntactic terms has been superseded: between the syntactic and semantic categories there is not a relation of reducibility but rather that of interaction, and this relation is given by adjoint functors. We also touch upon other philosophical aspects of the categorical approach to the problem of meaning.