TY - JOUR T1 - Categorial Compositionality: A Category Theory Explanation for the Systematicity of Human Cognition A1 - Phillips, Steven A1 - Wilson, William H. Y1 - 2010/07/22 N2 - Author Summary Our minds are not the sum of some arbitrary collection of mental abilities. Instead, our mental abilities come in groups of related behaviours. This property of human cognition has substantial biological advantage in that the benefits afforded by a cognitive behaviour transfer to a related situation without any of the cost that came with acquiring that behaviour in the first place. The problem of systematicity is to explain why our mental abilities are organized this way. Cognitive scientists, however, have been unable to agree on a satisfactory explanation. Existing theories cannot explain systematicity without some overly strong assumptions. We provide a new explanation based on a mathematical theory of structure called Category Theory. The key difference between our explanation and previous ones is that systematicity emerges as a natural consequence of structural relationships between cognitive processes, rather than relying on the specific details of the cognitive representations on which those processes operate, and without relying on overly strong assumptions. JF - PLOS Computational Biology JA - PLOS Computational Biology VL - 6 IS - 7 UR - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000858 SP - e1000858 EP - PB - Public Library of Science M3 - doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000858 ER -