Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.