M.A. Heather
B.N. Rossiter
University of Newcastle upon Tyne. 1994
Mathematics gives rigour to a subject. The humanities have long sought a formal basis in logic and set theory especially in the understanding of language and linguistics. The axiomatic approach, however, has proved to be very limiting for representing human thought and behaviour. Constructive mathematics now offers category theory developed in the second half of this century as an all-embracing formal language which may prove to be the ultimate breakthrough the humanities have been long seeking. The paper 1 provides two examples - one at the very abstract level of adjointness between discourse in speech writing and the electronic format. At a much lower level the same mathematical formalism can represent methods of optimisation in organizing dictionary data on disk.