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Comment by nbulka | Hacker News Reader

Thanks I should clarify. I don't mean understanding all of the details. I mean from a high level. To be clear, I mean the incredibly useful notion of realizing that cross-domain knowledge can share structure. Logic and geometry are in some sense related in a very formal way. I was never introduced to that notion in the required logic class.

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Do you think there could be a risk telling the eager-eyed philosophy students that there are truths that they should grant on principle but that they don't need to understand the details?

What do they think when they take the epistemology course next?

Yes the details are important; if you are so inclined to trace the reasoning all the way back to the axioms, thankfully they are very easy to understand! And doing so would definitely prepare them for epistemology. There's a reason that physics leans heavily on category theory.

> To be clear, I mean the incredibly useful notion of realizing that cross-domain knowledge can share structure.

Is there somewhere you can suggest that I can read more about this notion?

By "share structure" they mean (the various degrees of) analogy - a widely-known concept that has been made rigorous within the framework of category theory (via the notion of a functor).

Check out this section of the SEP entry on Category Theory:

3. Philosophical Significance https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/category-theory/

I suspect a lot of the formal work on ontology involves CT.

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