Categories: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Two Sorts

RS-frames were introduced by Gehrke as relational semantics for substructural logics. They are two-sorted structures, based on RS-polarities with additional relations used to interpret modalities. We propose an intuitive, epistemic interpretation of RS-frames for modal logic, in terms of categorization systems and agents’ subjective interpretations of these systems. Categorization systems are a key to any decision-making process and are widely studied in the social and management sciences.

A set of objects together with a set of properties and an incidence relation connecting objects with their properties forms a polarity which can be ‘pruned’ into an RS-polarity. Potential categories emerge as the Galois-stable sets of this polarity, just like the concepts of Formal Concept Analysis. An agent’s beliefs about objects and their properties (which might be partial) is modelled by a relation which gives rise to a normal modal operator expressing the agent’s beliefs about category membership. Fixed-points of the iterations of the belief modalities of all agents are used to model categories constructed through social interaction.