Re: On the etymology of the word "functor"

[Julian Rohrhuber <rohrhuber@protonmail.com>]

Dear George, thank you for posting the full text, I felt this impulse too.
(just to be clear: I didn't cut the passage and called it "somewhat
arrogant"!)

On 20. Feb 2024, at 14:20, George Janelidze <janelg@telkomsa.net> wrote:
>
> Referring to Julian Rohrhuber's message of February 20: I don't think it is
> a good idea to cut a sentence in the middle and then call it "somewhat
> arrogant", especially when it is from a paper of Saunders Mac Lane. The full
> sentence is:
>
> "There was also some fun with the choice of terminology. Since the
> philosopher Kant had made ample use of general categories, the term was
> borrowed from him for its present mathematical use, while Camap, in his book
> on Die Logische Syntax der Sprachen had talked of functors in a different
> sense and made some corresponding mistakes. It seemed in order to take over
> that word for a better and less philosophical purpose."

What I would be interested in would be in what sense Carnap's mistakes, according to Mac Lane,
corresponded to the concept of functor. Or, perhaps, how Carnap's failed attempt to define analyticity
corresponds to a wrong concept of functor.




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