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  1. (1 other version)Merits of Leśniewski type nominalism.Henning Hintze - 1995 - Logic and Logical Philosophy 3:101-114.
    For the sake of explaining the merits of a Leśniewski type nominalism, it should be made clear what is meant by „nominalism” and what the characteristics of this special type of nominalism are. To the first question we can find quite a lot of mutually inconsistent answers. Therefore I will just explain the distinction between two different nominalistic traditions which I hold to be fundamental. I think we should not just focus on the question which so-called abstract entities are rejected (...)
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  • Unity, Mereology and Connectivity.Farid Masrour - 2014 - Analysis 74 (3):509-520.
    The goal of this paper is to raise a few questions about Bayne s mereological account of the unity of consciousness. In Section 1, I raise a few clarificatory questions about the account and the thesis that consciousness is necessarily unified. In Sections 2 and 3, I offer an alternative view of unity of consciousness and contrast it with Bayne's view. I call this view the connectivity account. These sections prepare the ground for the main question of this article: why (...)
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  • (1 other version)How to Talk about Unobservables.F. A. Muller & B. C. van Fraassen - 2008 - Analysis 68 (3):197 - 205.
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  • From Hume's Dictum Via Submergence to Composition as Identity or Mereological Nihilism.Einar Duenger Bohn - 2014 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 95 (1):336-355.
    I show that a particular version of Hume's Dictum together with the falsity of Composition as Identity entails an incoherency, so either that version of Hume's Dictum is false or Composition as Identity is true. I conditionally defend the particular version of Hume's Dictum in play, and hence conditionally conclude that Composition as Identity is true. I end by suggesting an alternative way out for a persistent foe of Composition as Identity, namely mereological nihilism.
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  • Parts, classes and Parts of Classes : an anti-realist reading of Lewisian mereology.Neil Tennant - 2013 - Synthese 190 (4):709-742.
    This study is in two parts. In the first part, various important principles of classical extensional mereology are derived on the basis of a nice axiomatization involving ‘part of’ and fusion. All results are proved here with full Fregean rigor. They are chosen because they are needed for the second part. In the second part, this natural-deduction framework is used in order to regiment David Lewis’s justification of his Division Thesis, which features prominently in his combination of mereology with class (...)
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  • Whatever Binds the World’s Innermost Core Together Outline of a General Theory of Ontic Predication.Luc Schneider - 2013 - Axiomathes 23 (2):419-442.
    Nexuses such as exemplification are the fundamental ties that structure reality as a whole. They are “formal” in the sense of constituting the form, not the matter of reality and they are “transcendental” inasmuch as they transcend the categorial distinctions between the denizens of reality, including that between existents and non-existents. I shall advocate a moderately particularist view about (external) nexuses and argue that it provides not only the best solution to Bradley’s regress, but also an elegant account of symmetrical (...)
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  • From Change to Spacetime: An Eleatic Journey.Gustavo E. Romero - 2013 - Foundations of Science 18 (1):139-148.
    I present a formal ontological theory where the basic building blocks of the world can be either things or events. In any case, the result is a Parmenidean worldview where change is not a global property. What we understand by change manifests as asymmetries in the pattern of the world-lines that constitute 4-dimensional existents. I maintain that such a view is in accord with current scientific knowledge.
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  • Parts and Moments. Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology.Barry Smith (ed.) - 1982 - Philosophia Verlag.
    A collection of material on Husserl's Logical Investigations, and specifically on Husserl's formal theory of parts, wholes and dependence and its influence in ontology, logic and psychology. Includes translations of classic works by Adolf Reinach and Eugenie Ginsberg, as well as original contributions by Wolfgang Künne, Kevin Mulligan, Gilbert Null, Barry Smith, Peter M. Simons, Roger A. Simons and Dallas Willard. Documents work on Husserl's ontology arising out of early meetings of the Seminar for Austro-German Philosophy.
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  • (1 other version)Composition as Identity: Part 1.Meg Wallace - 2011 - Philosophy Compass 6 (11):804-816.
    Many of us think that ordinary objects – such as tables and chairs – exist. We also think that ordinary objects have parts: my chair has a seat and some legs as parts, for example. But once we are committed to the (seemingly innocuous) thesis that ordinary objects are composed of parts, we then open ourselves up to a whole host of philosophical problems, most of which center on what exactly the composition relation is. Composition as Identity (CI) is the (...)
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  • Composition as Identity: Part 2.Meg Wallace - 2011 - Philosophy Compass 6 (11):817-827.
    Many of us think that ordinary objects – such as tables and chairs – exist. We also think that ordinary objects have parts: my chair has a seat and some legs as parts, for example. But once we are committed to the (seemingly innocuous) thesis that ordinary objects are composed of parts, we then open ourselves up to a whole host of philosophical problems, most of which center on what exactly this composition relation is. Composition as Identity (CI) is the (...)
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  • (1 other version)Wholes that cause their parts: Organic self-reproduction and the reality of biological teleology.Thomas Teufel - 2011 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42 (2):252-260.
    A well-rehearsed move among teleological realists in the philosophy of biology is to base the idea of genuinely teleological forms of organic self-reproduction on a type of causality derived from Kant. Teleological realists have long argued for the causal possibility of this form of causality—in which a whole is considered the cause of its parts—as well as formulated a set of teleological criteria of adequacy for it. What is missing, to date, is an account of the mereological principles that govern (...)
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  • Ordinary objects.Daniel Z. Korman - 2011 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    An encyclopedia entry which covers various revisionary conceptions of which macroscopic objects there are, and the puzzles and arguments that motivate these conceptions: sorites arguments, the argument from vagueness, the puzzles of material constitution, arguments against indeterminate identity, arguments from arbitrariness, debunking arguments, the overdetermination argument, and the problem of the many.
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  • Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano.Barry Smith - 1994 - Chicago: Open Court.
    This book is a survey of the most important developments in Austrian philosophy in its classical period from the 1870s to the Anschluss in 1938. Thus it is intended as a contribution to the history of philosophy. But I hope that it will be seen also as a contribution to philosophy in its own right as an attempt to philosophize in the spirit of those, above all Roderick Chisholm, Rudolf Haller, Kevin Mulligan and Peter Simons, who have done so much (...)
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  • What Collectives Are: Agency, Individualism and Legal Theory.David Copp - 1984 - Dialogue 23 (2):249-269.
    An account of the ontological nature of collectives would be useful for several reasons. A successful theory would help to show us a route through the thicket of views known as “methodological individualism”. It would have a bearing on the plausibility of legal positivism. It would be relevant to the question whether collectives are capable of acting. The debate about the ontology of collectives is therefore important for such fields as the theory of action, social and political philosophy, the philosophy (...)
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  • Space, Time and Falsifiability Critical Exposition and Reply to "A Panel Discussion of Grünbaum's Philosophy of Science".Adolf Grünbaum - 1970 - Philosophy of Science 37 (4):469 - 588.
    Prompted by the "Panel Discussion of Grünbaum's Philosophy of Science" (Philosophy of Science 36, December, 1969) and other recent literature, this essay ranges over major issues in the philosophy of space, time and space-time as well as over problems in the logic of ascertaining the falsity of a scientific hypothesis. The author's philosophy of geometry has recently been challenged along three main distinct lines as follows: (i) The Panel article by G. J. Massey calls for a more precise and more (...)
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  • Nominalistic systems.Rolf A. Eberle - 1970 - Dordrecht,: Reidel.
    1. 1. PROGRAM It will be our aim to reconstruct, with precision, certain views which have been traditionally associated with nominalism and to investigate problems arising from these views in the construction of interpreted formal systems. Several such systems are developed in accordance with the demand that the sentences of a system which is acceptable to a nominalist must not imply the existence of any entities other than individuals. Emphasis will be placed on the constructionist method of philosophical analysis. To (...)
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  • Duhem’s theory of mixture in the light of the Stoic challenge to the Aristotelian conception.Paul Needham - 2002 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 33 (4):685-708.
    The bulk of Duhem's writing which bears on the understanding of mixtures suggests he adopted an Aristotelian position which he opposed only to the atomic view. A third view from antiquity-that of the Stoics-seems not to be taken into account. But his lines of thought are not always as explicit as could be wished. The Stoic view is considered here from a perspective which Duhem might well have adopted. This provides a background against which his somewhat unorthodox Aristotelianism might be (...)
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  • Brutal Composition.Ned Markosian - 1998 - Philosophical Studies 92 (3):211 - 249.
    According to standard, pre-philosophical intuitions, there are many composite objects in the physical universe. There is, for example, my bicycle, which is composed of various parts - wheels, handlebars, molecules, atoms, etc. Recently, a growing body of philosophical literature has concerned itself with questions about the nature of composition.1 The main question that has been raised about composition is, roughly, this: Under what circumstances do some things compose, or add up to, or form, a single object? It turns out that (...)
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  • Parts, Wholes, and Part-Whole Relations: The Prospects of Mereotopology.Achille C. Varzi - 1996 - Data and Knowledge Engineering 20:259–286.
    We can see mereology as a theory of parthood and topology as a theory of wholeness. How can these be combined to obtain a unified theory of parts and wholes? This paper examines various non-equivalent ways of pursuing this task, with specific reference to its relevance to spatio-temporal reasoning. In particular, three main strategies are compared: (i) mereology and topology as two independent (though mutually related) chapters; (ii) mereology as a general theory subsuming topology; (iii) topology as a general theory (...)
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  • Reasoning about Space: The Hole Story.Achille C. Varzi - 1996 - Logic and Logical Philosophy 4:3-39.
    This is a revised and extended version of the formal theory of holes outlined in the Appendix to the book "Holes and Other Superficialities". The first part summarizes the basic framework (ontology, mereology, topology, morphology). The second part emphasizes its relevance to spatial reasoning and to the semantics of spatial prepositions in natural language. In particular, I discuss the semantics of ‘in’ and provide an account of such fallacious arguments as “There is a hole in the sheet. The sheet is (...)
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  • Basic Problems of Mereotopology.Achille C. Varzi - 1998 - In Nicola Guarino (ed.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems. IOS Press. pp. 29–38.
    Mereotopology is today regarded as a major tool for ontological analysis, and for many good reasons. There are, however, a number of open questions that call for an answer. Some are philosophical, others have direct applicative import, but all are crucial for a proper assessment of the strengths and limits of mereotopology. This paper is an attempt to put sum order in this area.
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  • Superplurals in English.Øystein Linnebo & David Nicolas - 2008 - Analysis 68 (3):186–197.
    where ‘aa’ is a plural term, and ‘F’ a plural predicate. Following George Boolos (1984) and others, many philosophers and logicians also think that plural expressions should be analysed as not introducing any new ontological commitments to some sort of ‘plural entities’, but rather as involving a new form of reference to objects to which we are already committed (for an overview and further details, see Linnebo 2004). For instance, the plural term ‘aa’ refers to Alice, Bob and Charlie simultaneously, (...)
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  • The primacy of place: An investigation in Brentanian ontology.Barry Smith - 1989 - Topoi 8 (1):43-51.
    What follows is an investigation of the ontology of Franz Brentano with special reference to Brentano's later and superficially somewhat peculiar doctrine to the effect that the substances of the material world are three dimensional places. Taken as a whole, Brentano's philosophy is marked by three, not obviously compatible, trait. In the first place, his work is rooted in the metaphysics of Aristotle, above all in Aristotle's substance/accident ontology and in the Aristotelian theory of categories. In the second place, Brentano (...)
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  • Replies to Gallois, Hirsch and Markosian. [REVIEW]Theodore Sider - 2004 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (3):674–687.
    I thank my commentators for their kind words, and for their close reading and challenging criticisms of my book. I have chosen selective and substantive replies. Those criticisms I ignore, I ignore because I have little more to say, not because they are unworthy of discussion.
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  • A leśniewskian re-examination of Goodman's nominalistic rejection of classes.Judith M. Prakel - 1983 - Topoi 2 (1):87-98.
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  • Logical parts.Laurie A. Paul - 2002 - Noûs 36 (4):578–596.
    I argue for a property mereology and for mereological bundle theory. I then apply this theory to the one over many problem (universals) and puzzles concerning persistence and material constitution.
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  • Applications and limits of mereology. From the theory of parts to the theory of wholes.Massimo Libardi - 1994 - Axiomathes 5 (1):13-54.
    The discovery of the importance of mereology follows and does not precede the formalisation of the theory. In particular, it was only after the construction of an axiomatic theory of the part-whole relation by the Polish logician Stanisław Leśniewski that any attempt was made to reinterpret some periods in the history of philosophy in the light of the theory of parts and wholes. Secondly, the push for formalisation - and the individuation of mereology as a specific theoretical field - arise (...)
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  • Isolation and non-arbitrary division: Frege's two criteria for counting.Kathrin Koslicki - 1997 - Synthese 112 (3):403-430.
    In §54 of the Grundlagen, Frege advances an interesting proposal on how to distinguish among different sorts of concepts, only some of which he thinks can be associated with number. This paper is devoted to an analysis of the two criteria he offers, isolation and non-arbitrary division. Both criteria say something about the way in which a concept divides its extension; but they emphasize different aspects. Isolation ensures that a concept divides its extension into discrete units. I offer two construals (...)
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  • The crooked path from vagueness to four-dimensionalism.Kathrin Koslicki - 2003 - Philosophical Studies 114 (1-2):107-134.
    In his excellent book, Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time (Sider, 2001), Theodore Sider defends a version of four-dimensionalism which he calls the ‘stage-theory’. This paper focuses on Sider's argument from vagueness and argues that, due to the problematic nature of the argument from vagueness, Sider’s case in favor of four-dimensionalism is in the end not successful.
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  • Non-egalitarianism.Michael Huemer - 2003 - Philosophical Studies 114 (1-2):147 - 171.
    Equality of welfare among persons has no intrinsic value. This follows from three axiological principles: (i) a principle of the indifference of the distribution of utility across time within an individual’s life, (ii) a strong supervenience principle for value, and (iii) a principle of the additivity of value across disjoint time periods. (iii) is the most likely target for attack by the egalitarian; but the rejection of (iii) creates decision-theoretic paradoxes.
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  • The Structure of Spatial Localization.Roberto Casati & Achille Varzi - 1996 - Philosophical Studies 82 (2):205 - 239.
    What are the relationships between an entity and the space at which it is located? And between a region of space and the events that take place there? What is the metaphysical structure of localization? What its modal status? This paper addresses some of these questions in an attempt to work out at least the main coordinates of the logical structure of localization. Our task is mostly taxonomic. But we also highlight some of the underlying structural features and we single (...)
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  • In defense of essentialism.L. A. Paul - 2006 - Philosophical Perspectives 20 (1):333–372.
    If an object has a property essentially, it has that property in every possible world according to which it exists.2 If an object has a property accidentally, it does not have that property in every possible world according to which it exists. Claims about an object’s essential or accidental properties are de re modal claims, and essential and accidental properties are de re modal properties. Take an object’s modal profile to specify its essential properties and the range of its accidental (...)
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  • Mass terms and quantification.Jan Tore Lønning - 1987 - Linguistics and Philosophy 10 (1):1 - 52.
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  • The semantics of mass-predicates.Kathrin Koslicki - 1999 - Noûs 33 (1):46-91.
    Along with many other languages, English has a relatively straightforward grammatical distinction between mass-occurrences of nouns and their countoccurrences. As the mass-count distinction, in my view, is best drawn between occurrences of expressions, rather than expressions themselves, it becomes important that there be some rule-governed way of classifying a given noun-occurrence into mass or count. The project of classifying noun-occurrences is the topic of Section II of this paper. Section III, the remainder of the paper, concerns the semantic differences between (...)
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  • Propositions, circumstances, objects.Walter Edelberg - 1994 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 23 (1):1 - 34.
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  • Mereotopological Connection.Anthony G. Cohn & Achille C. Varzi - 2003 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 32 (4):357-390.
    The paper outlines a model-theoretic framework for investigating and comparing a variety of mereotopological theories. In the first part we consider different ways of characterizing a mereotopology with respect to (i) the intended interpretation of the connection primitive, and (ii) the composition of the admissible domains of quantification (e.g., whether or not they include boundary elements). The second part extends this study by considering two further dimensions along which different patterns of topological connection can be classified - the strength of (...)
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  • Can mereological sums serve as the semantic values of plurals?David Nicolas - 2007
    Abstract: Friends of plural logic—like Oliver & Smiley (2001), Rayo (2002), Yi (2005), and McKay (2006)—have argued that a semantics of plurals based on mereological sums would be too weak, and they have adduced several examples in favor of their claim. However, they have not considered various possible counter-arguments. So how convincing are their own arguments? We show that several of them are easily answered, while some others are more problematic. Overall, the case against mereological singularism—the idea that mereological sums (...)
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  • Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences: Proceedings of the 16th International Wittgenstein Symposium (Kirchberg Am Wechsel, Austria 1993).Roberto Casati & Barry Smith (eds.) - 1994 - Vienna: Wien: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky.
    Online collection of papers by Devitt, Dretske, Guarino, Hochberg, Jackson, Petitot, Searle, Tye, Varzi and other leading thinkers on philosophy and the foundations of cognitive Science. Topics dealt with include: Wittgenstein and Cognitive Science, Content and Object, Logic and Foundations, Language and Linguistics, and Ontology and Mereology.
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  • Physical Constituents of Qualia.István Aranyosi - 2003 - Philosophical Studies 116 (2):103-131.
    In this paper I propose a defense of a posteriori materialism.Problems with a posteriori identity materialism are identified,and a materialism based on composition, not identity, is proposed.The main task for such a proposal is to account for the relationbetween physical and phenomenal properties. Composition does notseem to be fit as a relation between properties, but I offer apeculiar way to understand property-composition, based on somerecent ideas in the literature on ontology. Finally, I propose amaterialist model for the mind-body relation that (...)
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  • What Is Classical Mereology?Paul Hovda - 2009 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 38 (1):55 - 82.
    Classical mereology is a formal theory of the part-whole relation, essentially involving a notion of mereological fusion, or sum. There are various different definitions of fusion in the literature, and various axiomatizations for classical mereology. Though the equivalence of the definitions of fusion is provable from axiom sets, the definitions are not logically equivalent, and, hence, are not inter-changeable when laying down the axioms. We examine the relations between the main definitions of fusion and correct some technical errors in prominent (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Toward a logic of experience.Zane Parks - 1972 - Philosophia 2 (3):183-194.
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  • (2 other versions)Toward a logic of experience.Zane Parks - 1973 - Philosophia 3 (4):183-194.
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  • Mereological Bimodal Logics.Li Dazhu & Yanjing Wang - 2022 - Review of Symbolic Logic 15 (4):823-858.
    In this paper, using a propositional modal language extended with the window modality, we capture the first-order properties of various mereological theories. In this setting,$\Box \varphi $readsall the parts(of the current object)are$\varphi $, interpreted on the models with awhole-partbinary relation under various constraints. We show that all the usual mereological theories can be captured by modal formulas in our language via frame correspondence. We also correct a mistake in the existing completeness proof for a basic system of mereology by providing (...)
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  • The act‐type theory of propositions as a theory of what is said.Thomas Hodgson - forthcoming - Analytic Philosophy.
    I propose a version of the act‐type theory of propositions, following Hanks and Soames. According to the theory, propositions are types of act of predication. The content of a sentence is the type of such act performed when that sentence is uttered. A consequence of this theory is that the structure of the content of a sentence will mirror the structure of that sentence. I defend this consequence of the theory from two important objections. I then argue that this theory (...)
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  • Coherence of Inferences.Matheus Silva - manuscript
    It is usually accepted that deductions are non-informative and monotonic, inductions are informative and nonmonotonic, abductions create hypotheses but are epistemically irrelevant, and both deductions and inductions can’t provide new insights. In this article, I attempt to provide a more cohesive view of the subject with the following hypotheses: (1) the paradigmatic examples of deductions, such as modus ponens and hypothetical syllogism, are not inferential forms, but coherence requirements for inferences; (2) since any reasoner aims to be coherent, any inference (...)
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  • Extension and Self-Connection.Ben Blumson & Manikaran Singh - 2021 - Logic and Logical Philosophy 30 (3):435-59.
    If two self-connected individuals are connected, it follows in classical extensional mereotopology that the sum of those individuals is self-connected too. Since mainland Europe and mainland Asia, for example, are both self-connected and connected to each other, mainland Eurasia is also self-connected. In contrast, in non-extensional mereotopologies, two individuals may have more than one sum, in which case it does not follow from their being self-connected and connected that the sum of those individuals is self-connected too. Nevertheless, one would still (...)
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  • The Mereological Problem of Entanglement.Paul M. Näger - manuscript
    It is well-known that the entangled quantum state of a composite object cannot be reduced to the states of its parts. This quantum holism provides a peculiar challenge to formulate an appropriate mereological model: When a system is in an entangled state, which objects are there on the micro and macro level, and which of the objects carries which properties? This paper chooses a modeling approach to answer these questions: It proceeds from a systematic overview of consistent mereological models for (...)
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  • Plurals and Mereology.Salvatore Florio & David Nicolas - 2020 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 50 (3):415-445.
    In linguistics, the dominant approach to the semantics of plurals appeals to mereology. However, this approach has received strong criticisms from philosophical logicians who subscribe to an alternative framework based on plural logic. In the first part of the article, we offer a precise characterization of the mereological approach and the semantic background in which the debate can be meaningfully reconstructed. In the second part, we deal with the criticisms and assess their logical, linguistic, and philosophical significance. We identify four (...)
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  • Relative Positionalism and Variable Arity Relations.T. Scott Dixon - 2019 - Metaphysics 2 (1):55-72.
    Maureen Donnelly’s (2016) relative positionalism correctly handles any fixed arity relation with any symmetry such a relation can have, yielding the intuitively correct way(s) in which that relation can apply. And it supplies an explanation of what is going on in the world that makes this the case. But it has at least one potential shortcoming — one that its opponents are likely to seize upon: it can only handle relations with fixed arities. It is unable to handle relations with (...)
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  • The polysemy of ‘part’.Meg Wallace - 2019 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 18):4331-4354.
    Some philosophers assume that our ordinary parts-whole concepts are intuitive and univocal. Moreover, some assume that mereology—the formal theory of parts-whole relations—adequately captures these intuitive and univocal notions. Lewis, for example, maintains that mereology is “perfectly understood, unproblematic, and certain.” Following his lead, many assume that expressions such as ‘is part of’ are univocal, topic-neutral, and that compositional monism is true. This paper explores the rejection of –. I argue that our ordinary parts-whole expressions are polysemous; they have multiple distinct, (...)
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