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mereology

Literally, ‘theory of parts’. Term introduced by the Polish logician Stanislaw Lesniewski (1886-1939) to cover a theory which used the whole/part relation as a substitute for the class-membership relation to deal with the structure of classes in ways that would avoid various difficulties connected with the vicious CIRCLE PRINCIPLE and the theory of types. (The term also has a technical use within the theory itself.)

The point about the whole/part relation is that, unlike class-membership, it is transitive; that is if a is a part of b, and b is a part of c, then a is a part of c.

The notion has also been used (by N Goodman, The Structure of Appearance (1951)) to deal with problems concerning stuffs (like water) or general qualities (like red): ‘water’ is taken to be a name for the total quantity of water in the universe (so that the Pacific Ocean counts as a part of water); similarly ‘red’, in naming the colour red, names the totality of red things, treated as a single large object split up over space.

Source:
P Simons, Parts (1987), ch. 1

Table of Contents

    • 0.1 Related:
  • 1 Videos
  • 2 Related Products
    • 2.1 Mereology: A Philosophical Introduction
    • 2.2 Handbook of Mereology (Analytica)
    • 2.3 Substance and the Fundamentality of the Familiar: A Neo-Aristotelian Mereology (Routledge Studies in Metaphysics)
    • 2.4 Metaphysical Foundations: Mereology and Metalogic (Analytica)
    • 2.5 Mereology and the Sciences: Parts and Wholes in the Contemporary Scientific Context (Synthese Library)
    • 2.6 Mereologies, Ontologies, and Facets: The Categorial Structure of Reality
    • 2.7 Parts: A Study in Ontology
    • 2.8 Mereology and Location
    • 2.9 Foundations of the Theory of Parthood: A Study of Mereology (Trends in Logic (54))
    • 2.10 Hylomorphism and Mereology (Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysic)

Related:

  • causal theory of names
  • Hempel’s paradox
  • simple theory of types
  • descriptive theory of names
  • picture theory of meaning

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