This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
This is different from Schaffer’s (2010) understanding of priority. I suspect that our differences come from our different views about the role and direction of composition.
See Bennett (2011) for a relevant discussion of world-building.
Some think the relation can’t be fundamental if it has a non-fundamental relatum. I don’t see why, unless we are reducing relations to their relata. But why think we non-nihilists should be reductionists like that, especially when the relation in question is the world-building relation? In any case, we need it, whether we count it as strictly fundamental or something that occupies some intermediate status.
We might also want to add the thought that it is analytic that building is a kind of fusing.
For example, scientists and ordinary people don’t care whether composition is identity, whether it is like identity, or about whether to restrict it. They usually (implicitly) assume it exists in some commonsensical way to the extent that they even consider the issue at all.
See Paul forthcoming for more details.
For representative approaches towards monism, see Schaffer (2010) and Horgan and Potrč (2008). For representative approaches towards nihilism, see Dorr (2005), Cameron (2010) and Sider (draft ms). (Horgan and Potrč defend a version of monism that denies the existence of proper parts. In this sense, it can also be thought of as an extreme version of nihilism according to which there is only one extended simple).
For simplicity, I’ll ignore endurantist moves like the one where we take parts to simply be spatial parts. Such views are also spatiotemporalist in the intended sense.
Many, but not all, traditional spatiotemporalists hold it to be an a priori truth that that there is a world and that the fundamental building relation of the world is composition.
“Fuse into” and “compose” pick out the same relation, as in “the xs fuse into a y” and the “xs compose a y.” Composition may be partially defined by its relata, so a spatiotemporal composition relation is a composition relation between spatiotemporal parts. One possibility I am leaving aside for the moment is the possibility that there are no spatiotemporally smallest parts, that is, that the world is gunky. If the world is gunky, then the spatiotemporal view cannot give us the fundamental constituents of the world, although its proponents may argue that very small spatiotemporal parts are somehow suitably fundamental corpuscles. Gunk theorists take the world to be fundamentally spatiotemporal, and so fall victim to the same problems as the traditional spatiotemporalist. Arntzenius and Hawthorne (2005) argue that, for empirical and theoretical reasons deriving from physics and mathematics, the actual world is unlikely to be a gunk world.
Note: for simplicity in Sects. 1 and 2, when talking about the spatiotemporalist view, I will assume substantivalism about spacetime, although I myself prefer relationalism. The relevant issues won’t change if we move to a relational theory of spacetime and build in fundamental, external spatiotemporal relations along with the puzzle pieces.
Strictly speaking, Lewis’s view only requires the existence of a basic, very spacetime-like entity that occupies the spacetime role and captures the geometric intuition. Lewis usually assumes that spacetime is the occupant of the spacetime role. My arguments apply to this sort of spatiotemporal-role-ism as well, since the intended spacetime role is not filled by, e.g., configuration space, given how different configuration space is from spacetime. (See my discussion of the difference between ordinary spacetime and configuration space in Sect. 2.).
This possibility introduces certain complications that I will ignore below. In particular, we need to be clear about how the substances are mereologically fused when the spatiotemporal regions are fused. Spatiotemporalists usually gloss this issue, assuming that the substances are somehow identical to the spatiotemporal parts, so fusing spatiotemporal parts is the same as fusing the substances. But there is room for a view where the substances are not spatiotemporal substances, but prime matter or some such. The issues about building with exactly-located-substances also involve questions raised in Gabriel Uzquiano Cruz’s nice paper “Mereological Harmony” (draft ms).
Kochiras (2009).
See Peter van Inwagen (forthcoming) for two important papers on category theory.
As I said, the division of labor isn’t sharp. For example, science can force revision of category theory on metaphysicians, as demonstrated by my view that physics tells us about the category of an existence space. I discuss these methodological issues in my (2012).
There is a related issue here involving a possible move, analogous to the spatiotemporalist’s treatment of temporal parts, of fusing the points of configuration space together to make an extended whole. Since we aren’t preserving spatiotemporalism (recall how, for example, our ordinary notions of height along a dimension and length along a dimension are replaced in the configuration-space picture), the rules of configuration-space composition need to be examined. In particular, it isn’t clear to me that a classical extensional mereological treatment of configuration space generates the best metaphysical picture of the evolution of the world particle through configuration space. We certainly can’t just assume this.
This also ties to issues about a Kantian notion of space or location that might actually work as a synthetic a priori hypothesis.
Take fitting together unextended spatiotemporal points to be the “null” case of fitting together spatiotemporal shapes.
I find Wilson (2012)’s defense of fundamental determinables interesting and plausible.
Note: because I am concerned primarily with various sorts of “spaces” needed in fundamental physics, my discussion does not need to engage directly with some other common themes in the philosophy of physics, such as the dispute between advocates of Bohmian mechanics and the Copenhagen interpretation about how to handle the measurement problem. (For example, we can understand Bohmian mechanics in terms of configuration space, and the same goes for the Copenhagen interpretation).
The priority monist who takes the spatiotemporal whole to be fundamental can do so as long as she is clear that this is an empirical claim that relies on spacetime being the most fundamental constituent of the world-space. By extension, she should not take the metaphysical nature or essence of the world-space to be spatiotemporal: instead, its nature is (at least in part) to be an arena or a stage. If it turns out that configuration space is the fundamental space, this sort of monist would replace spatiotemporal decomposition with a mode of decomposition appropriate for configuration space—perhaps a mode of property decomposition. This version of monism would be broadly consistent with Schaffer’s (2010) approach (Jonathan Schaffer, personal communication).
I take this point to relate to Sider’s (2008) arguments for subworld objects. We can endorse the existence of subworld objects under the categorical views I’ve been defending here: the world particle, for example, is either a fusion of properties or a fusion of a substrate and its properties, but in each case it and its constituents are subworld objects with the requisite sort of metaphysical priority.
David Wallace (2004) argues for a similar kind of neutrality and against letting our metaphysical ontology be determined solely by the current state of fundamental physics. Ney (forthcoming b) challenges his defense of neutrality.
The thorough-going constructive empiricist or instrumentalist may agree, but take the fundamental category of n-adic properties to be some sort of neo-Kantian conceptual category rather than as an objective, ontological category of the world. Such empiricism might also be combined with suitably empiricist versions of structuralism to arrive at a clean, ontologically light understanding of the science. But as should be clear, I am happy—unlike the empiricist—to rely on inference to the best explanation, so I prefer the metaphysically and scientifically realist approach, with a correspondingly ontologically heavier understanding of the science.
Elsewhere I’ve argued (Paul 2006) that puzzles concerning material coincidence show how “ordinary objects” cannot be modeled using classical extensional mereology. It’s worth noting that in that paper and in other previous work I was more willing to take spatiotemporal parts and other entities as fundamental existents. I am not committed to that view here.
I suspect that qualitative parts are the only parts there are, but I include the designation here for clarity. Note that haecceitistic and other impure properties can still be qualitative parts as I am using “qualitative” and that the fusion relation is the composition relation.
Cf. Markosian (1998).
Note that since qualitative fusion may be restricted we have the resources to make sense of cases where proper qualitative parts P, Q and R are qualitatively fused together but there is no fusion of P and R, and so no object that includes P and R. Imagine an object O that includes red, round and squashed in its fusion. Is there an object that is simply round and squashed? If so, then we grant that there can exist incomplete objects, perhaps as long as such objects are part of a complete object. If not, then this is an instance of restricted fusion.
Related issues are taken up in Fine (1999).
I’m indebted to conversation with Ted Sider here.
The mosaic model also makes very good sense of Goodman (1966), who takes qualitative parts to be appearances of spatiotemporally located trope-like entities or patches of the overall phenomenological quilt and builds a mereology of appearances in the spatiotemporal manifold.
I think this view has interesting connections to the holistic view Dasgupta’s (2009) describes as “generalism”—although my view is still atomistic in his sense.
Horgan and Potrc (2008) defend the view that the world has no proper spatiotemporal parts and develop a contextual semantics intended to accommodate our ordinary ways of speaking.
We can extend the global model in a way that is parallel to the first way we extended our first model of mereological bundle theory. Instead of holding that there is only a single world-whole, or (as in the mosaic model) holding that there are many unextended fundamental qualitative fusions of the world, we might hold that there are some or many extended fundamental qualitative fusions, where such fusions are arranged as a mere plurality, that is, they do not spatiotemporally compose into a larger whole. If our world is like this, then the fundamental entities are extended qualitative fusions (perhaps they are the “spacetime states” of Wallace and Timpson (2009) or successive stages of the “world particle” of Albert 1996).
References
Albert, D. (1996). Elementary quantum metaphysics. In J. Cushing, A. Fine, & S. Goldstein (Eds.), Bohmian mechanics and quantum theory: An appraisal (pp. 277–284). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Allori, V., Goldstein, S., Tumulka, R., & Zanghì, N. (2008). On the common structure of bohmian mechanics and the Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber Theory. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 59, 353–389.
Armstrong, D. M. (1997). A world of states of affairs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Arntzenius, F., & Hawthorne, J. (2005). “Gunk and continuous variation”, co-authored with John Hawthorne. The Monist, 88(4), 441–466.
Bennett, K. (2011). Construction area: No hard hat required. Philosophical Studies, 154, 79–104.
Cameron, R. P. (2010). How to have a radically minimal ontology. Philosophical Studies, 151, 249–264.
Dasgupta, S. (2009). Individuals: An essay in revisionary metaphysics. Philosophical Studies, 145(1), 35–67.
Dorr, C. (2005). What we disagree about when we disagree about ontology. In M. Kalderon (Ed.), Fictionalism in metaphysics (pp. 234–286). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fine, K. (1999). Things and their parts. In P. A. French & H. K. Wettstein (Eds.), New directions in philosophy: Midwest studies in philosophy (Vol. 23, pp. 61–74). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Fine, K. (2001). The question of realism. Philosopher’s Imprint, 1(2), 1–30.
Fine, K. (2010). Towards a theory of part. Journal of Philosophy, 107, 559–589.
French, S., & Ladyman, J. (2003). Remodelling structural realism: Quantum physics and the metaphysics of structure. Synthese, 136, 31–56.
Greaves, H. (2010). Talk given at Amsterdam conference on physics and mereology.
Healey, R. A. (1989). The philosophy of quantum mechanics: An interactive interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Healey, R. A. (1991). Holism and nonseparability. Journal of Philosophy, 88(8), 393–421.
Healey, R. A. (2010). Physical composition. In Talk given at Amsterdam conference on physics and mereology.
Horgan, T. E., & Potrč, M. (2008). Austere realism: Contextual semantics meets minimal ontology. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Kochiras, H. (2009). Locke’s philosophy of science. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2009/entries/locke-philosophy-science/
Koslicki, K. (2008). The structure of objects. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ladyman, J., & Ross, D. (2007). Every thing must go: Metaphysics naturalized. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lewis, K. (1983). How to define theoretical terms. Philosophical Papers, I, 78–97.
Lewis, D. (1986a). Philosophical papers (Vol. 2). New York: Oxford University Press.
Lewis, D. (1986b). On the plurality of worlds. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lewis, K. (1991). Parts of classes. Oxford: Blackwell.
Loewer, B. (2004). Humean supervenience. In J. Carroll (Ed.), Readings on laws of nature (pp. 176–206). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Markosian, N. (1998). Brutal composition. Philosophical Studies, 92(3), 211–249.
Maudlin, T. (2007). Completeness, supervenience and ontology. Journal of Physics A Mathematical and Theoretical, 40, 3151–3171.
Ney, A. (forthcoming a). The status of our ordinary three dimensions in a quantum universe. Noûs.
Ney, A. (forthcoming b). Ontological reduction and the wave function ontology. In D. Z. Albert, & A. Ney (Eds.), The wave function: Essays in the metaphysics of quantum mechanics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
North, J. (2009). The `structure’ of physics: A case study. Journal of Philosophy, 106, 57–88.
Paul, L. A. (2006). Coincidence as overlap. Nous, 40, 623–659.
Paul, L. A. (2012). Metaphysics as modeling: The handmaiden’s tale. Philosophical Studies. doi:10.1007/s11098-012-9906-7.
Paul, L. A. (draft ms). Categorical parsimony.
Paul, L. A. (forthcoming). A one category ontology.
Schaffer, J. (2010). Monism: The priority of the whole. Philosophical Review, 119(1), 31–76.
Sider, T. (2008). Monism and statespace structure. In R. Le Poidevin (Ed.), Being: Developments in contemporary metaphysics (Vol. 129–150). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sider, T. (2012). Writing the book of the world. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sider, T. (draft ms). Against parthood.
Simons, P. (1987). Parts: A Study in Ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Van Inwagen, P. (forthcoming). Relational vs. consituent ontologies. Philosophical Perspectives.
Van Inwagen, P. (forthcoming). What is an ontological category?
Wallace, D. (2004). Protecting cognitive science from quantum theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27, 636–637.
Wallace, D., & Timpson, C. G. (2009). Quantum mechanics on spacetime i: Spacetime state realism. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 61, 697–727.
Williams, D. C. (1953). On the elements of being. The Review of Metaphysics, VII, 3–18, 171–192.
Wilson, J. (2012). Fundamental determinables. Philosophoer’s Imprint, 12, 1–17.
Acknowledgments
This paper grew out of conversations I have had with Elizabeth Barnes and Jonathan Schaffer about mereology. I am indebted to Elizabeth Barnes, Ross Cameron, Louis deRosset, Peter Forrest, Elise Kroll, Christian Loew, Alyssa Ney, Raul Saucedo, Jonathan Schaffer, Ted Sider, Alex Skiles, Jeff Snapper, Meghan Sullivan and the audiences at the ANU Fundamentality Workshop and the 2011 Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference for helpful comments.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Appendix: Mereological Bundle Theory
This material is presented and developed in detail in my (forthcoming).
Appendix: Mereological Bundle Theory
I take the derivative ontological structure of the world, the structure built from the basic constituents of the world, to be mereological structure. Mereological structure is based on relationships between parts and wholes. Such structure is not categorical: sums of properties do not create new natures or real categories (In this sense, composition is like identity). I take composition to be the basic building relation of the world, and the individuals that are the basic parts are used to construct everything else there is. What sorts of individuals are the fundamental constituents of the world, the metaphysically prior simples that are fused to create the world- whole? This is the delicate question. In my view, the fundamental constituents are properties, or qualitative natures, and all else is mereologically composed from these.
So the world-whole is built by fusions of qualities. I shall take the basic notion of my mereology to be the primitive notion of “proper part,” and assume that proper parthood is analytically irreflexive, asymmetric and transitive. With these notions, along with a principle of supplementation and what I take to be uncontroversial presuppositions about identity and existence, I capture the meaning of “part” with my account of qualitative parts and go on to define qualitative composition (Cf. Simons 1987).
Hence I develop my qualitative mereology by starting with thin notions of parthood and composition, ones which are perfectly well-defined mereologically and are also the basis for classical extensional mereology. Of course, classical extensional mereology takes parts and wholes to be spatiotemporal parts and wholes, where parts are individuals that are—or are defined in terms of occupying—four-dimensional regions of spacetime. But we can apply the basic notion of parthood to other sorts of constituents, and define composition as a relation between these sorts of constituents, just as well as we can develop these notions so that they apply to spatiotemporal regions.
My qualitative mereology is the basis for my mereological bundle theory: properties are literally objects and parts of objects, and properties are bundled using the composition relation. Assuming an appropriate first-order predicate calculus with identity, here are the basic axioms and definitions of my qualitative mereology M (“qualitative parts” are property parts).Footnote 29
A1. For any x, x is not a proper qualitative part of itself (Proper qualitative parthood is irreflexive).
A2. For all x and y, if x is a proper qualitative part of y, y is not a proper qualitative part of x (Proper qualitative parthood is asymmetric).
A3. For all x, y, and z, if x is a proper qualitative part of y and y is a proper qualitative part of z, x is a proper qualitative part of z (Proper qualitative parthood is transitive.).
A4. For all x, y, and z, if x is a proper qualitative part of y, y has a proper qualitative part z qualitatively disjoint from x (This is weak supplementation: if an individual has a proper qualitative part, it has at least one other proper qualitative part).
D1. For all x and y, x is a qualitative part of y iff x is a proper qualitative part of y or x is identical to y (An object’s improper qualitative part is just itself).
D2: For all x and y, x qualitatively overlaps y iff x and y have a qualitative part in common.
D3: For all x and y, x is qualitatively disjoint from y iff x and y have no qualitative part in common.
D4: For all x and y, x is qualitatively composed of ys (or x is a qualitative fusion of ys) iff x has all the ys as qualitative parts and has no qualitative part that is qualitatively disjoint from each of the ys. Footnote 30
Qualitative composition is neither covertly nor overtly spatiotemporal, nor is it somehow tied to spatiotemporal location or occupation. Like many fans of mereology, I take composition to be restricted, and I recognize the serious problems associated with adequately determining the conditions under which composition occurs. Hence I endorse a brute restriction and correspondingly reject a general qualitative fusion axiom.Footnote 31, Footnote 32
I have described my properties as “qualitative natures,” and taken them to be a kind of repeatable universal, perhaps akin Aristotle’s nonsubstantial forms. Properties are located in virtue of being qualitatively fused to spatiotemporal relations or relational properties. They are the basic constituents of the world, hence all universals are instantiated, where this just means that they exist and are parts of the world-whole. Not just any predicate defines a property, properties are sparse, and there are no negative properties, merely negative predicates (if an object is ~F then it does not include F as a part). Properties can be monadic or polyadic (a.k.a., relations).
My property mereology allows fundamental relations, if there are any, to fuse with other properties in just the same way as monadic properties fuse with other properties. The fundamental relations have what we can metaphorically describe as “ends” that fuse to n-adic properties.
Now, there might not be any fundamental asymmetric relations. If not, M could be made extensional (replacing the axiom of weak supplementation with something stronger to give extensionality). But if there are fundamental asymmetric external relations, I take such relations to be relations with a certain sort of intrinsic character: character that influences the structure of a fusion that includes them. Metaphorically speaking, we can understand this as the view that the asymmetric external relation has places, and which of these places other properties and relations are fused with determines the overall character of the fusion that includes the asymmetric relation. Less metaphorically speaking, the asymmetric external relation has an intrinsic direction such that when it is fused to other properties, the resulting fusion has a certain sort of structure. When asymmetric fundamental external relation R is fused with properties A and B, R is such that the fusion of ARB is different from the fusion of BRA. On this view, asymmetric external relations provide fusions with structure via the mereological composition of properties with relations that have places, so qualitative composition is not extensional. We might describe the result as “neopredicational” fusing.Footnote 33 For example, perhaps there is a fundamental temporal relation of direction. If so, then the world will include an asymmetric temporal structuring relation R, such that the fusion of ARB has an intrinsic direction because it includes the intrinsic character of R. If so, then the fusion of BRA has a different intrinsic direction, even though it has the very same proper parts. To mark such a difference, we may define primitive predicates D1 and D2 that apply to ARB and BRA, respectively.
Broadly speaking, there are two models the mereological bundle theorist might use to represent the nature of the world as built from properties.Footnote 34 The first model accommodates most of the mainstream metaphysical intuitions about spatiotemporal composition by endorsing two different composition relations, one for qualitative parts and one for spatiotemporal parts, and building the world up from quality-points plus spatiotemporal fusions. The second model builds the world entirely from qualitative parts, and captures a kind of holism that is congenial to certain sorts of fundamental physical theories. I’ll discuss each model briefly.
The first model for mereological bundle theory starts with properties qualitatively fused together with locations (understood to be relations or relational properties of having such-and such locations) to create a mosaic-like lowest compositional level of located, unextended qualitative fusions distributed through a network of spatiotemporal relations. I’ll call this model the mosaic model. M is the mereology that applies to this level of composition. Extended objects are then created using a different composition relation and hence a different mode of mereological construction. This second composition relation is defined in the following way. Call each (maximal) located unextended qualitative fusion a “spatiotemporal part.” Proper spatiotemporal parthood is defined in the usual way, as asymmetric and transitive, and one can accept a strong supplementation principle to make the spatiotemporal mereology extensional. Further axioms and definitions consistent with classical extensional mereology can be accepted, including unrestricted composition. We might then call our new composition relation “spatiotemporal composition.”
On this model, spatiotemporal parts and spatiotemporal composition are embedded in a qualitative, one category ontology, and the relation between qualitative and spatiotemporal composition is clear. The fundamental spatiotemporal parts or “spatiotemporal simples” are qualitative, located fusions of properties, and larger spatiotemporal parts are constructed from a relation defined on these spatiotemporal simples.Footnote 35 Rocks, persons, stars, and abstract objects are all fusions built from quality-fusions then fused together by spatiotemporal composition. Such fusions, in addition to being complex constructions of quality and spatiotemporal fusions, are also plain-jane property fusions, where the properties fused are the whole (distributed) properties of the object. Take the spatiotemporal fusion of simples s1 and s2, where s1 has the properties of having a mass of one gram and having a semi-circular shape and s2 has the property of having a mass of one gram and having a semi-circular shape. When there is a spatiotemporal fusion of s1 with s2, giving us an object with a mass of 2 grams and the shape of a circle, this is also the fusion of the distributed property of having a mass of two grams with the distributed property of having a circular shape.
Although there are two sorts of compositional structure in the world, the mosaic theorist fiercely denies that fusing properties together to create located quality bundles gives us an emergent or otherwise irreducible category of “objects,” or that the different compositional structures demarcate different fundamental categories in any way. The world is purely qualitative, and spatiotemporal parts are fusions of properties (not emergent objects of any sort). We are simply building the world with n-adic properties, albeit with different sorts of properties at different compositional “levels.” The loss of parsimony here is a loss of parsimony with respect to the number of composition relations, since there are two species of composition relation, but not with fundamental categories, since there is still just one, and we still build the world with one (generic) kind of relation, composition.
The view has appeal for those who like Lewis-style Humean mosaics, and indulges our corpuscular intuitions and our attraction to classical-mechanical or particle-based depictions of the world. If we understand fields in appropriately property-theoretic terms, the model can even capture Barry Loewer’s (2004) Humean supervenience-friendly account of the Lewisian mosaic, which Loewer designs in order circumvent worries about quantum nonlocality for the fan of mosaic-style views.
The mereological bundle theorist might further develop the mosaic model. One way of developing it goes fictionalist about spatiotemporal (or, alternatively, configuration-space) composition. The fictionalist denies the existence of any sort of equivalent of spatiotemporal composition after the level of the mosaic of located, unextended qualitative fusions distributed through a network of spatiotemporal relations. On this sort of (spatiotemporal compositional) fictionalist approach, one might describe what seems to be a table as “some qualitative fusions- arranged-tablewise.”
A very different way of developing mereological bundle theory, the global model, denies that strictly speaking, spatiotemporal composition is used to build the world. Instead, the extended world is wholly and immediately constructed from a fusion of n-adic properties, including spatiotemporal relations and perhaps a structuring lawlike relation, resulting in a distribution of properties across a spatiotemporal manifold. It is the whole, structured world that results from the original fusion of fundamental properties and relations. Although we can pick out portions of the manifold and describe them as “spatiotemporal parts” or imagine them as the products of the spatiotemporal composition of simples, all of this is merely a useful fiction. The real parts of the world are the properties and relations that compose the extended world- whole, and here, parthood is transitive.Footnote 36
On this sort of fictionalist approach towards spatiotemporal composition, one might describe what seems to be a spatiotemporal part of a table as “a portion of the qualitative world- fusion that is distributed table-top-wise.” The fictionalism exactly parallels that of the compositional nihilist, except instead of taking the phrase “this table-top” to refer to a certain plurality of unextended simples arranged table-top-wise, it takes it to refer to a certain region of the world-whole. One might also look to Horgan and Potrc (2008) for assistance with the semantics here.Footnote 37 Another alternative would be to adopt a version of Jonathan Schaffer’s (2010) priority monism for spatiotemporal parts (not monism in general, since the world is still built from quality parts), taking spatiotemporal parts to be real, but derivative. Here, again, we have two different kinds of parts, and so transitivity would fail to apply. Such a view has costs with regard to parsimony, but might be attractive overall: we just need to remember that classical extensional mereology is either derivative or just a handy toy model, and that the fundamental ontological basis for reality is a qualitative mereology.
The global model has more physical plausibility than one might initially think: consider the wave-function realist who takes the world-whole to be a wavefunction. On the GRW theory of the world, the world is a universal wave function that evolves in accordance with the dynamical laws. Understood in terms of mereological bundle theory, the wavefunction is the fusion of amplitude and phase properties (along with any other properties of the system) with structuring properties or relations, including the structuring relations described by Schrödinger’s equation and by the collapse postulate. A variant of this view can fit the Everettian approach, and one can also fit David Albert’s (1996) treatment of Bohmian mechanics by adding a world-particle that is simply a fusion of properties to the plurality of things.Footnote 38 For this reason, I find the global model more appealing than the mosaic model. The empirical facts about the world, especially given facts about the existence of entangled states, just don’t seem to support the sort of atomistic world that the mosaic view describes (although, admittedly, Loewer’s model is consistent with these facts). However, the jury is still out on what the best fundamental physical theory will be, and so for some, at least for the moment, the mosaic model retains its appeal.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Paul, L.A. Building the world from its fundamental constituents. Philos Stud 158, 221–256 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9885-8
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9885-8