Abstract
Slot mereology reduces parthood to slot-filling: a material object is structured by a certain arrangement of slots; and the fillers of these slots are the object's proper parts. My aim in this essay is to go further and reduce slot-filling to essence and grounding. In combination, the reduction of parthood to slot-filling and the reduction of slot-filling to essence and grounding yields the reduction of parthood to essence and grounding. If this overarching reduction succeeds, it promises new metaphysical foundations for neo-Aristotelian mereology.
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Notes
This description of the car’s parts is temporally relativized because the car can change in its proper parts over time.
Cf. Bennett (2013, Section 6). If material objects persist by perduring, then the basic notion of proper parthood need not be temporally relativized, in order to allow for mereological change. If material objects persist by enduring, the basic notion requires temporal relativization. I invoke the relativized notion, since neo-Aristotelians commonly hold that material objects persist by enduring—see, inter alia, Fine (1999).
These examples are helpful to get us started, but they will later turn out to be mere first approximations, especially in light of the second clarification in Sect. 4.
Cf. Fine (1999, p. 73).
I adapt the rigid/variable terminology from Fine (1999), where it is used differently.
It is common to understand subregions as parts of regions: if p and p* are regions, then p is a subregion of p* = def p is a part of p*. If this definition is adopted in the present context, then parts of regions are of a different type than parts of material objects, since the parthood relation that holds between regions is, presumably, not a slot-theoretic parthood relation of the type developed here. Alternatively, being a subregion may be defined set-theoretically or may be taken as primitive. For an overview of links between location and parthood, see Gilmore (2018).
See Fine (2012) for an overview and the grounding-distinctions mentioned below.
I am here assuming that grounding backs metaphysical explanation. Some friends of grounding reject this link. See Thompson (2016) for an overview.
This idea is inspired by the account of mereological structure in my framework of perspectival hylomorphism; see Sattig (2015, Section 2.2).
Note that a kind’s nature and its spatio-temporal realizations are intimately related. To be a car, in general, is to have some automotive function. Given this nature of carhood, to ask what makes something a car, at a specific region and time, is to ask what makes something in this spatio-temporal region have that automotive function—that is, to ask how the automotive function is realized in this region.
While I understand a realization of a kind as the grounding of a spatio-temporal instantiation of that kind, I do not offer this as an analysis of the notion as it is used in a variety of contexts in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. There may well be different notions of realization in play.
Note that condition (iv) is existentially quantified. It does not simply say that the fact that x is a K, at p, at t, partially grounds the fact that y is a K*, at p*, at t. I shall return to this aspect in Sect. 4.
Note, further, that specifying partial grounds of the fact that an object is a K*, at a given region and time—as condition (iv) in (K-slot) does—is different from specifying grounds of the fact that an object is essentially a K*. Specifying grounds of essentiality facts is not a part of the proposed account.
See Fine (2012).
By clause (i) and (K-slot), x and y are required to belong to their kinds essentially.
Note that I do not say that y fills the door slot of z that was previously filled by x, since my definitions do not provide means to identify K-slots and R-slots across times (or worlds). This should not be considered a limitation of the account.
Accordingly, recognizing an explanatory link between x’s filling a K-slot in y, for any K, and y’s essential kind does not require viewing this K-slot as being essential to y—that is, it does not require viewing this K-slot as a rigid slot.
Cf. Sattig (2015, p. 55).
The following type of case has been discussed intensively, though it is usually encountered in a slightly different context. See, inter alia, Gendler and Hawthorne (2000) and Sattig (2015, pp. 155–162). Skiles’ (2015) discussion of grounding necessitarianism focuses on Theseus-style cases that are closely related to the recurrence-case discussed here.
Thanks to Claudio Calosi for the example.
While causal-functional roles clarify the realization of functional kinds, the proposed slot-definitions do not appeal to causal-functional roles, in order to cover slots in non-functional kinds of material object as well.
For comments on the material presented in this paper I am indebted to Claudius Berger, Valerio Buonomo, Claudio Calosi, Jonathan Schaffer, Alexander Skiles, Paolo Valore, Tobias Wilsch, and audiences at École Normale Supérieure (Paris), Uppsala University, the University of Milan, and GAP.10 (University of Cologne). I am especially grateful for the constructive comments that I received from two reviewers for Synthese.
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Sattig, T. Part, slot, ground: foundations for neo-Aristotelian mereology. Synthese 198 (Suppl 11), 2735–2749 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02141-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02141-9