Abstract
David Lewis insists that restrictivist composition must be motivated by and occur due to some intuitive desiderata for a relation R among parts that compose wholes, and insists that a restrictivist’s relation R must be vague. Peter van Inwagen agrees. In this paper, I argue that restrictivists need not use such examples of relation R as a criterion for composition, and any restrictivist should reject a number of related mereological theses. This paper critiques Lewis and van Inwagen (and others) on their respective mereological metaphysics, and offers a Golden Mean between their two opposite extremes. I argue for a novel account of mereology I call Modal Mereology that is an alternative to Classical Mereology. A modal mereologist can be a universalist about the possible composition of wholes from parts and a restrictivist about the actual composition of wholes from parts. I argue that puzzles facing Modal Mereology (e.g., puzzles concerning Cambridge changes and the Problem of the Many, and how to demarcate the actual from the possible) are also faced in similar forms by classical universalists. On my account, restricted composition is rather motivated by and occurs due to a possible whole’s instantiating an actual type. Universalists commonly believe in such types and defend their existence from objections and puzzles. The Modal Mereological restrictivist can similarly defend the existence of such types (adding that such types are the only wholes) from similar objections and puzzles.
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Notes
See Smith (2006) for strong arguments against Lewis and Ted Sider’s ‘vagueness arguments’ for universalism and against restrictivism.
Rea (1998), for example, argues that universalists can accommodate relation R in their mereological theories of composition.
Such ‘actual types’ exist according to a number of universalists. The universalist Lewis accounts for and defends the existence of such types from vagueness-related objections in his 1993, and the universalist Rea accounts for the existence of such types in his 1995, p. 348ff.
Van Inwagen believes that organisms are quite possibly the only composite beings that exist, and he believes in the Mereological Theses I reject. To put part of my thesis in the terms of organisms, there can be some exact duplicates of organisms that are not organisms, and there can be exact duplicates of non-organisms that are organisms.
By standard restrictivist views, I mean the kind of views on which I have either only one body (or at least ‘almost one’ body). To put this in another way, on standard views, I have only one desk in my office and not thousands of desks occupying roughly the same region of space–time.
Kim expresses some of the basic ideas behind classical mereological supervenience when he says,
Consider mereological supervenience, the thesis that properties of wholes supervene on the properties and relations characterizing their parts…. It seems likely that mereological supervenience represents a metaphysically fundamental, sui generis form of dependence (1993, p. 166).
Kim also states,
The part whole relation is also important; however, its importance seems to derive largely from the belief that many crucial aspects of a whole including its existence and nature are dependent on those of its parts. That is, mereological relations are significant because mereological determination, or ‘mereological supervenience,’ is, or is thought to be, a pervasive fact (1993, p. 54).
Note that relation R on SIP need not be the same for each case of composition.
My use of R is consistent with how a universalists might use R in a theory of types (see below).
The Cambridge changes allow some groups of parts that either compose nothing at all (for restrictivists) or not a thing of its type at all (for universalists) to change into something of a specific type (e.g., a body). I will suggest that external changes can take a possible body and make it into an actual body. This kind of possible-to-actual Cambridge change seems less mysterious that a Cambridge change that makes something that is not anything at all into something substantial. Somewhat analogously, external changes can take ‘a cup of water that could possibly drown someone’ and make it ‘a cup of water that actually drowns someone.’ Similarly, external changes can change the content of a belief without making it an entirely different kind of thing (i.e., a non-belief). Consider the analogy to various Twin Earth and Switching Twin Earth cases in which mental and semantic content can change due to changes in external circumstances. See Putnam (1973) and Burge (1979).
Van Inwagen believes that only organisms exist as composite wholes, and does not believe in bodies. Van Inwagen claims not to understand what people mean by ‘My body exists’ (1995, p. 76).
According to van Inwagen’s theological views, God in fact has created a number of things ex nihilo in the cases of miracles, and thus has mimicked certain causal powers perfectly. For an application of such cases to issues of ethical supervenience and intrinsic moral value, see Walsh (2011).
On van Inwagen’s view, parthood comes in degrees, and thus parthood need not be all or nothing. For van Inwagen, a part of an organism is paradigmatically and completely caught up in a life to the highest degree when it is both the object and the subject of robust maintenance and control for a living system. In the ex nihilo examples, God appears to be the subject of that robust maintenance (the ex nihilo arm is functionally equivalent to a real arm in a number of ways, after all). God also appears to be the object of maintenance (God is reacting to the needs of the biological system, after all). However, even if God is not a part of Limbless to the highest degree in the most paradigmatic sense, God still may be part of Limbless to a lesser degree and in a less paradigmatic sense. See van Inwagen’s (1995) (especially §17–18) on mereological vagueness and varying degrees of being ‘caught up in a life.’
This hybridization solution can equally apply to the Biblical story of raising Lazarus from the dead. When the New Testament God violated natural laws, God could have used ex nihilo causation to restart Lazarus’ Krebs Cycles. On the hybridization view, God parts then get caught up in the Krebs Cycles of Lazarus. Since van Inwagen as a Christian believes that such miracles have occurred, on this hybridization account van Inwagen would be committed to the existence of physical/non-physical hybrid humans like Lazarus in the actual world.
However, to these problems it might be replied that these miracle cases are exceptional, and therefore strange non-physical parts are not so problematic (after all, they are parts for principled reasons, qua ‘caught up in a life,’ etc.).
Lycan says:
[Some] fault me for waffling (as indeed I have) on theories of teleology. They maintain that the teleofunctionalist bears the burden of explaining the teleology to which s/he appeals, because ‘[t]he devil is in the details.’ I think it is important for the teleofunctionalist to resist that demand. It is one thing to offer a theory of mental representation or a theory of consciousness; it is quite another to offer a metaphysical theory of teleology. The former task is for philosophers of mind, the latter for metaphysicians and philosophers of science. Of course I agree that if one’s particular theory of mind happens to commit one to some thesis about teleology that is on its own merits implausible, that would be an objection to the theory of mind. But I myself am not in that position; the connection between teleological theories of mind and particular theories of teleology is too loose, and the options too plentiful. (2001, p. 127)
The classical article that introduces the artword theory of art is Danto (1964).
A helpful reviewer for Phil Studies suggested the following account of artifacts: ‘The xs compose an artifact iff the xs are the current object of a history of maintenance and the xs are the best candidate parts for composing the object.’ This is another very liberal account of artifacts, since just about any xs could be identical to something that has such a history of maintenance. Such liberal accounts can motivate Strong Modal Mereology.
Although there is disagreement about which types we actually have epistemic access, metaphysicians can avoid epistemological questions simply by referring to ‘whatever types there actually are or could be’ (but ‘natural kinds’ is one answer). Lycan (2001) has a similar ‘agnostic’ solution to disagreements about what ‘teleology’ comes to in his teleological functionalism (Lycan says ‘teleology is whatever it is’ and that his teleological functionalist arguments need not say what it is). I also believe that one does not have to believe something exists to have epistemic access to it. So I believe van Inwagen does indeed have epistemic access to tables and chairs, although he denies it.
Some hold that there are many bodies typically composed out of the parts of one body. See Hudson (2001, Chap. 1).
See Rea, who is one universalist who makes the latter complaint in his 1999.
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Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Tristram McPherson, Alex Skiles, Jason Ford, Bill Lycan, Peter van Inwagen, Jaegwon Kim, the participants in the metaphysics colloquium at the Pacific APA, and the people in Peter van Inwagen’s Material Beings seminar for helpful discussions about various stages of the ideas for this paper. This paper is also partly an homage to Chapel Hill’s late, great Jay Rosenberg.
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Walsh, S.D. Modal Mereology and Modal Supervenience. Philos Stud 159, 1–20 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9681-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9681-2