Compositional Pluralism and Composition as Identity

Abstract

The point of this chapter is to assess to what extent compositional pluralism and composition as identity can form a coherent package of views. Since I think there are good arguments for compositional pluralism and I feel the intuition that gives some support to composition as identity, I am motivated to determine this. But regardless of whether you feel attraction to either of these two views, it is worth thinking about how versions of them might interact with each other, since doing so is likely to lead to interesting thoughts about parthood and identity. Let’s start with compositional pluralism. Elsewhere I’ve defended compositional pluralism, which we can provisionally understand as the doctrine that there is more than one basic parthood relation.1 (Youmight wonder what I mean by “basic.” We’ll discuss this in a bit.) On the metaphysics I currently favor, there are regions of space-time and material objects, each of which enjoys a distinct parthood relation to members of its own kind. Perhaps there are other kinds of objects that enjoy a kind of parthood relation other than the ones enjoyed by material objects and regions of space-time. Perhaps, for example, there are facts; I’ve been wavering over whether to embrace these entities for years now. However, I’m reasonably confident that, if there are facts, then the kind of parthood relation that facts bear to that which composes them is not the kind of parthood relation enjoyed by material objects or regions of space-time. More on why I am reasonably confident later. Let’s turn to a brief discussion of composition as identity. The primary motivation for the view is an intuition generated by reflection on cases like the following.2 A farmer has a farm consisting of six plots, each of which he sells