Abstract
Mereological principles are often controversial; perhaps the most stark contrast is between those who claim that Weak Supplementation is analytic—constitutive of our notion of proper parthood—and those who argue that the principle is simply false, and subject to many counterexamples. The aim of this paper is to diagnose the source of this dispute. I’ll suggest that the dispute has arisen by participants failing to be sensitive to two different conceptions of proper parthood: the outstripping conception and the non-identity conception. I’ll argue that the outstripping conception (together with a specific set of definitions for other mereological notions), can deliver the analyticity of Weak Supplementation on at least one sense of ‘analyticity’. I’ll also suggest that the non-identity conception cannot do so independently of considerations to do with mereological extensionality.
Highlights
Philosophy can be strange—perhaps metaphysics especially so
Weak Supplementation is an intuitive mereological decomposition principle governing proper parthood; it is frequently used in the philosophical literature on mereology
I’ll suggest that the analyticity of Weak Supplementation on the non-identity conception is deeply entangled with mereological extensionality
Summary
I’ll use P for the parthood predicate, P P for proper parthood, and O for mereological overlap. WSP states that whenever an object has a proper part, it has another part that does not overlap—that is mereologically disjoint—from the first. Cotnoir and Bacon (2012) note that Weak Supplementation is inconsistent with the possibility of proper parthood loops This is, in part, because WSP entails the irreflexivity of P P in any system where P P is transitive. On the understanding that persons are hylomorphic composites, and that two things cannot become one, the view implies that upon losing her body a person will continue to exist with only one proper part—the soul.17 Another case in point is the theory of accidents in Brentano (1981), according to which a mind is a proper part of a thinking mind even though there is nothing to make up for the difference..
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