Abstract
The special composition question (SCQ), which asks under which conditions objects compose a further object, establishes a central debate in modern metaphysics. Recent successes of inductive metaphysics, which studies the implications of the natural sciences for metaphysical problems, suggest that insights into the SCQ can be gained by investigating the physics of composite systems. In this work, I show that the minus first law of thermodynamics, which is concerned with the approach to equilibrium, leads to a new approach to the SCQ, the thermodynamic composition principle (TCP): Multiple systems in (generalized) thermal contact compose a single system. This principle, which is justified based on a systematic classification of possible mereological models for thermodynamic systems, might form the basis of an inductive argument for universalism. A formal analysis of the TCP is provided on the basis of mereotopology, which is a combination of mereology and topology. Here, “thermal contact” can be analyzed using the mereotopological predicate “self-connectedness”. Self-connectedness has to be defined in terms of mereological sums to ensure that scattered objects cannot be self-connected.
Highlights
The special composition question (SCQ) (van Inwagen 1987), which asks under which conditions objects compose a further object, is among the central problems of modern metaphysics
This is a promising route of inquiry: Various authors have approached the problem of composition from a scientific perspective (Schaffer 2010; Healey 2013; Calosi and Tarozzi 2014; McKenzie and Muller 2017; Husmann and Näger 2018), and mereology has become an important topic in philosophical approaches to thermodynamics (Needham 2010a, 2013) as well as related fields such as chemistry (Needham 2007; Harré and Llored 2013) and biology (Jansen and Schulz 2011, 2014)
While technical details of Wallace’s discussion cited above are not of central importance here, the first assumption is very interesting and far from being metaphysically innocent: “Multiple systems in thermal contact may be treated as a single system” can— intended here to be a purely physical statement—be seen as a partial answer to the SCQ, as it states the existence of composite systems and provides a
Summary
The special composition question (SCQ) (van Inwagen 1987), which asks under which conditions objects compose a further object, is among the central problems of modern metaphysics. It arises in mereology, which is the theory of parthood relations (Burkhardt et al 2017). Such a principle, while being routinely employed in thermal physics, is not metaphysically innocent: If it holds, it provides at least a partial answer to the SCQ, such that studying the thermodynamics of composite systems is a very promising route for philosophers interested in inductive metaphysics. From a formal point of view, this is a clean and elegant solution, which does, have some drastic ontological consequences (for example, there does exist an object composed of the Eiffel tower and your underwear)
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