Mereology Research Articles

There is No Anima Mundi: Leibniz on the Impossibility of a Soul of the World

The main source of perplexity raised by Leibniz’s (mathematical) argument against the soul of the world stems from the idea that it is the infinity of the universe that precludes it from having a soul. But if this is so, how is it possible that organic bodies, which, having infinitely many parts, are also infinite, are endowed with a soul? The present paper aims to provide a new solution to this puzzle. The solution explains the difference between the body and the universe by looking at how their respective parts are arranged. It is the arrangement of the parts of the body that allows a body to be divided into infinitely many parts whilst, at the same time, having a finite magnitude. By contrast, the way in which the alleged parts of the world are arranged makes it impossible that the world has a finite magnitude: the world cannot be a whole, and so it cannot have a soul. The consequence is that it does not matter how many parts bodies have, but only that they have a finite magnitude. In this case, bodies respect the Part-Whole Principle (the whole is bigger than any of its proper parts) and therefore can be described as finite wholes with parts.

The Common Basis Complex and the Partial Decomposition Poset

Abstract For a finite-dimensional vector space $V$, the common basis complex of $V$ is the simplicial complex whose vertices are the proper non-zero subspaces of $V$, and $\sigma $ is a simplex if and only if there exists a basis $B$ of $V$ that contains a basis of $S$ for all $S\in \sigma $. This complex was introduced by Rognes in 1992 in connection with stable buildings. In this article, we prove that the common basis complex is homotopy equivalent to the proper part of the poset of partial direct sum decompositions of $V$. Moreover, we establish this result in a more general combinatorial context, including the case of free groups, matroids, vector spaces with non-degenerate sesquilinear forms, and free modules over commutative Hermite rings, such as local rings or Dedekind domains.

Don’t imagine junk! Positive conceivability and modal illusion in mereology

There is a widespread practice of using evidence obtained from conceiving/imagining for establishing possibility claims. As a case study. I offer a critical reconstruction of an influential conceivability argument, Bohn’s (Philosophical Quarterly 59:193-201, 2009a, Analysis 70:296–298, 2009b, Analysis 70:296-298, 2010) argument for junk (there are proper parts forming wholes, but there is no whole that is not a proper part itself). The most influential scenario used by Bohn and his successors is purported to be junk but not ensured to be junk. This finding calls for an explanation. I distinguish ways of conceiving/imagining that are insufficient to establish modal claims from positive conceiving/imagining, which is more promising. Positive conceiving/imagining often works by a partial structural isomorphy to its target, and it is sufficiently detailed. In order to be sufficiently detailed, it has to properly integrate theoretical considerations. I outline a concern about extant ways of conceiving/imagining junk: they do not yet include a metaphysical understanding of what it takes for there to be proper parts and wholes without a whole that is not a proper part itself, for instance in terms of a non-gerrymandered principle of composition.

Shepherd’s Accounts of Space and Time

Abstract There is an apparent tension in Shepherd’s accounts of space and time. Firstly, Shepherd explicitly claims that we know that the space and time of the unperceived world exist because they cause our phenomenal experience of them. Secondly, Shepherd emphasizes that empty space and time do not have the power to effect any change in the world. My proposal is that for Shepherd time has exactly one causal power: to provide for the continued existence of self-same or changing objects. Because Shepherd takes causation to be a relation whereby two objects combine to form a third, their effect, whenever we perceive a continually existing object, since time is a proper part of such objects, our perception of time is caused by time itself. Likewise, space’s causal power is to provide for the possibility of the motion or rest of objects, and so when we perceive objects with space as a proper part, we come into causal contact with space.

The self saves the day! Value pluralism, autonomous belief and the dissolution of the value problem through the encroachment of the self on knowledge

ABSTRACT In his book Autonomous Knowledge J. Adam Carter argues that the possibility of radical cognitive enhancement shows the need for epistemology to be significantly updated. Reflection on the possibility of such enhancement shows that doxastic autonomy matters. If a belief fails to be autonomous, it cannot qualify as knowledge. Sects. 1-3 of this paper introduce the key components of Carter's autonomy framework and his considerations on the value of knowledge (including his proposed solution to the value problem, i.e. the challenge of accounting for why knowledge has greater value than any of its proper parts). Sects. 4-7 offer a critical appraisal of Carter's framework. We are not convinced that Carter has succeeded in showing that there is an autonomous belief condition on knowledge. In this paper, however, we shall not engage with this issue. Instead, for the sake of our critical discussion, we shall assume that autonomous belief is a condition on knowledge and engage Carter on a cluster of issues concerning axiology.

The Puzzle of Dion and Theon Solved

Dion is a human person, Lefty is his left foot, and Theon is Lefty-Complement, a proper part of Dion. Lefty is annihilated and Dion survives left-footless. After Lefty’s annihilation Theon, if he survives, occupies the same region as Dion. I suggest that this scenario be understood as a fusion case in which Dion and Theon, initially overlapping but distinct, are identical after Lefty’s annihilation and propose an account of proper names that allows us to say that Dion and Theon have ‘become identical’ without commitment to occasional identity or other controversial metaphysical doctrines. The proposed solution employs the semantics developed by Wolfgang Schwarz to address the ‘paradox of occasional identity’, posed by puzzle cases of fission, to deal with the problem of Dion and Theon, a body-minus puzzle.

The Microbiological Landscape of Diabetic Foot Infections: Implications for Treatment and Prevention

Diabetic foot infections (DFIs) represent one of the most serious and frequent complications resulting from diabetes mellitus, causing substantial morbidity as well as enhanced risk for amputation. The microbiological world of DIFs is typically multifaceted and usually includes a polymicrobial community with both aerobic bacteria this anaerobe the purpose of this review is to decompose the current knowledge about microbial diversity in DFIs, their resistance patterns and biofilms contribution for resilience towards infection persistence and therapy. Development of molecular techniques has allowed increased insight into the DFI microbiome, not only uncovering prevalent pathogens such as Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa but also lesser frequently isolated organisms. The employment of multidrug-resistant organisms and the intricate relationship between microbial species within biofilms present serious management challenges. The review focuses on the relevance of early and accurate diagnosis using culture-based methodologies as well molecular methods that, in turn, would enable more specific antimicrobial therapy. Moreover, the opportunity of new antibacterial agents will be available; other local delivery systems and adjunctive therapies like negative pressure wound therapy would also be addressed. Strategies of prevention that involve patient education, regular foot checks and proper glycemic control form part of essential measures in reducing incidences of DFIs. An interdisciplinary approach to care is highlighted in the review, influencing diabetology specialists, infectious disease physicians and microbiologists as well as podiatrists be able to improve treatment outcomes. This review aims to provide the most recent synthesis on microbiological aspects of DFIs and their clinical implications, with an intent of informing development of more effective strategies for management thus improving patient’s quality life as well reducing pressure from health care systems.

Personal Persistence and Post-Mortem Survival

Can a materialist look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come? Dean Zimmerman’s Falling Elevator Model is a speculative account of how persons, understood as material beings, might survive in a post-mortem resurrected state—a just-so story. It assumes endurantism, the doctrine that persons and other ordinary objects are three-dimensional beings which are wholly present at every time they exist. I argue that neither endurantism, nor purdurantism, according to which persons are four-dimensional ‘worms’ who have proper temporal parts at every time that they exist, provides a plausible account of personal survival. If you want to be a Christian materialist you should embrace exdurantism, the ‘stage theory’, according which persons are instantaneous stages and are not identical to their temporal successors either in this world or in any world to come. Exdurantism provides a plausible account of survival in ordinary cases and extraordinary cases of this-worldly fission, and of post-mortem survival.

On the Structure and Accumulation of Realist Content

Ever since the heyday of the Vienna Circle, scientific realists have worked hard to document and clarify the structure and growth of truth content in theoretical descriptions. Today, this trait is particularly intense among “selective realists” – realists focused on theory parts with high empirical corroboration rather than whole theories. From their perspective, theories with posits systematically deployed in corroborated novel predictions are, with high probability, descriptively true or contain a proper part that is. Unlike traditional realists, selectivists acknowledge that (a) radical conceptual change is a recurring scientific phenomenon and (b) empirical theories have poor reliability records at the most profound ontological level. At the same time, they point to significant descriptive continuities at intermediate theoretical levels between successful theories and their successors – i.e., a false theory can (and often does) contain parts that succeed as correct descriptions. Selectivists seek to identify those parts. Their approaches limit ontological commitment exclusively to highly confirmed theoretical descriptions; unfortunately, the selection criteria they use seemingly support many regrettable choices. One source of trouble is that extant approaches leave unclear the ontology described by the selected parts. Historical cases and scientific practice gesture toward a functional resolution of this difficulty, but the clues could be more transparent and need elaboration. Otherwise, selectivism has improved in consistency over the last three decades. Current projects emphasize the continuity of well-established scientific content (relating to how entities and processes effectively behave within a specific regime or descriptive level) instead of just the continuity of “structure”. This paper provides some clarifications that arguably clear the road for realist commitment toward functional and effective theoretical content. The proposed functional/effective turn is checked against some plausible objections.

On Strictly Positive Real Improper Transfer Matrices

In this article we consider linear systems having real rational transfer matrices that may be improper. We investigate the properties of strictly positive real and weakly strictly positive real systems and their connections. Our first contribution is to establish a necessary and sufficient condition for a rational and possibly improper transfer matrix to be strictly positive real. Beside stability, this condition only involves the properties of the transfer matrix in the imaginary axis and a geometric relation between the feedthrough term and the residue at infinity of the transfer matrix. Our condition connects some of the properties of the system with those of its proper part. This leads to our second contribution: integrate in the improper setting all the several conditions derived in the literature for the proper case that discriminate weakly strictly positive real and strictly positive real systems.

Hydra: Hybrid-model federated learning for human activity recognition on heterogeneous devices

Federated Learning (FL) has recently received extensive attention in enabling privacy-preserving edge AI services for Human Activity Recognition (HAR). However, users’ mobile and wearable devices in the HAR scenario usually possess dramatically different computing capability and diverse data distributions, making it very challenging for such heterogeneous HAR devices to conduct effective collaborative training (co-training) with the traditional FL schemes. To address this issue, we present Hydra, a Hybrid-model federated learning mechanism that facilitates the co-training among heterogeneous devices by allowing them to train models that well fit their own computing capability. Specifically, Hydra leverages BranchyNet to design a large-small global hybrid-model and enables heterogeneous devices to train the proper parts of the model tailored to their computing capability. Hydra drives co-training among the devices and clusters them based on model similarity to mitigate the impact of HAR data heterogeneity on model accuracy. In order to deal with the issue that large model may lack sufficient training data due to the limited number of high-performance devices in FL, we introduce a pairing scheme between high and low performance devices for effective co-training, and further propose sample selection approach to select more valuable samples to participate in co-training. We then formulate a constrained co-training problem within a cluster that is proved to be NP-hard and devise a fast greedy-based heuristic algorithm to solve it. In addition, to address the low accuracy of small models, we also propose a Large-to-Small knowledge distillation algorithm for resource-constrained devices to optimize the efficiency of transferring knowledge from large models to small models. We conduct extensive experiments on three HAR datasets and the experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of Hydra for achieving outstanding model accuracy improvement compared with other state-of-the-art schemes.

Nutritional behaviours and lifestyle before and during covid-19 pandemic: based on data from Polish and Turkish surveys.

Students are a group particularly high risk of adverse effects from such restrictions introduced within counter transmission the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Fear felt of contracting the disease and social isolation can lead to consuming excessive amounts of energy with food, resulting in weight gain and eating disorders. The aim of the study was analysed selected lifestyle aspects of Polish and Turkish students before and during the COVID-19 pandemic and to determine the existence of differences between the lifestyles of these individuals during the two periods. The study was conducted at the turn of 2020-2021 among 435 students, including 331 Polish and 104 Turkish students. The research instrument was an original questionnaire created in a Google Forms, consisting of metric and a proper part regarding lifestyle before and during the pandemic. Prior to the actual study, in order to verify whether the research tool is understandable, a pilot study was conducted, which included 40 individuals. The Wilcoxon test was used to examine the differences between the lifestyle of students before and during the pandemic. A value of p<0.05 was considered statistically significant. Both before and during the pandemic, most Polish students ate 4-5 meals daily (52.9% and 47.7%, respectively), while most Turkish students ate 3 meals (47.1% and 38.5%, respectively). There were statistically significant differences in: duration of sleep (p=0.001), way of spending one's leisure time (p=0.001) and type of physical activity (p=0.001) among the Polish and Turkish students before and during the pandemic. The results of this study showed changes in the lifestyle of both Polish and Turkish students during the pandemic compared to the pre-pandemic period. This indicates the need to develop interventions to prevent harmful behaviour and their health consequences in the future.

Language Teachers’ Autonomy in EFL Classroom: A Narrative Inquiry

The study aims to find out practices undertaken by English language teachers for their autonomous development in EFL classrooms. Autonomy has become one of the most problematic and significant issues to be discussed in the field of teacher education in the recent era. This paper deals with the ways to support teachers in their classroom practices, as well as a way of improving professional practices and career development. It is based on qualitative research in general and narrative inquiry in particular. The information is based on four teachers from the community as well as institutional schools. It mainly discusses the perceptions and practices of teachers towards teacher autonomy. From the obtained information, the study found positive feelings of teachers towards employing initiatives taken regarding autonomy, and they note that other stakeholders must encourage the teachers’ efforts for successful implementation. It reveals that most schools have strong and self-empowered human resources but proper encouragement and application parts seem to be weak.

Zero morphology and change-of-state verbs

Abstract This paper discusses a theory of conversion (zero derivation) in terms of phrasal spellout. In this approach, there are no zero morphemes. Instead, the ‘silent’ meaning components are pronounced cumulatively within overt morphemes. As an empirical case, we discuss adjective/verb ambiguity as in narrow. As verbs, these roots have both an inchoative and a causative sense. Following Ramchand (2008), we assume that such deadjectival causatives contain three parts: the adjective denoting a state, a change-of-state component proc, and a causative component init. Adopting a Nanosyntax approach, we propose that verbs like narrow spell out a complex node with all these abstract heads. The ambiguity between the inchoative, causative and adjective falls out as a consequence of the Superset Principle (Starke 2009), which states that a lexical entry can spell out any subtree it contains. Since both the inchoative sense and the adjective sense correspond to proper parts of the causative one, we derive these readings without the need to postulate zeroes. We show how these assumptions allow us to capture a broad range of patterns, focussing mainly on English and Czech.

Atoms, combs, syllables and organisms

Mereological atomism is the thesis that everything is ultimately composed of atomic parts, i.e., parts without proper parts. Typically, this thesis is characterized by an axiom stating that everything has atomic parts. The present paper argues that the success of this standard characterization depends on how the notions of sum and composition are defined. In particular, we put forward a novel definition of mereological sum that: (i) is not equivalent to existing definitions in the literature, if no strong decomposition principle is assumed; (ii) can be used to argue that the standard characterization of atomism fails, because having atomic parts is not sufficient to be a sum of atoms; and (iii) provides a purely mereological distinction between structured and unstructured wholes, contributing to the ongoing debate on this crucial topic.

A Mereological Study of Lowe’s Constituting Parthood Theory

Abstract Late Lowe’s metaphysics of material objects is an interesting multi-thingist theory that still attracts interest from various authors. The core idea is that if x materially constitutes y, the x is a proper part of y. I discuss some mereological issues that arise from the approach and propose a revision of the mereology associated. Particularly, I examine the tenability of a number of supplementation principles and conclude that just one may serve the theory adequately. Still, the endorsement of such a principle does not come for free. Successively, I address the derivability of an important extensionality theorem and conclude that the theorem must be taken as an axiom in the mereology at stake. Lastly, I discuss two notable definitions of mereological fusions to assess which one best suits the present theory. The result is that authors sharing Lowe’s multi-thingist conception of material objects can still enjoy a moderately strong mereology.

The Mereotopology of Pregnancy

Consider the following two metaphysical questions about pregnancy: (1) When does a new organism of a certain kind start to exist? (2) What is the mereological and topological relationship between the pregnant organism and with what it is pregnant? Despite assumptions made in the literature, I take these questions to be independent of each other, such that an answer to one does not provide an answer to the other. I argue that the way to connect them is via a maximality principle that prevents one organism being a proper part of another organism of the same kind. That being said, such a maximality principle need not be held, and may not apply in the case of pregnancy. The aims of this paper are thus to distinguish and connect these metaphysical questions, in order to outline a taxonomy of rival mereotopological models of pregnancy that result from the various combinations of their answers.

Universalism and extensionalism revisited

We present a new notion of mereological sum that is inequivalent to extant ones in the literature and does not fall prey to reasonable complaints that can be raised against some such notions. In light of this notion, we then revisit the relation between mereological universalism and extensionalism. In particular we argue that Varzi’s claim to the point that universalism entails extensionalism is justified only insofar as one sticks to Varzi’s notion of sum. In effect, we distinguish different versions of extensionalism and argue that universalism—when cashed out in terms of our new notion of sum—entails some versions but not others. Most significantly it does not entail extensionality of proper parthood. In the light of the above we set forth a new mereological system, Universalist Quasi-Supplemented Mereology, that can be considered a worthy alternative to different mereological systems in the literature.

SUTTON’S SOLUTION TO THE GROUNDING PROBLEM

I critically discuss Sutton’s 2012 attempt to solve the so-called “grounding problem” for coincident objects, namely, the difficulty of explaining how such objects, such as a statue and the lump of clay from which it was made, can have distinct kind and modal properties, even though they share the same proper parts and basic microphysical properties. Sutton bases her solution on an account of the extrinsic composition of the different sorts of objects involved in such cases - in particular, artefacts, organisms and persons. I show that the accounts she gives of their composition are flawed, and that her proposal therefore does not solve the grounding problem.

First-Class and Coach-Class Knowledge

AbstractI will discuss a variety of cases such that the subject's believing truly is somewhat of an accident, but less so than in a Gettier case. In each case, this is because her reasons are not ultimately undefeated full stop, but they are ultimately undefeated with certain qualifications. For example, the subject's reasons might be ultimately defeated considered in themselves but ultimately undefeated considered as a proper part of an inference to the best explanation that is undefeated without qualification. In each section of the paper, I consider different qualifications and show how in each case we get an epistemic standing I call “coach-class knowledge”. First-class knowledge requires justifying reasons that are undefeated without qualification. Coach-class knowledge only requires qualified lack of defeat. I will use this distinction to bring debates over knowledge from falsehood and fake barns to an ecumenical resolution. In both cases, the subject enjoys coach-class rather than first-class knowledge. I will also show that the defeasible reasoning tradition can better account for graded accidental truth than safety theories.