Composition and the Logic of Location: An Argument for Regionalism

Abstract

Ned Markosian (2014) has recently defended a new theory of composition, which he calls regionalism: some material objects xx compose something if and only if there is a material object located at the fusion of the locations of xx. Markosian argues that regionalism follows from what he calls the subregion theory of parthood (STP). Korman and Carmichael (2016) agree. We provide countermodels to show that regionalism does not follow from (STP), even together with fourteen potentially implicit background principles. We then show that regionalism does follow from five of those background principles together with (STP) and two additional principles connecting parthood and location, which we call (Overlap) and (Strong Delegation). While the additional principles are not uncontroversial, our conjecture is that many will find them attractive. We conclude by mentioning that (Strong Delegation) fills a previously unnoticed gap in the formal theory of location presented in Parsons (2007).

Plenty of Room for Multilocation

“…Here the choice for a two-sorted language is philosophically moot; we could have used a language with a single domain and specific predicates for objects and regions instead. See Gilmore and Leonard (2020) for more discussion.) There are two main candidates for the role of the locational primitive: exact location and weak location.…”