Composition as Identity, Modal Parts, and Mereological Essentialism

Are The Statue and The Clay Mutual Parts?

“…Assuming that both survive the foot's destruction, then if our tripartite claim about ending parthood is correct, then after the operation Theon is a part of Dion and coincident with him. 11 A second way of allowing partial but not complete overlap consistent with Strong Supplementation and the denial of Mutual Parthood is to posit modal parts (see Graham, 2014;and Wallace, 2014). 12 In standard mereologies, Weak Supplementation follows from Strong Supplementation given the asymmetry of parthood: if x is a part of y, then y is not a part of x.…”

“…A second way of allowing partial but not complete overlap consistent with Strong Supplementation and the denial of Mutual Parthood is to posit modal parts (see Graham, ; and Wallace, ).…”

Mereology and Identity

“…Given the links between mereology and identity, there is an ensuing risk of making all the instances of parthood and composition equally necessary and permanent. In the extant literature this line of thought has been used as either a refutation of CAI (composition is contingent and identity is necessary; thus, composition is not an identity relation, contra CAI; Merricks 1999); or as a reason to integrate CAI with a specific theory of modality, such as the counterpart theory or the theory of modal parts (Bøhn 2014;Wallace 2014). However, the problem of the modal and temporal mismatch between identity and mereological relations is only seldom discussed in the literature about mereology and identity and surely deserves further scrutiny.…”

Contingent composition as identity

“…By contrast, the extant literature on CAI, when it deals with the relation between CAI and NI at all, accepts that NI, the contingency of composition and CAI are indeed an inconsistent of theses and goes in one of the following directions: a) either CAI is rejected (Merricks 1999);b) or NI is rejected, by endorsing a view of modality (counterpart theory) in which NI can fail (Bøhn 2009;Borghini 2005); c) or CC is rejected, by endorsing a view of modality (theory of modal parts) that makes the resulting failure of CC palatable (Wallace 2014).…”

“…26 Second, even if we lay the non-modal problems of CAI aside, the problem remains whether CCAI is any better of its competitors on the modal terrain. CCAI should be compared to other ways of avoiding (Merricks 1999)'s attempt to refute CAI on the basis of NI, such as the adoption of counterpart theory in order to reject NI in (Bøhn 2009) and (Borghini 2005) and the adoption of the theory of modal parts in order to make the rejection of CC acceptable in (Wallace 2014).…”