Parts as counterparts

Abstract

Mereological nihilists are faced with a difficult challenge: explaining ordinary talk about material objects. Popular paraphrase strategies involve plurals, arrangements of particles, or fictions. In this paper, a new paraphrase strategy is put forward that has distinct advantages over its rivals: it is compatible with gunk and emergent properties of macro-objects. e only assumption is a commitment to a liberal view of the nature of simples; the nihilist must be willing to accept the possibility of heterogeneous extended simples. e author suggests reinterpreting the parthood and composition relations as modal. According to this paraphrase, composition is a kind of counterpart relation. e author shows that one can accept that mereological nihilism is metaphysically necessary, while endorsing all the claims of classical mereology. As a result, the nihilists are in exactly the same position as the classical mereologist when it comes to explaining talk about ordinary objects, but without the additional ontology.

Emergence for Nihilists

“…16 See Parsons, 2004;McDaniel, 2007;Cameron, 2010b. 17 An interesting version of something in the vicinity of this strategy has recently been defended by Cotnoir (2013), relying on the possibility of extended simples and claiming to allow the nihilist to accommodate emergent properties. However, his parts as counterparts approach requires some explicit heavy duty commitments to both substantival space and fundamental distributional properties (p. 237).…”