Back علم الأجزاء Arabic Mereologie German Mereología Spanish Mereoloogia Estonian جزءشناسی Persian Méréologie French Mereologia Italian メレオロジー Japanese 부분론 Korean Mereologie Dutch
Mereology (from Greek μέρος 'part' (root: μερε-, mere-, 'part') and the suffix -logy, 'study, discussion, science') is the philosophical study of part-whole relationships, also called parthood relationships.[1][2] As a branch of metaphysics, mereology examines the connections between parts and their wholes, exploring how components interact within a system. This theory has roots in ancient philosophy, with significant contributions from Plato, Aristotle, and later, medieval and Renaissance thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus.[3] Mereology was formally axiomatized in the 20th century by Polish logician Stanisław Leśniewski, who introduced it as part of a comprehensive framework for logic and mathematics, and coined the word "mereology".[2]
Mereological ideas were influential in early § Set theory, and formal mereology has continued to be used by a minority in works on the § Foundations of mathematics. Different axiomatizations of mereology have been applied in § Metaphysics, used in § Linguistic semantics to analyze "mass terms", used in the cognitive sciences,[1] and developed in § General systems theory. Mereology has been combined with topology, for more on which see the article on mereotopology. Mereology is also used in the foundation of Whitehead's point-free geometry, on which see Tarski 1956 and Gerla 1995. Mereology is used in discussions of entities as varied as musical groups, geographical regions, and abstract concepts, demonstrating its applicability to a wide range of philosophical and scientific discourses.[1]
In metaphysics, mereology is used to formulate the thesis of "composition as identity", the theory that individuals or objects are identical to mereological sums (also called fusions) of their parts.[3] A metaphysical thesis called "mereological monism" suggests that the version of mereology developed by Stanisław Leśniewski and Nelson Goodman (commonly called Classical Extensional Mereology, or CEM) serves as the general and exhaustive theory of parthood and composition, at least for a large and significant domain of things.[4] This thesis is controversial, since parthood may not seem to be a transitive relation (as claimed by CEM) in some cases, such as the parthood between organisms and their organs.[5] Nevertheless, CEM's assumptions are very common in mereological frameworks, due largely to Leśniewski influence as the one to first coin the word and formalize the theory: mereological theories commonly assume that everything is a part of itself (reflexivity), that a part of a part of a whole is itself a part of that whole (transitivity), and that two distinct entities cannot each be a part of the other (antisymmetry), so that the parthood relation is a partial order. An alternative is to assume instead that parthood is irreflexive (nothing is ever a part of itself) but still transitive, in which case antisymmetry follows automatically.
- ^ a b c Champollion, Lucas; Krifka, Manfred (2016), Aloni, Maria; Dekker, Paul (eds.), "Mereology", The Cambridge Handbook of Formal Semantics, Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 369–388, doi:10.1017/cbo9781139236157.014, ISBN 978-1-139-23615-7, retrieved 2024-04-21
- ^ a b Cotnoir, A. J.; Varzi, Achille C. (2021). "What is Mereology?". Mereology. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780191811647.
- ^ a b Varzi, Achille (2019), Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), "Mereology", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 2024-04-21
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
:14was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Bunnin, Nicholas; Yu, Jiyuan (2004). The Blackwell dictionary of Western philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub. p. 424. ISBN 978-1-4051-0679-5.