On Tue, May 21, 2013 04:29, Pat Hayes wrote:
> On May 20, 2013, at 4:33 PM, doug foxvog wrote:
>> On Mon, May 20, 2013 13:36, Pat Hayes wrote: (01)
>>> Mereology - the ontology of parthood - is concerned with the
>>> relation being-a-part-of, which is a rather particular relation, and
>>> cannot be understood by just making vague analogies to how
>>> people might express themselves in casual English conversation. (02)
>>> Mereology (which was originally conceived as an alternative to set
>>> theory, a foundational theory for mathematics)
>>> thinks of the world as made up of
>>> lumps of anonymous stuff, and the basic relation between these lumps is
>>> parthood. A is part of B when, if you "take" all of B, you must "take"
>>> all of A with it.
>>> (It does NOT mean, you would say "A is part of B" in normal
>>> idiomatic English.) If we are talking about physical objects (the usual
>>> case) then it can be described as: if you were to draw a tight
>>> spatiotemporal boundary around B, A would be wholly included inside
>>> that boundary. So if a lock is part-of a door,
>>> and a door is part-of a house, then yes, that lock is part-of that
>>> house, because the door is inside the
>>> house-boundary and the lock is inside the door-boundary. (03)
>> The lock is certainly not within the house's spatiotemporal boundary.
>> In almost all cases, the lock was made outside the house, so the
>> spatiotemporal boundary of the house would intersect the lock (and
>> the nails, boards, and most other primary components of the house),
>> not encompass it. If you mean an instantaneous spatial boundary, (04)
> I was thinking of a cotemporal spatial boundary, yes. (05)
A cotemporal spatial boundary and an instantaneous spatial boundary
are different. In case of a lock that was replaced in a house door, both
the lock and house existed at a time when the lock was not part of the
house. So it does seem that "cotemporal spatial boundary" is still too
broad. (06)
>> then the lock is within the boundary and thus included as part of the
>> house, but so is every piece of furniture, person, pet, insect, liter of
>> air and water that happens to be within the confines of the house at
>> the time.. (07)
>> It seems that you would have to define interior boundaries to the
>> house so that you can exclude the contents of the house as not
>> being "part of" the house. (08)
> No, the spatial boundary of the house can be limited from within the
> contained space. Boundaries do not have to be convex. (09)
Certainly. But it seems to me that trying to use spatial boundaries instead
of the mass of the two objects is difficult. One would have to consider
the surface of each fiber of fiberglass in all the insulation of the house
in order to exclude a bug crawling through the fiberglass from being
part of the house. The boundary of the house changes as termites
eat into floor beams such that the termites never become part of the
house. (010)
> There are certainly tricky edge cases. Carry a can of paint into a room of
> a house, paint the walls, let the paint dry. The dried paint is then,
> arguably, part-of the house. When did that happen? I honestly don't know,
> but it was somewhen in the above scenario. (011)
I'd say it was when the paint became solid (012)
> Yes, exactly. I was presuming a topological notion of 'boundary'. (013)
>>> One might object, but the world is not made of lumps of anonymous
>>> stuff:
>>> there are other kinds of things, and in any case the lumps have
>>> properties, and roles and names, etc.. But mereology does not deny
>>> this,
>>> of course: it simply ignores it when describing parthood. Or, one might
>>> object, but that is not what *I* mean by 'part of'. Fine: your notion
>>> is
>>> one relation, and mereological parthood is, apparently, a different
>>> relation.
>>
>> Yes, there are many types of parthood.
>>
>>> Take the team/club example.
>>> It seems obvious to me that a team member is
>>> indeed a mereological part-of the team, at least if we ignore temporal
>>> extents (We might have to say, the temporal part of the member during
>>> the time interval that the team exists, is part-of the team.) (014)
>> Why do you consider the team to have a spatial extent? (015)
> Yes. Assuming that membership in the team is well defined, of course. (016)
>> I'd resist such a model. (017)
> Why? On what grounds? (018)
I consider the team to be an organization. People become for a time
organizational members. That is a relationship between them and
the intangible organization. (019)
>> Does the team have a mass and a volume? (020)
> I don't see why not. If I were to ask for the total weight of the team,
> the question seems to have a clear and determinate answer. (021)
English uses lots of tricks, including using one term to refer to something
else associated with it. This seems one of such cases. It may be
difficult at first to understand the question, until the proper mapping
is guessed. Just because such a question may be asked, does not
mean that the property adheres without a mapping step or two. (022)
-- doug foxvog (023)
> Its not a very usual question to ask,
> but I'm sure you can make up a scenario which might
> require it.
>
> Pat
>
>>
>> -- doug foxvog
>>
>>> It is far less
>>> obvious that the team is part-of the club; indeed, that seems like a
>>> category mistake. (Does a club have a spatiotemporal extent?) And it is
>>> surly not true to say that a club is part-of a federation. I don't see
>>> a
>>> federation as being a mereological whole. So, part-of is indeed
>>> transitive, its is easy to describe, and it has nothing much to do with
>>> federations. That all seems pretty obvious to me. Next question?
>>>
>>> Pat Hayes
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------
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>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
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