Category: Wholes and Parts
-
The Hatfields and the McCoys: A Challenge to Reists and Extreme Nominalists
Top of the Substack pile.
-
Colin McGinn on Paradoxical Paradoxes
The indented material is from Colin McGinn's blog. My responses are flush left and in blue. Paradoxes exist. True. Paradoxes belong either to the world or to our thought about the world. True, if 'or' expresses exclusive disjunction. They cannot belong to the world, because reality cannot be intrinsically paradoxical. True. And so one ought…
-
Referring to Two Things
Ed writes, Does ‘these two things’ refer to two things, or not? (Suppose the things are shoes.) Perhaps not. For there are the two things, but also the plurality of them. The plurality is one thing, identical with neither the first thing, nor the second. So the phrase ‘these two things’ actually refers to three…
-
Pluralities
To what does the plural referring expression, 'the cats in my house,' refer? Not to plurality, but to a plurality. A plurality is one item, not many items. It is one item with many members. 'The guitars in my house' refers to a numerically different plurality. It too refers to one item with many members. …
-
On Sets: A Response to Brightly
David Brightly in a comment far below writes: Bill says, at 03:21 PM. …a family cannot be reduced to a number of persons; it is not a mere manifold, or a mere many… The same is true for a pair (of shoes) and other collective terms. They all imply relations of some sort between their…
-
The Hatfields and the McCoys
Whether or not it is true, the following has a clear sense: 1. The Hatfields outnumber the McCoys. (1) says that the number of Hatfields is strictly greater than the number of McCoys. It obviously does not say, of each Hatfield, that he outnumbers some McCoy. If Gomer is a Hatfield and Goober a McCoy, it…
-
Are You Clumsy? The Paradox of the Smashed Vase
I'm not, but you might be. Suppose you inadvertently knock over a priceless vase, smashing it to pieces. You say to the owner, "There's no real harm done; after all it's all still there." And then you argue: 1) There is nothing to the vase over and above the ceramic material that constitutes it. 2)…
-
Divine Simplicity and Divine Comprehensibility
From a reader, who is responding to God as Uniquely Unique: An objection I recently heard to the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) that is novel as far as I can tell. Goes like this: if DDS is true, God is unlike anything in our human experience, not having parts. We cannot comprehend God on…
-
Some Questions About Divine Simplicity
This recently over the transom: Dear Dr. Vallicella, I'm a reader of your blog, and have really enjoyed much of your work. Since you wrote the Stanford Encyclopedia article on the topic of divine simplicity, I thought I might reach out to you to ask your opinions on some things. I am on an…
-
Were You a Part of Your Mother?
Here Elselijn Kingma Mind, Volume 128, Issue 511, July 2019, 609–646. Abstract Is the mammalian embryo/fetus a part of the organism that gestates it? According to the containment view, the fetus is not a part of, but merely contained within or surrounded by, the gestating organism. According to the parthood view, the fetus is a…
-
Did the Universe Have a Beginning in Time?
Some of you may remember the commenter 'spur' from the old Powerblogs incarnation of this weblog. His comments were the best of any I received in over ten years of blogging. I think it is now safe to 'out' him as Stephen Puryear of North Carolina State University. He recently sent me a copy of…
-
Mereology and Trinity: Response to Wong
Kevin Wong offers some astute criticisms: You wrote: "For one thing, wholes depend on their parts for their existence, and not vice versa. (Unless you thought of parts as abstractions from the whole, which the Persons could not be.) Parts are ontologically prior to the wholes of which they are the parts.This holds even in…
-
Constituent Ontology and the Problem of Change
In an earlier entry I sketched the difference between constituent ontology (C-ontology) and relational ontology (R-ontology) and outlined an argument against R-ontology. I concluded that post with the claim that C-ontology also faces serious objections. One of them could be called the 'argument from change.' The Argument from Change Suppose avocado A, which was unripe…
-
Reduction, Elimination, and Material Composition
Yesterday I wrote, "And yet if particular a reduces to particular b, then a is nothing other than b, and is therefore identical to b." This was part of an argument that reduction collapses into elimination. A reader objects: "I am not sure that this is an accurate definition of reduction." He gives an argument having…