Mereological monism and Humean supervenience
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Mereological monism and Humean supervenience Andrea Borghini1 · Giorgio Lando2
Received: 10 April 2015 / Accepted: 12 February 2016 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016
Abstract According to Lewis, mereology is the general and exhaustive theory of ontological composition (mereological monism), and every contingent feature of the world supervenes upon some fundamental properties instantiated by minimal entities (Humean supervenience). A profound analogy can be drawn between these two basic contentions of his metaphysics, namely that both can be intended as a denial of emergentism. In this essay, we study the relationships between Humean supervenience and two philosophical spin-offs of mereological monism: the possibility of gunk and the thesis of composition as identity. In a gunky scenario, there are no atoms and, thus, some criteria alternative to mereological atomicity must be introduced in order to identify the bearers of fundamental properties; this introduction creates a precedent, which renders the restriction of the additional criteria to gunky scenarios arbitrary. On the other hand, composition as identity either extends the principle of indiscernibility of identicals to composition or is forced to replace indiscernibility with a surrogate; both alternatives lead to the postulation of a symmetric kind of supervenience which, in contrast to Humean supervenience, does not countenance a privileged level. Both gunk and composition as identity, thus, display a tension with Humean supervenience.
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Andrea Borghini [email protected] Giorgio Lando [email protected]
1
Department of Philosophy, College of the Holy Cross, 1 College Street, Worcester, MA 01610, USA
2
Scuola Normale Superiore, Piazza dei Cavalieri 7, 56126 Pisa, PI, Italy
123
Synthese
Keywords Mereological monism · Humean supervenience · Composition as identity · Gunk · Indiscernibility of identicals · David Lewis Humean supervenience (henceforth referred to as HS) is the claim that every contingent feature of the world supervenes upon some fundamental properties instantiated by minimal entities and upon the spatiotemporal relations between them. On the other hand, mereological monism1 (MM) is the contention that a formal theory, namely classical extensional mereology, is the general, exhaustive theory of ontological composition, so that any relation of composition is seen as a relation of parthood governed by the axioms of mereology. David Lewis endorsed both HS and MM as pivotal tenets of his metaphysics. Both HS and MM are now subject to wide-ranging critical challenges, and many have come to reject one or both.2 Their inter-relation, however, has been rarely and sparsely considered.3 In this essay we aim to show that HS is in tension with two philosophical theses entrenched with MM, namely the hypothesis of gunk and the thesis of composition as identity (CAI henceforth). According to the hypothesis of gunk, it is possible that something is such that all its parts have proper parts. According to CAI, the relation of com
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