Monday, December 05, 2011

Parthood, CAI and grounding

I've posted a new paper: 'Parts generate the whole, but they are not identical to it'. The paper argues that the view that wholes are grounded (at least in part) by their parts is better than the view that wholes are their parts (composition as identity), because it does as well or better at solving certain puzzles concerning parthood, and has the advantage of not having counter-intuitive essentialist consequences. Any comments welcome!

5 comments:

Dan López de Sa said...

Nice! Very sympathetic. I thought however you were hostile to the view that the reality(/being) of the derivative was vindicated by being grounded on the fundamental, endorsing something like the "deflationary" conception you discuss in footnote 21. Was I wrong? Or you're just neutral on this for the purposes of this discussion?

Ross Cameron said...

*This* paper is about the inflationary conception. Previous papers have been about the deflationary conception. I don't have views on anything other than conditionals! ;-)

Anonymous said...

Where in the scheme of things would human butt-holes fit?
Especially is someone is suffering from piles or a prolapsed bowel?

Anonymous said...

Is this a silly complaint?:
'My arm and I can happily exist at the same region, because my arm is part of me'

is (intuitively, anyways) a better explanation than

'My arm and I can happily exist at the same region, because my arm features in a complete explanation of my existence (plus some of my properties)'

?

Teknik Informatika said...

what are the benefits received?