Plenty of Room for Multilocation

Open Access
Authors
Publication date 08-2023
Journal Erkenntnis
Volume | Issue number 88 | 6
Pages (from-to) 2365–2378
Number of pages 14
Organisations
  • Interfacultary Research - Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC)
Abstract
Classical mereology is a particularly strong theory about the part–whole relation. Not only does it ensure that any collection of entities composes a whole, or ‘fusion’, it also states that this object is unique: no two entities have the same parts. Recently, Claudio Calosi (dialectica 68(1):121–139, 2014) has argued that this extensional aspect makes classical mereology incompatible with multilocated entities. Calosi’s argument is arguably the most precise one from a whole battery of arguments to the effect that some mereological principle is at odds with multilocation. Still, I show that Calosi’s arguments fail and that classical mereology is a safe space for multilocation. Moreover, I argue that the question of extensionality is orthogonal to the question of multilocation.
Document type Article
Language English
Published at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-021-00456-z
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s10670-021-00456-z_new (Final published version)
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