(September 17, 2021 at 10:55 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:(September 16, 2021 at 8:23 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote: I liked mereological nihilism too. One of the reasons it seems so appealing is that, otherwise, there would have to be a Platonic form of the chair "out there" somewhere. And I have trouble believing that. But if that isn't true at all, then mereological nihilism must be true.
Mereological nihilism has always struck me as word play. Instead of saying, ‘This is a chair and it is made of chair parts’ we should say, ‘This is a collection of simples arranged chair-wise.’
Am I missing something, or are those semantically equivalent statements?
Boru
Vulcan can answer for himself, but mereology is the philosophy concerning parts and wholes. Mereological nihilism is the position that there are no parts and wholes in the world, that identifying something as a part and something else as a whole is just an arbitrary convention that we adopt which has no basis in the features of reality. So yeah, you can say this is a chair, or that these are simples behaving chair-wise, but mereological nihilism is the position that there is no objective fact of the matter.