(September 17, 2021 at 11:19 am)Angrboda Wrote:(September 17, 2021 at 10:55 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: 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.
Right now, I’m sitting on a four-legged, cushioned object that keeps my bony arse from colliding with the floor. Conventionally, this is called ‘a chair’. In fact, this convention is so widespread (I’m tempted to use the term ‘universal’) I think it’s safe to state that an object with this form and function is objectively a chair.
Boru
‘But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no gods. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.’ - Thomas Jefferson