Abstract
There are three families of solutions to the traditional Amputation Paradox: Eliminativism, Contingent Identity Theories, and Theories of Coincident Entities. Theories of Coincident Entities challenge our common understanding of the relation between identity and parthood, since they accept that two things can be mereologically coincident without being identical. The contemporary discussion of the Amputation Paradox tends to mention only one theory of Coincident Entities, namely the Constitution View, which violates the mereological principle of Extensionality. But in fact, there is another theory, namely the Unique Part View, which violates another mereological principle (the Weak Supplementation Principle). In this paper, I argue that the contemporary focus on the Constitution View is unmotivated, at least when we are confronted with the Amputation Paradox, and that a balanced comparison of the two views (as solutions to this specific paradox) should favour the Unique Part View.
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Notes
Although it is arguably more accurately described as an amputation of everything but the brain.
Mereological Nihilism denies the existence of both Bob and Brain, both before and after amputation. Peter van Inwagen only rejects the existence of Brain before the amputation, i.e. the existence of Brain as an “undetached part”. This solution is somewhat attractive when we are dealing with other amputation scenarios, in which we are asked to give names to such arbitrary parts as “the tail-complement of Tibbles, named Tib” (are there really any such things as “tail-complements”?). But it seems much harder to deny the existence of brains (even as “undetached” parts). That’s one reason why I prefer the brain-amputation scenario.
The temporal part of Bob after amputation and the temporal part of Brain after amputation would be coincident but also identical things, while Bob as whole (with all his temporal parts) and Brain as a whole (with all its temporal parts) would be distinct things but not coincident.
One might wonder what it means for Sally and Soul to be “coincident” after disembodiment: it cannot mean that they are made of the same “matter”, nor that they occupy the same spatial location since Soul is immaterial and non spatially located. In first approximation, (3d) is meant to capture the intuition that “Sally is reduced to just her soul after disembodiment”. In section 2, I will provide a more careful definition of Sally and Soul’s coincidence as mereological coincidence, i.e. being composed by the same things. Of course, this presupposes that Soul is not a mereological atom, a claim which most actual dualists would reject; but this presupposition will not be a problem here since I am not at all in the business of trying to defend the actual plausibility of the dualist model that I discuss. Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting this clarification.
More precisely, the hypothetical philosopher would have to be a Compound Dualist, in Olson’s terminology (Olson 2001): a Simple Dualist holds that the person (even before disembodiment) is just a soul, and not a compound of soul and body. For that reason, a Simple Dualist rejects premise (2d). The Compound Dualist on the other hand is precisely one who endorses premise (2d). Premise (3d) on the other hand is just as much a component of the scenario itself as was premise (3) for the Amputation Paradox.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for bringing my attention to this point.
We will not discuss here the question whether Sally’s Body also continues to exist (as a corpse) or whether it ceases to exist altogether (the corpse being a thing numerically distinct from Sally’s Body). Orthodox Thomists are adamant that the latter is what happens, but it will play no role in our discussion.
For historical reasons, Survivalism and Corruptionism are mostly discussed, in the contemporary literature, by people who either are historians of Aquinas’ thought, or are Thomists themselves. For that reason, most papers on Survivalism and Corruptionism will include a substantial part discussing the question whether Aquinas himself was a Survivalist or a Corruptionist. See especially (Stump 2006; Toner 2009; Oderberg 2012). For that reason, philosophers are sometimes called “Corruptionists” (Toner, Pasnau) because they defend the view that Aquinas was a Corruptionist, but not because they defend Corruptionism themselves (and similarly for Survivalists). This is not how we will use the terms here: I will sidestep completely the historical question of what Aquinas thought, which has no bearing on the present discussion.
“In cases of putative counter-examples where a disjoint supplement is lacking, we are more inclined to deny that the one object is a proper part of the other at all. That would suggest that WSP is indeed analytic—constitutive of the meaning of ‘proper part’.” (Simons 1987, p. 116).
Cf. footnote 11.
Perhaps one might try to argue for the view that Lumpl is sometimes a proper part of Goliath (see e.g. Koslicki 2008, pp. 180–81), but whether or not there are good arguments for that view, this is certainly not an obvious truth of common sense nor a widely shared basic intuition in the case of the statue and the clay.
From now on, I will use the phrase “the Constitution Theorist” to mean “the Constitution Theorist of the Amputation Paradox”. This is the person I will be arguing against. I will not be arguing against a Constitution Theorist who applies the Constitution View only to cases such as the Statue and the Clay, and doesn’t apply it to the Amputation Paradox. I have no objection against someone who would be a Unique Part Theorist for the Amputation Paradox and a Constitution Theorist for some other cases. That’s why I am not arguing against “the Constitution Theorist” absolutely or strictly speaking.
Even though, as an anonymous reviewer rightly points out, the Constitution Theorist could in principle acknowledge the existence of this remaining intrinsic relation, since the existence of such a relation is perfectly consistent with the Constitution Theory. We will see in the next paragraphs what would happen if the Constitution Theorist explicitly takes into account this relation.
I will come back later on the difficult question whether the parthood relation so understood is an extrinsic relation or an intrinsic relation. What is important in the present argument is only the fact that (i) the other relation, “is a what-it’s-made-of”, is clearly an intrinsic relation, (ii) it is an intrinsic relation that Bob and Brain don’t lose during the Amputation process, and (iii) the parthood relation, be it extrinsic or intrinsic, is grounded in this relation.
As an anonymous reviewer rightly points out, an other classical way to convey the analytic intuition of WSP is the slogan “the whole is greater than the part”. But this slogan, if we regard it not as a mere expression of the intuition of WSP, but as a formulation that helps seeing why it seems to be analytic, seems to me to have two defects, as compared with my formulation of the rationale of the analyticity intuition. One problem is that the slogan uses the word “greater” which seems to be adequate (or at least literally adequate) only for parts and wholes that are situated in space. Therefore it doesn’t seem to capture adequately the generality of the intuition (which should apply also to non material, non spatial, parts and wholes). Second, and more importantly, the slogan involves not only the notion of “part” but also the notion of “whole”. Now, let us grant that it seems to be analytically contained in the notion of a whole that a whole must be made of more than one parts. But is it contained in the notion of part that that which has a part must have more than one parts? That is much less clear, and that is what we want to determine here. It might be that the notion of a whole is not equivalent to the notion of “that which has a part”. Perhaps is it the case that, among the things that have part(s), (we can conceive that) some are wholes (those which have several parts) and others are not wholes (but only things with a unique part). In any case, what I say later about the weighing of opposite analytic intuitions would also apply to this analytic intuition.
I.e. A relation that would still hold between the perfect duplicates of the relata, since the duplicate of the whole must have all the same parts.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting this objection.
What if possible supplementation were itself not asymmetrical? I.e. what if we could think of some x and some y such that: (i) x and y are (now and actually) coincident, (ii) x could be a part of y with a supplement in y, and (iii) y could also be a part of x with a complement in x. This scenario seems to me to be clearly metaphysically impossible. I am not sure I can give more here than my intuition of impossibility, but so long as noone comes up with a counter-example, this intuition of impossibility seems to me to be pretty robust. Possible supplementation is asymmetric, and therefore can account for the asymmetry of (temporarilly or contingently coinciding) parthood.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Claudine Tiercelin, Eric T. Olson and Uriah Kriegel, whose comments on earlier drafts of this paper were extremely helpful. I would like to thank also audiences at Institut Jean Nicod and at Collège de France, especially Olivier Massin, Frédéric Nef, Ghislain Guigon, Guillaume Bucchioni, Grégoire Lefftz and Alexandre Declos. I am grateful to Daniel De Haan, discussions with whom stimulated my first reflections on this topic. Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers for their comments concerning the earlier versions of the paper. This paper was written during my research position at the Collège de France, chaire de Métaphysique et Philosophie de la Connaissance of Professor Claudine Tiercelin.
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Guillon, JB. Coincidence as parthood. Synthese 198 (Suppl 18), 4247–4276 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02105-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02105-z