ILLUSIONS OF GUNK

Gunk, Topology and Measure

Atoms, Gunk, and the Limits of 'composition'

This predicate1 has played a central role in the debate on the special composition question and on related metaphysical issues concerning the mereological structure of objects. In this note we show that the characterization in (1) is nonetheless inadequate. We do so by constructing a mereological model M where everything qualifies as composed of atoms even though some elements in the domain are...

The Structure of Gunk: Adventures in the Ontology of Space

Here are two ways space might be (not the only two): (1) Space is “pointy”. Every finite region has infinitely many infinitesimal, indivisible parts, called points. Points are zero-dimensional atoms of space. In addition to points, there are other kinds of “thin” boundary regions, like surfaces of spheres. Some regions include their boundaries—the closed regions—others exclude them—the open reg...

Overdistribution Illusions

Overdistribution is a form of memory distortion in which an event is remembered as belonging to too many episodic states, states that are logically or empirically incompatible with each other. We investigated a response formatting method of suppressing 2 basic types of overdistribution, disjunction and conjunction illusions, which parallel some classic illusions in the judgment and decision mak...

Auditory Illusions