Mereological essentialists argue that mereological summations cannot change their parts. Mereological inessentialists argue that mereological summations can change some or all of their parts. In this paper I articulate and defend a position called Moderate Mereological Inessentialism, according to which certain mereological summations can change some, but not all, of their parts. Persistent mer...

Suppose that a material object is gunky: all of its parts are located in space, and each of its parts has a proper part. Does it follow from this hypothesis that the space in which that object resides must itself be gunky? I argue that it does not. There is room for gunky objects in a space that decomposes without remainder into mereological simples.

One can granulate data and information in multiple ways to generate granulation hierarchies. What the characteristics of such hierarchies are and what consequences they have on levels of granularity is, however, left implicit. We propose an explicit representation of such additional information of granulation hierarchies and transform them to granular perspectives. Granular perspectives can be ...

The aim of this paper is to build an upper-level ontology of artifacts. To this end, two formal tools are employed: theory of consequence operation and ontology of states of affairs. It is argued that the adequate representation of an artifact consists of the representation of the artifact’s purposes, the representation of its design, the representation of the background knowledge according to ...

We determine the implicit assumptions and the structure of the Single and Double Cross Calculi within Euclidean geometry, and use these results to guide the construction of analogous calculi in mereogeometry. The systems thus obtained have strong semantic and deductive similarities with the Euclidean-based Cross Calculi although they rely on a different geometry. This fact suggests that putting...

Let us say that space is discrete if and only if every finite extended region of space is composed of finitely many atomic regions of space. I assume here that regions of space are individuals rather than sets of points, and have mereological structure; their parts are all and only their subregions. A region of space is an atomic region if and only if it has no proper parts, i.e., if and only i...

David Armstrong believes in universals. Once universals are accepted, it must also be accepted that they resemble one another to various degrees. Colors, for instance, fall into a complicated multidimensional resemblanceorder. Armstrong claims that all universals are complex universals, and that they resemble one another insofar as they have common universal constituents. Armstrong’s reductive ...

We analyze the rank-frequency distributions of words in selected English and Polish texts. We show that for the lemmatized (basic) word forms the scale-invariant regime breaks after about two decades, while it might be consistent for the whole range of ranks for the inflected word forms. We also find that for a corpus consisting of texts written by different authors the basic scale-invariant re...

Say that mereological harmony is the view that there is at least some mirroring between the mereological structure of material objects and the mereological structure of their locations: each, in some way, mirrors the other. As it turns out, there is a confusing array of systems of harmony available to the substantivalist. In this paper, I attempt to bring some order to these systems. I explore ...

We propose a taxonomy of mereological relations between dispositions, as well as a series of axioms relating the bearers, triggers or realizations of disposition-complexes and disposition-parts. We apply them on a use case to show how basic dispositions can be combined to express elaborate dispositions. We consider whether those relations of partial ordering satisfy axioms of composition and de...