Parts and Wholes

Abstract

An important set of questions in analytic metaphysics, and one which is often taken to lack real significance and interest from the empiricist/naturalist viewpoint, concerns mereology and its application to the inquiry into the nature of reality. Recall, for example, the question that Putnam takes to be paradigmatic of the uselessness of metaphysics, and that we discussed in Chapter 1: “How many objects are there in a three-particle universe?” If a metaphysical question is to have any significance at all from the naturalistic perspective, it must be somehow connected, at least potentially, to empirical data and scientific theorising. But how can this be done, when all we have to work with are abstract principles endowed with merely formal significance?