Mereology is the study of the relations between parts and wholes. It asks what it means for one thing to be a part of another, how parts compose wholes, and whether composition is governed by universal principles or context-dependent conditions.
Classical mereology (Stanisław Leśniewski, Nelson Goodman) treats parthood as a partial order and typically adopts unrestricted composition: any collection of things composes a whole. This yields a Boolean algebra of parts, where the mereological sum of any two things exists.
Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy offers an alternative: wholes are not aggregates of preexisting parts but products of concrescence. Parts acquire their identity through the process that integrates them, not prior to it. This makes mereological structure dependent on the occasion of experience rather than fixed in advance.
In this vault’s research, mereological decomposition appears in the combinatorial scent mereology, where odor compounds are treated as parts of olfactory wholes. The question of how parts constitute wholes — whether composition is free or constrained by relational context — connects mereology to the broader project of relationality, where relations constitute their relata rather than joining preexisting entities.
Related terms
- Concrescence — process-philosophical alternative to aggregative composition
- Eternal object — qualities as potentials for mereological ingression
- Actual occasion — the wholes produced by concrescence
- Combinatorial scent mereology — applied mereology in olfactory research
- Heyting algebra — the algebraic structure that replaces Boolean mereology in constructive settings