This is a short and *really* rough draft of some thoughts on composition. It’s really just some thoughts that were kicking around in my head for a while that I finally got down on paper. I ran the general idea by Dan Korman, who seemed to be unbothered by it, which in turn made me more bothered by it. Anyway, it may only make sense to people who know something about the composition debate (Kristin, I’m looking at you), but I’d appreciate anyone’s thoughts on it. Again, it’s super rough, and maybe just deeply confused. But who knows!
EDIT (02/28/13): I’ve done some more thinking/work on this paper, so I’m linking the new draft here. I’m also adding an “abstract” (basically the first two paragraphs of the paper), but at least you can see what the paper is about before clicking on the link, which is a serious commitment.
Abstract: Much of the recent work in contemporary metaphysics has been focused around the ontological problem of composition. One of the central issues in the debate has been coined the “special composition question”: the question of when and under what conditions objects combine so as to constitute or compose another object. But philosophers are not the only ones concerned with something called “composition.” Scientists—physicists and chemists specifically—also study a phenomenon they call “composition.” This phenomenon (which I will call p-composition, for “physical composition”) occurs via electromagnetism, and it is the process by which atoms combine to compose chemical molecules and compounds, and by which those compounds compose cells and macroscopic objects. This, at least structurally, seems very similar to the phenomenon that philosophers are interested in (which I will call m-composition, for “metaphysical composition”), though it’s less clear by what process this kind of composition is supposed to occur. Both phenomena seem to be processes by which entities or objects might come to compose further objects, and become parts of those further objects. But there is at least one key difference between the two apparently distinct conceptions of composition: p-composition is a natural, empirical phenomenon, whereas m-composition is generally taken to be a conceptual or a priori matter. I will argue in this paper that having these two different conceptions of composition at play leads to some interesting puzzles, ones that raise questions about what is really being argued about in the metaphysical composition debate. These puzzles, I will suggest, should at least raise the question of whether we really need a unique concept and theory of m-composition.
Here’s a link to the paper: Do We Need A Theory of Metaphysical Composition?
No comments yet.