Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Mereology — parts and wholes — composition, individuation of systems and collectives (group: philosophy).
26 of 1352 THEORY documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| THEORY-017 v6 | In a Hilbert-space model only unitarily invariant structure is intrinsic; a basis or tensor factorisation, and so any parts or features, is extra data supplied from outside the space, and the record’s Hilbert-space works differ in where they get it | Carroll (2021), LIT-123: a quantum theory is fixed up to unitary equivalence by the Hamiltonian’s spectrum, and subsystems come from a factorisation that the dynamics must select. Van Rijsbergen (LIT-262) computes only traces and inner products, and treats each observable’s eigenbasis as a “point of view”. DisCoCat’s ε/η composition (LIT-273) is orthogonally covariant, while its Frobenius sequel (LIT-272) stipulates a basis and composes by elementwise product in it. THEORY-004 is the same point for learned representations. This is a synthesis across the four, not a result any one of them states. It does not say that basis-dependent models are wrong; it says what they have assumed. | Active |
| THEORY-043 v6 | A mind of mindless agents and a mind of minded agents are one functionalist move run in two directions, and what separates them is an anti-nesting principle or an architectural criterion, neither yet principled | Minsky’s society of mind builds a mind downward, out of agents that are not minds. Schwitzgebel (LIT-159) builds a candidate mind upward, out of agents that are. The readings agree that agency survives both directions: Block grants a homunculi-head beliefs, List grants organised groups agency and awareness, Levin finds nested goal-pursuing collectives (his “Selves”) at every scale. The dispute narrows to phenomenal consciousness, and every published way to accept the downward move while refusing the upward one is either an anti-nesting principle (Putnam’s stipulation, IIT’s exclusion postulate, Kammerer’s functional version), each introduced for or justified weakly by the verdict it gives, or an architectural criterion that would count against a loosely coupled society of mind as much as against a nation. Proposed: an account of where a dispute stands, from philosophical argument and no measurement. | Proposed |
| THEORY-232 | A whole can be compared in agency with its parts, relative to a chosen decomposition and the parts’ goals: it is more agential when its organization lets the parts resolve more of their mutual constraints than they do at the equilibrium of their former organization, which shows as delayed gratification | Watson (2023), LIT-990, read in full in NOTE-747. A perspective essay’s definition, argued and illustrated, not proved: agency of a whole with respect to its parts is the reduction in the parts’ total frustration at equilibrium that its organization achieves over the old one, shown by directed uphill excursions to lower minima. It is comparative and sets no threshold for an additional agent, and it holds only relative to a stipulated decomposition and stipulated goals for the parts. That bottom-up learning produces such organization is reported from earlier models, not shown here. | Proposed |
| THEORY-443 | Being a biological individual is not being an organism: evolutionary (Darwinian) individuality and physiological individuality come apart, and each is found among parts of organisms and groups of organisms as well as among organisms, so a part or a group can be an individual of one kind and not the other | Wilson and Barker (SEP, 2007; substantive revision 2024), LIT-168, read in NOTE-114. That organisms are not the only biological individuals is argued from examples; that evolutionary and physiological individuality is the most recognised distinction is a survey judgement. The nine-region framework that places each case is the authors’ own and tentative, and its figures draw as disjoint the categories the text says overlap. It offers no criterion of parthood and leaves holobionts open. | Proposed |
| THEORY-448 | On a substance ontology, a gestated foster that is part of the pregnant organism either is no substance, so that mammals begin at birth and the foster is not the later baby, or is part and substance at once, which leaves no consistent count; a process ontology keeps both parthood and foster–neonate identity, at the price of a count between one and two that it does not define | Meincke (2021), LIT-142, read in NOTE-115. The critique of the Parthood View under substance ontology holds on its own and is the paper’s firm contribution. The positive view rests on five process-biology premises assumed for the sake of argument, and is programmatic by the paper’s own word; “something in between one and two” has no formal content. It keeps parthood rather than rejecting it, and it draws no ethical conclusion. | Proposed |
| THEORY-452 | A thing with many equally good candidate boundaries can be counted as one in two ways that cover each other’s failures: supervaluation makes ‘there is one cat’ true on every precisification though no candidate is definitely the cat, and counting by almost-identity, meaning extensive mereological overlap, makes it true enough where the candidates overlap almost completely | Lewis (1993), LIT-1015, read in full in NOTE-722. Two answers to Unger’s problem of the many, offered together. Supervaluation makes “there is one cat” super-true at the granted cost that nothing is super-truly the cat. Almost-identity, which is overlap and not similarity, makes the many candidates “almost one”. It is not transitive and its threshold is left undecided. Each covers a case the other fails: Fred’s house needs supervaluation, and supervaluation is natural only where the candidates differ little. It assumes semantic indecision, perdurance and no natural joint among the candidates. It has no metric, no dynamics and no threshold, so it is a precedent for counting by something weaker than identity, not evidence for any of the record’s claims. | Proposed |
| THEORY-476 | If continuant persons are maximal aggregates of person-stages interrelated by the psychological relation R, then the relation of belonging to one person is R itself, so Parfit’s premises do not show that identity is not what matters; the price is that persons overlap in fission and are counted by a relation weaker than identity | Lewis (1976), LIT-446, read in NOTE-373. Shown: that identity being one-one and all-or-nothing, and what matters branching and coming in degrees, do not entail that identity is not what matters, once stages and continuants are told apart; and that under supervaluation degrees of I-relatedness equal degrees of R-relatedness. Stipulated: that persons are the maximal R-interrelated aggregates. Conceded as costly: counting persons by tensed identity, which “is not a kind of identity”. | Proposed |
| THEORY-493 | From core mereology, classical extensional mereology (GEM) is reached by exactly three pairings of a decomposition principle with an unrestricted-sum principle: Supplementation with Sum2, Strong Supplementation with Sum3, and Complementation with Sum1; Supplementation with Sum3, the pairing given by Simons (1987), does not yield it, because which definition of ‘sum’ is used decides which decomposition axiom is needed | Varzi, SEP “Mereology” (2003, revised June 2026), LIT-124, read in full in NOTE-163. A result the entry reports with citations (Hovda 2009; Cotnoir and Varzi 2019) and a countermodel (its Fig. 4; Pietruszczak 2000a, Pontow 2004), and which corrects Simons (1987), Casati and Varzi (1999) and the entry’s own 2003 edition. The record has not checked the proofs. It is stated for first-order theories with a single primitive P and infinitary principles as axiom schemas, and it is a fact about axiom systems: it does not say classical mereology is true of anything. | Active |
| THEORY-507 | Any system with the same fine-grained functional organisation as a conscious system has qualitatively the same experiences, with natural though not metaphysical necessity, because otherwise a neuron-by-neuron replacement would yield either a rational subject systematically wrong about its fading experience or experience that flips with a switch nobody could notice; the principle covers only isomorphs, so it says nothing about systems merely similar in kind to a conscious one | Chalmers (1995), LIT-392, read in full in NOTE-347, with the one-page sketch in “Facing Up”, LIT-406 (NOTE-336). A plausibility argument by the author’s own account: the fading- and dancing-qualia conditionals are strong given the replacement series; their rejection rests on a premise about self-knowledge drawn from familiar cases. It extends to a population of people implementing a person’s neurons, so it rules out absolute anti-nesting for isomorphs. It does not reach any system that is not an isomorph of something conscious, which includes every actual AI system and every group. | Proposed |
| THEORY-512 | The extended-mind thesis worth disputing is that external entities partly constitute a subject’s mental states in virtue of the subject’s sensorimotor interaction with them; so stated it can reach standing belief but not consciousness, if consciousness needs information directly available for global control, since perception makes availability indirect | Chalmers (2019), LIT-415, read in NOTE-356, and his foreword to Clark’s book (2008), LIT-421, read in NOTE-369. The 1998 thesis is satisfied by wired-in “extended circuits” that its critics accept, so the controversial thesis is constitution through perception and action. The perception-action boundary is then the strongest objection, met by revisionism, not refuted. Consciousness does not extend this way, on an imported criterion (direct availability, “not mediated by other mental states”) and on the absence of any working twin case. Both halves are proposals defended against a few cases; the criterion is the author’s earlier correlate of consciousness, not an argument made here. | Proposed |
| THEORY-514 | Self-maintenance through closure of constraints does not single out organisms, since colonies, holobionts, symbioses and ecosystems meet it too, so a persister criterion applied at whatever level meets it turns organisms into parts; what is proposed to mark organisms is that they can also induce, control and come through phases of destabilised organisation and reach a new closure regime, though that only organisms can do so is asserted | Baedke (2025), LIT-167, read in full in NOTE-148. The negative half, that persister criteria are too permissive, is argued from the literature: closure has been applied to symbioses, ecosystems and eusocial colonies, and Mossio (2024) concedes that “organized systems are not necessarily organisms”. The positive half, the overcomer, is drawn “with rough brushstrokes” (p. 51) from three cases, two of which are lineage-level evolution or colony-triggered plasticity, and its uniqueness to organisms is asserted, with the one contrast (colony against ant) presupposing its verdict. Proposed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-528 | The cases offered for extended cognition are explained at least as well by embedded cognition, on which the organism leans heavily on external props, and memory research finds that external stores lack the interference, generation effect and power-law learning and forgetting of internal memory, so a kind spanning both does no explanatory work and conservatism favours the embedded account | Rupert (2004), LIT-422, read in NOTE-343. The past-endorsement dilemma is strong: without it, directory assistance makes Otto believe every listed number; with it, the organism’s endorsement is the final authority. The memory comparisons are moderate: the internal side is cited research, the external side is thought experiment, and no experiment on an external store is run or cited. The step from “different fine-grained kinds” to “no useful coarse kind” is a challenge plus conservatism. | Proposed |
| THEORY-540 | For moral purposes the body is bounded below by depth: objects whose real definitions are too microphysically committal are not body parts though they are parts in the ordinary sense, and bodily rights and interests concern only events that change the body’s high-level properties, so a brain-computer interface user’s implemented software can be a body part while the third-party server running it is not | Register (2025), LIT-138, read in full in NOTE-151. An argument from cases. It assumes that BCIs can be body parts and that no part of a person may be owned by another, and uses depth to reconcile the user’s unqualified bodily ownership with the operator’s property in the server. The two moral principles are its operative premises, and it says they do not depend on the real-definition ontology, which only explains them. The threshold for “high-level” is context-sensitive and unfixed, and the step that software and server are distinct coinciding objects is hedged. The conflict over servers is narrowed, not dissolved. | Proposed |
| THEORY-549 | A structured group is not identical to its members: two groups of one kind can have the same members at every time and still be two, which theories that identify a group with a plurality, fusion, aggregate or set of its members cannot allow, and a view of groups as realizations of structures with functionally defined nodes can | Ritchie (2013, online 2012), LIT-479, read in NOTE-390, with its 2018 sequel LIT-486 (NOTE-389). Six criteria for a theory of groups, each defended by one example, rule out non-singular pluralities, Sider’s fusions, Burge’s aggregates and Effingham’s sets; the decisive one is Coincidence. Groups as realized structures meet all six. The refutations are strong given the criteria; the criteria rest on single cases, and the positive view is a four-page sketch with no persistence conditions. It says nothing about agency or minds. | Proposed |
| THEORY-582 | Causal coupling between a process and something outside it does not by itself make that thing part of the process, so an argument from coupling to extended cognition needs a further premise saying what makes a process cognitive | Adams & Aizawa (2001), LIT-438, read in NOTE-368, and their reply to Clark (2010, read from a draft), LIT-455, read in NOTE-380. A thermostat’s bimetallic strip, the kidney’s filtration and a nerve at a neuromuscular junction are each coupled to more than themselves, and their processes do not extend. The 2010 text names the inference the “coupling-constitution fallacy”. The point is that coupling does not entail parthood. It is not shown that coupling never accompanies parthood, nor that the extended-mind authors relied on coupling alone. | Active |
| THEORY-583 | An agent is the set of parts that pursue a goal together, bounded by the farthest events it can sense and try to regulate; cells joined by bioelectric coupling share measurements and so form larger agents with larger goals without ceasing to be agents, so a living system is many nested agents, not one, and cancer is the larger agent shrinking back to the cell | Levin (2019), LIT-439, a hypothesis-and-theory essay read in full in NOTE-341. A definition of the Self as a goal-pursuing collective, tied to a mechanism, gap-junctional coupling, from cited experiments on patterning and cancer. It has no model, no measurement of the light cone and no new data. Its goals are cybernetic set points, so any homeostat is a Self. Its Self is an agent and an individual, not a subject. The sentence against IIT’s single Self is a bracket, and the closing remarks on experience are labelled speculation. | Proposed |
| THEORY-585 v2 | In the Döring–Isham scheme for realising collections of systems in topoi, disjoint sums of quantum systems compose exactly; along a tensor product of finite-dimensional systems, the pull-back of a constituent’s quantity agrees with the composite’s own quantity at a context exactly when every projection in it with proper support on the first factor has the form P⊗1, so it fails for every non-scalar quantity and no operator on the composite realises the pull-back | Döring & Isham, paper IV (2007/8), LIT-310 (NOTE-285), restated in LIT-378 §§11–13 (NOTE-326). Classical physics satisfies the translation condition (3.18) exactly. For quantum disjoint sums the pull-back of δ̆(A₁⊕A₂) is δ̆(A₁) (Lemma 4.2, 4.24; checked). For H₁⊗H₂ the pull-back gives δ(Â₁)_{V_W}⊗1̂ at each context W, which equals δ(Â₁⊗1̂)_W on contexts V₁⊗ℂ1̂. That it differs elsewhere, and that no operator realises it, are asserted. The rules are “partly experimental”, and the trivial-system rule contradicts the series’ own definition of contexts. | Active |
| THEORY-589 | No principle of mereology is merely a fixing of what ‘part’ means: even reflexivity, transitivity and antisymmetry face counterexamples that do not rest on equivocation, and every principle beyond them is contested, so classical mereology is one substantive theory among several and not a neutral default | Varzi, SEP “Mereology”, LIT-124, read in full in NOTE-163. The entry’s verdict, reached by surveying counterexample families: Antisymmetry “can hardly be regarded as constitutive”, and most ordinary-language objections to Reflexivity and Transitivity equivocate, leaving the metaphysical ones. It is the author’s informal argument, and he is a known extensionalist who gives that side the last word on extensionality. Its headline that “all composition principles turn out to be controversial” is stronger than its own verdict that bounds for overlapping things are “rather uncontroversial”. It corrects the record’s earlier summary, which called the partial-order core uncontroversial. | Proposed |
| THEORY-591 | Cognition has two necessary marks, involving non-derived content and a distinctive kind of causal processing, and as a contingent fact only processes in the brain have both, so notebooks, screens and tools coupled to a thinker are not parts of cognition, and human-plus-tool systems will support no science of their own | Adams & Aizawa (2001), LIT-438, read in NOTE-368, restated against Clark in 2010, LIT-455, read in NOTE-380 from a draft. Both marks are assumed: the first on a claimed consensus, the second on how mature sciences individuate kinds. The authors grant the parity principle and that cognition could extend; the claim is that it does not. The “no science of tool use” half is offered as a bet. Rupert, the other critic, rejects the derived-content argument as question-begging. | Proposed |
| THEORY-622 | Spatial boundaries are bona fide where a spatial discontinuity or a heterogeneity of material is present and fiat where they exist only by demarcation; the two obey different topologies, distinct bodies are never in bona fide contact, so any whole of separate bodies is a fiat object, and real properties of the material still enable and constrain where fiat boundaries can be drawn | Smith & Varzi (2000), LIT-1024, read in full in NOTE-721. A typology with a formal sketch: ordinary closure topology for bona fide boundaries, and a Brentanian theory of coinciding boundaries for fiat ones, which are parts of what they bound. The test is whether a discontinuity is there, not who or what made it. The theory is spatial, synchronic and pitched at the common-sense level; it has no models or consistency result, and the typology is stipulated by examples. It does not map onto the record’s produced/imposed distinction, and it classifies the record’s combined forms as fiat without choosing among them. | Proposed |
| THEORY-644 | Panpsychism escapes dualism’s problem of mental causation only in its constitutive Russellian form, where micro-experiences constitute macro-experience; that form meets three combination problems, of subjects, qualities and structure, and every response that avoids combining (emergent, autonomous or identity panpsychism) gives back the advantage in mental causation or revised physics, while the combinatorial responses remain unworked | Chalmers (2016/2017), LIT-395, read in full in NOTE-358 from the April 2015 draft. A map of the problem, not a solution or an impossibility proof, and the author says so. The dilemma is argued case by case; the strongest arguments against constitutive panpsychism, subject-summing and structural mismatch, rest on conceivability premises and on a structure-preservation principle called plausible, not shown. The verdicts on which responses are most promising are judgements of promise. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1287 | The experiments mechanists use to find a mechanism’s components (correlation, lesion, stimulation, and intervening on the whole while recording the parts) run in both directions between part and whole and, by Craver and Bechtel’s own account, show only prima facie that an item is a component, because an item not interactively integrated into the system could be a background condition; they give no test of integration, so the experiments do not by themselves fix where a mechanism ends | Craver and Bechtel (2007), LIT-1928, pp. 553–554, read in NOTE-1491. The four kinds of interlevel experiment “share a form with Mill’s methods” and are symmetrical. A lesion deficit is “only prima facie” evidence of componency, since a part “not interactively integrated” may be a background condition (n. 10). “Integrated” is never defined, and nothing in the four experiments tests where the system’s edge is. That leaves the mechanism’s boundary to be fixed some other way. | Active |
| THEORY-1288 | If a mechanism’s behaviour supervenes on its constituents’ behaviours and constitution is not causal, every cause of that behaviour is also a cause of some constituent along another path, so no intervention can change the whole without separately changing a part; mutual manipulability by ideal interventions is then unsatisfiable, and once interventions are relaxed to admit these common causes, every model with constitutive dependence has a model without it that implies the same correlations under every manipulation, even in ideal experimental conditions | Baumgartner & Gebharter (2016), LIT-1934, pp. 10–13, 18–20, and Baumgartner & Casini (2017), LIT-1939, pp. 6–11; restated by Baumgartner, Casini & Krickel (2020) as Systematic Fat-Handedness. Read in NOTE-1493 and NOTE-1490. Active as a conditional: valid on supervenience and non-causal constitution, and checked step by step. It does not say that constitution cannot be known, only that no finite set of manipulations of whole and part shows it; and it is about simultaneous whole–part dependence, not about a diachronic cause inside a system, which can be intervened on surgically. | Active |
| THEORY-1291 | Within levels of mechanisms, apparent top-down and bottom-up causes can be read as mechanistically mediated effects, intralevel causation among components together with the constitution of the whole by them, so that the relation between levels is constitution and not causation; Craver and Bechtel show the translation for six cases, on the assumption, not argued, that every higher-level cause has a mechanistic explanation | Craver and Bechtel (2007), LIT-1928, read in NOTE-1491. Parts and wholes are not distinct events. So, given transmission, distinctness or asymmetry views of causation, they cannot be cause and effect, and the symmetry of interlevel experiments is explained by constitution. The six worked cases translate. The account says nothing about whether a feedback loop crossing the mechanism’s boundary changes the analysis, and its generality is assumed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1293 | Given that every change in a phenomenon is simultaneously realized by some constituent on every lower level, that simultaneous changes are not causally related, that co-occurrence is transitive, and that the parts and their levels are already known, a single intervention that changes a part and the phenomenon simultaneously while directly changing at most one behaviour on each lower level shows that the part is a constituent; the condition presupposes the boundary and the level hierarchy it is applied to and cannot supply them | Baumgartner, Casini & Krickel (2020), LIT-1924, §§3–4, read in NOTE-1494. Active as a conditional: the eight-line reductio is valid on Universal Constitution, Simultaneity and transitivity of co-occurrence, and checked. It does not say such interventions exist in any real system, that the condition is necessary, or where the boundary lies; and its line between causation and constitution is simultaneity, which is sharp only at a fixed time resolution. | Active |
| THEORY-1294 | Constitution is best inferred, and only abductively, from the failure to break a coupling: a set of parts constitutes a phenomenon when every cause of the phenomenon is also a cause of some member of the set, no smaller set does as much, and no expansion of the variables studied turns up a cause of the phenomenon that spares them all, so constitutive relevance is fixed by the set a part belongs to and no finite series of experiments settles it | Baumgartner & Casini (2017), LIT-1939, §§4–5, their No De-Coupling account, developing the fat-handedness criterion of Baumgartner & Gebharter (2016), LIT-1934, pp. 20–22. Read in NOTE-1490 and NOTE-1493. Proposed: a definition offered with no operationalization and no case from practice, which the authors say themselves. It does not say how far a variable set must be expanded, and it takes parthood as given. | Proposed |