Anne Sophie Meincke (2021), Philosophical Studies 179(5):1495–1521 (May 2022) — DOI-10.1007/s11098-021-01716-y
Key takeaways
- Because organisms are processes rather than substances, a pregnant individual — an asymmetrically bifurcating hypercomplex autopoietic process — is neither one individual nor two but something in between, which neither the Containment View nor the Parthood View can capture.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-115. What follows is what the work says about itself.
Meincke asks how many individuals are present where there is a pregnant individual. Within substance ontology only two answers are available: two, on the dominant Containment View (the foetus sits in the gestating organism as in a container), or one, on Kingma’s Parthood View (the foetus is a part of the gestating organism). She proposes a third: a pregnant individual is neither one nor two but something in between, because organisms are better understood as processes than as substances. Focusing on the Parthood View, she argues that a Process View, on which the pregnant individual is a bifurcating hypercomplex process, does better than either substance-based view.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 45 seconds of active reading over 1 session. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-115 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as the clearest short worked case of process ontology changing a counting and parthood question, and for its sharp internal critique of Kingma’s Parthood View (§3.2). Its positive view is a programmatic sketch, as the paper itself says (fn 52), and it rests on five process-biology premises that are assumed rather than argued here.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-115, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: medium — moderate engagement (t = 45 s); the skim captures the argument, but it is a clear, citable application of process ontology to individuality.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-115 is that reading):
- A worked case where process ontology changes the answer to a counting and identity question; relevant to biological individuality (LIT-168) and mereology (LIT-124).
- Check whether “something in between one and two” is ontic vagueness or indeterminacy of count, and how it squares with the vagueness options in the SEP mereology entry (§5).
- The view has ethical implications around pregnancy that the paper largely sets aside; any use should report them neutrally and as the author’s own.
Access when seeded: link.springer.com blocks automated fetches (client challenge); the full open-access (CC BY) text came from Europe PMC’s JATS XML (PMC9162972) and was read by section; online date from Crossref.