NOTE-115: Meincke — A process view of pregnancy

Contribution

The paper adds a third answer to “how many individuals are present where we see a pregnant individual?”. The two existing answers are two (the Containment View, usually paired with the Two Individuals View) and one (Kingma’s Parthood View, usually paired with the One Individual View). Meincke’s answer is a non-integer count, “something in between one and two” (§4.3). It rests on treating organisms as processes. Her critical contribution is to show that the two versions of the Parthood View are unstable under substance ontology. One version gives up the foster–neonate identity. In the other, “there is no consistent way of counting” (§3.2, with Kingma 2018: 181). The critique holds on its own, whether or not the positive view is accepted.

Key insight

Parthood and count are separate questions, and substance ontology is what welds them together. For a substance, parts “do not count extra” and existence is all-or-nothing. On that framework, “the foster is a part” forces the count to one and “the foster is a substance” forces it to two. For a process, identity is compatible with change and emergence is gradual. So the foster can be a part of the gravida and also numerically (processually) identical with the neonate, without being a full-blown individual. The count then follows the degree of completed bifurcation, the way a river that is splitting is neither strictly one river nor two (§4.3).

Assumptions

• Five process-biology premises, assumed “for the sake of argument” and defended elsewhere (Meincke 2018b, 2019a, c, 2020b, forthcoming b) (§4.1): (1) living processes have varying degrees of unity and stability, reached through interactive self-stabilisation; (2) organisms are higher-level living processes constituted by, and not identical with, lower-level ones; (3) that constitution is autopoiesis (Maturana & Varela 1980), and the higher level cannot be reduced to its parts; (4) an organism’s identity over time is intrinsically dynamic and processual; (5) synchronic identity is an abstraction from diachronic identity, since “there is no change, no process, at an instant”.
• Definition of ‘process’: “an entity for whose identity change is essential”, as against a ‘thing’, “for whose identity change is not essential” (§4.1).
• Definition of ‘individual’ (fn 1): “any entity that, under some sufficiently fundamental description, counts as one entity”.
• Kingma’s four entanglement criteria, taken as empirically established: homeostasis/physiology, metabolic/functional integration, topological continuity, and immunological tolerance (§2, citing Kingma 2019: 622ff.).
• The foster–neonate identity intuition is treated as a datum any view must respect (§3.2, §5).
• Traditional substance ontology is taken to say that parts of substances are not substances and do not count extra, and that substances exist “either fully or not at all” (fn 65, quoting Smith & Brogaard 2003: 50).
• Scope: placental mammals only, for heuristic reasons (fn 7). Wider application is sketched only in fn 69.
• Identity is processual, not Leibnizian. The foster–baby identity “permits the gain and loss of properties over time” (fn 67). This non-standard notion of identity carries the positive view.

Key results

This is a philosophical argument, so the results are the argued positions.

• §2 Containment View. It is rooted in Aristotelian hylomorphism (the “flowerpot model”), which explains why it usually comes with the Two Individuals View. Meincke accepts Kingma’s negative case as “compelling”: the foster is entangled in all four respects and cannot move freely in and out, and birth is irreversible. The view is consistent but “obsolete” on the empirical evidence.
• §3.1 The sense of parthood. Kingma’s “common-sense” parthood is “unhelpfully vague”. The kidney analogy fails because organs are stable and contribute to survival, while fosters come and go. The reproductive-organ reading fails because “the former produce; the latter are produced”. What remains is a sui generis “fostal” parthood that has not yet been worked out.
• §3.2 Parthood under substance ontology, as two versions:
  • Parts-of-Substances: the foster is a non-substantial part, so mammalian organisms begin at birth and the count is one until birth. It is consistent, but it gives up foster–neonate identity.
  • Substances-as-Parts: the foster is a part and a substance. This faces three problems. (a) Nothing now separates fosters from organs, since Kingma grants that kidneys, spermatozoa and milk teeth “can all become substances”. (b) The notion of substance becomes “thin, deflationary and uninformative”. (c) A counting problem follows: substancehood from about day 4–5 or day 16 (depending on where the foster’s boundary is drawn, Kingma 2018: 183ff.) gives two, parthood gives one, and possibly three from day 16 (fn 26).
  • Conclusion: the second version is “not even a coherent option”, so under substance ontology the Parthood View “as such is unacceptable”.
• §4.2 The Process View. A gestating organism is a “hypercomplex higher-level autopoietic process”. It incorporates and maintains an internal, dynamical and asymmetrical relation with a complex of lower-level processes that is “potentially or rudimentarily” a higher-level autopoietic process of the same kind of realisation. Integration dominates early in pregnancy and “emancipation” late (the example is the active suppression of fostal immune responses until the third trimester, citing McGovern 2017).
• Existential dependence (§4.2, formal statement). “Necessarily, the foster exists only if an organism that gestates it (a gravida) exists, and it is not the case that, necessarily, the gestating organism (the gravida) exists only if a foster exists.” The dependence is non-rigid (on some gravida, as surrogacy shows) and holds only on an extensional reading of ‘gravida’.
• §4.3 The count. The “How many…?” question “cannot have a natural number as an answer”. The foster is “something in between zero and one”, and the pregnant individual is “something in between one and two”. Asymmetric dependence does not entail oneness (the analogy is the British Isles’ mild climate and the Gulf Stream). Being offspring is why the foster must add to the count.
• §4.3 Birth. Birth is itself an extended process (in humans about fourteen hours on average for first births and eight hours otherwise), and there is no exact moment of birth (fn 60). The bifurcation continues through lactation. Breastfeeding mother and offspring are “still … something between one and two”.
• §5 Reconciliation. Parthood and foster–neonate identity can both be kept. The foster is a part, and it is processually identical with the baby, but it is “not yet a full-blown individual”.

Claims

id	claim	strength	support
C1	The Containment View is logically consistent but empirically untenable.	moderate	Adopts Kingma’s (2018, 2019, 2020b) four entanglement criteria and the free-movement test (§2); no new empirical work
C2	Kingma’s parthood is either an inapt organ analogy or an unexplicated sui generis relation.	moderate	Informal argument: survival contribution and temporal profile of organs vs fosters, “produce/produced” (§3.1)
C3	Under substance ontology, “Substances-as-Parts” parthood is incoherent, not just counterintuitive.	moderate	Dilemma argument (deflationary vs robust substance) plus the counting problem (§3.2, fns 27–28); it depends on Kingma’s own concessions (kidneys etc. “can become substances”)
C4	So under substance ontology the Parthood View as a whole is unacceptable.	weak–moderate	Follows from C3 together with the premise that losing foster–neonate identity is unacceptable. That premise is taken from Kingma’s intuition, not argued (§3.2)
C5	Organisms are autopoietic processes whose identity is processual.	assertion here	Assumed “for the sake of argument”, defended in other works (§4.1)
C6	A pregnant organism is an asymmetrically bifurcating hypercomplex process.	informal argument	Conceptual redescription plus selected embryology and immunology (McGovern 2017; Howes 2007, 2008) (§4.2)
C7	The foster depends existentially, non-rigidly and asymmetrically on some gravida.	moderate	Formal statement plus the IVF/surrogacy and budding examples (§4.2)
C8	The count of a pregnant individual is not a natural number: between one and two (between one and three for twins).	weak	River-bifurcation analogy, which the author says is not an identity (“Identity is not to be asked of an analogy”, fn 53), plus the offspring argument. No account of what a non-integer count is. Non-additivity is only named (fn 59, citing Meincke 2020b)
C9	Bifurcation continues after birth (“postnatal pregnancy”).	weak	Examples (wildebeest calves vs human infants), lactation as ongoing entanglement (§4.3)
C10	The Process View, unlike its rivals, keeps both parthood and foster–neonate identity.	moderate, conditional	Holds if C5 and processual (non-Leibnizian) identity are granted (fn 67). Without them, the identity claim is relabelled rather than secured
C11	The abstract says the Process View “surpasses the substance ontological approaches”.	weak as stated	The body shows problems for substance-based Parthood and accepts that Containment is consistent. It argues for the positive view only programmatically (fn 52). The headline claims more than the body delivers

Method

Conceptual analysis in analytic metaphysics and philosophy of biology. It reconstructs the rival views, draws out their substance-ontological commitments, and argues by dilemma against Kingma’s Parthood View (§3.2). It then builds a process-ontological redescription on autopoiesis theory, using analogy (a bifurcating river, budding hydra and plants, the Gulf Stream) and selected empirical findings from embryology and reproductive immunology. It has no formal mereology, no model and no data of its own.

Concepts

• foster: the gestated entity across all developmental stages, at least from implantation (fn 2, after Smith & Brogaard 2003).
• gravida: the organism pregnant with a foster. The term carries no mereotopological commitment (fn 3).
• Containment View / Parthood View: Kingma’s (2019) terms (fn 4). On the first the foster is merely contained, like a tenant. On the second it is a part.
• Two / One Individuals View: the count claims, logically independent of the containment/parthood claims (§1).
• Parts-of-Substances vs Substances-as-Parts Parthood View: Meincke’s names for Kingma’s two horns. In the first the foster is a non-substantial part, and in the second it is a part that is also a substance (§3.2).
• process: an entity for whose identity change is essential (§4.1).
• hypercomplex process: a higher-level autopoietic process whose complexity includes a cross-level diachronic complexity resulting from bifurcation, i.e. it “produces more than just itself” (§4.2, fns 38, 44). Pregnancy is “autopoietic autopoiesis-poiesis”, a form of “top-down allopoiesis” (fn 40).
• internal relation: not the technical thin sense. It is a relation that “intra-actively” (Barad) produces one of its relata (§4.2).
• asymmetrical bifurcation: a complex of processes splitting off from a larger one, with what splits off ontologically dependent on its source (§4.2).
• processual identity: an identity relation that allows gain and loss of properties and does not comply with Leibniz’s Law. It is distinct from four-dimensionalist genidentity (fn 67).
• postnatal pregnancy: the continuation of asymmetric bifurcation after birth, chiefly through lactation (§4.3).

Connections

The main foil is Kingma (2018, 2019, 2020a, b), whose negative case against Containment the paper adopts and whose positive Parthood View it criticises. Smith & Brogaard (2003) are the explicit defenders of the Containment View. The paper builds on Meincke’s own earlier work on process ontology and autopoiesis (2018b, 2019a, 2020b) and on Dupré and Nicholson & Dupré (2018). It credits Dupré (2020: 161) with the suggestion that pregnancy is “a gradual bifurcation in a flow of living process”, without a worked-out view (fn 55). It separates itself from Martinez Quintero & De Jaegher (2020), whose “not one, not two” is a symmetric relational organisation (fns 51, 56), and it cites Howes (2008) for an immunological ‘not-one-but-not-two model’. It rejects four-dimensionalist analyses, on which gravida and foster are two overlapping spacetime worms “from start to finish” (fn 67).

Related works in this record:

• LIT-124 (SEP, Mereology). Its §5, “Indeterminacy and Fuzziness”, asks whether parthood can be indeterminate (the loosening whisker) and whether that calls for revising bivalent principles like extensionality. Meincke’s view is a biological instance of that concern, but she claims more: an indeterminate count, not only indeterminate parthood. She uses none of that entry’s machinery, and in particular she does not decide between the ontic (de re) and semantic (de dicto) readings that §5 distinguishes. Her wording (“flows naturally from the processual constitution”) leans de re.
• LIT-168 (SEP, Biological Individuals). Kingma’s criteria are physiological criteria of individuality in that entry’s sense. Fn 9 records Kingma’s (2020a) mixed verdict on evolutionary (Clarke-style) criteria and Grose’s (2020) evolutionary “two organisms” verdict. Meincke’s argument works on the physiological or organismal side and does not settle the evolutionary side.
• LIT-005 and LIT-049 (Bourrat on individuality). Both make individuality graded or description-relative: interventional information and a coarse-graining “worth its cost”. This fits Meincke’s definition of an individual as what counts as one “under some sufficiently fundamental description” (fn 1) and her rejection of an all-or-nothing count. The paper does not cite Bourrat, and the parallel is mine.
• LIT-138 (Register, The Depth of the Body). It shares the mereology-of-the-body question from the other direction: which high-level things count as body parts. The paper does not cite it (it predates Register 2025).

Bearing on the record

For identity and mereology it is a clear case in which the ontology decides the count, and it is worth pairing with LIT-124 §5 whenever indeterminate parthood or count comes up. Nothing in it bears on ML practice, and nothing belongs in the Anthology of the SOTA. The only abstract analogy is individuation by degree in systems that split, such as model forks or distillation lineages, and the paper has no evidence bearing on it. The skim’s summary should be amended so that it does not suggest parthood is rejected (see corrections).

Limitations

• The positive view is explicitly programmatic: “explicating the details is a separate task for future work” (fn 52).
• The load-bearing premises (C5, processual identity) are assumed here. A substance ontologist who rejects them has only §3 to answer.
• “Something in between one and two” has no formal content. The paper gives no measure, no degree function, no account of non-additivity beyond a citation, and no engagement with the metaphysics of vagueness. It also runs together alternative formulations: “both” one and two, and “neither strictly one nor strictly two” (§4.3).
• The river analogy is disclaimed as an identity (fn 53), yet it is the main support for the count claim.
• The ethical implications (abortion, surrogacy, moral status) are raised in fns 8 and 39 and in the “reproductive labour” remark, but they are not pursued. The author draws no normative conclusion, so none should be attributed to her.
• The empirical base is selective (for example McGovern 2017, Howes 2007 and 2008), and the paper does not survey the competing “foreign-foetus” immunology, which it notes only to reject (fn 46).
• The scope is placental mammals (fn 7). Wider applicability is asserted in fn 69.

Open questions

• What is a count “between one and two”? It could be a degree of individuality, a vague cardinality, or indeterminate identity. Which reading of indeterminacy in LIT-124 §5 fits, and does non-additivity (fn 59) have a coherent formal model?
• Does processual identity (fn 67) do more than rename the foster–neonate identity datum? And what separates it from genidentity once four-dimensionalism is set aside?
• Would evolutionary criteria of individuality (LIT-168, and the graded information-theoretic accounts in LIT-005 and LIT-049) give the same gradual verdict, or Grose’s “two”?
• Where does “postnatal pregnancy” end, and does the view extend in a principled way to non-mammalian matrotrophy (fn 69)?

Corrections to the seeded skim

• The skim (“neither the Containment View nor the Parthood View can capture”) makes the Process View sound like a rival to parthood. It is not. Meincke says the ontology “that can serve the Parthood View’s needs is process ontology” (§4.1). She keeps the claim that the foster is a part of the gravida, as a sui generis part, and calls it “true” but insufficient (§5). What she rejects is Parthood-with-substance-ontology. She also denies that her view is “just a version of the Parthood View”, because it puts “transition instead of composition” (§5).
• The skim does not report that the Containment View is granted to be “logically consistent but unconvincing on empirical grounds” (§1). It is rejected on Kingma’s four entanglement criteria, not for incoherence. Only the Parthood View is charged with contradiction.
• The skim puts the “substance from conception or about 14–16 days” point under “The Containment View”. In the text it opens §3.2, as the standard neo-Aristotelian background to the Parthood discussion.
• The skim misses two further conclusions. Birth does not finish the bifurcation: through breastfeeding there is “something like postnatal pregnancy” (§4.3). And a twin pregnancy is “something between one and three” under a stated “principle of non-additivity” (fn 59).
• The skim says the “Substances-as-Parts” version “contradicts itself when it tries to secure the foster–neonate identity”. More exactly, it faces a dilemma (§3.2). Either “substance” is deflationary, so that foster, organs and organisms collapse together and identity is merely stipulated, or it is robust and contradicts the parthood claim. Meincke adds that this makes it “not even a coherent option”, unlike the dilemma as Kingma posed it.
• The dossier’s open question (ontic vagueness vs indeterminacy of count) has an answer. The paper places the vagueness in the world: it “flows naturally from the processual constitution of organisms” (§5). It gives no logic or semantics for a non-integer count, however, and it does not engage the vagueness or indeterminacy literature.