Source
Meincke (2021), “One or two? A Process View of pregnancy”, Philosophical Studies 179(5): 1495–1521, LIT-142, read in NOTE-115 from the open-access text.
What was actually shown
Containment (§2). The view that the foster sits in the gestating organism as in a container is “logically consistent but unconvincing on empirical grounds” (§1). Meincke adopts Kingma’s negative case: the foster is entangled by homeostasis, metabolic integration, topological continuity and immunological tolerance, and cannot move freely in and out.
Parthood under substance ontology (§3). Kingma’s common-sense parthood is “unhelpfully vague”: fosters are not like kidneys, since organs are stable and contribute to survival while fosters come and go, and not like reproductive organs, since “the former produce; the latter are produced” (§3.1). Two versions remain (§3.2).
- Parts-of-Substances: the foster is a part and no substance. Consistent, but mammals then begin at birth, and foster–neonate identity is lost.
- Substances-as-Parts: the foster is part and substance. Either “substance” is deflationary, so that fosters, organs and organisms collapse together and identity is stipulated, or it is robust and contradicts the parthood claim. It also has no consistent count: substancehood from about day 4–5 or day 16 gives two, parthood gives one, and possibly three from day 16 (fn. 26). It is “not even a coherent option”.
The process view (§§4.1–4.3). On five premises assumed “for the sake of argument” and defended elsewhere, among them that organisms are autopoietic processes whose identity is processual, a pregnant organism is a “hypercomplex higher-level autopoietic process” bifurcating asymmetrically. “Necessarily, the foster exists only if an organism that gestates it (a gravida) exists”, but not the converse, and the dependence is on some gravida, as surrogacy shows. The “How many…?” question “cannot have a natural number as an answer”: the pregnant individual is “something in between one and two”. Birth is itself extended, and through lactation the bifurcation continues.
The reconciliation (§5). The foster is a part, sui generis, and processually identical with the baby, but “not yet a full-blown individual”.
What could have come out otherwise. One of the substance versions could have kept both parthood and identity with a stable count. The dilemma argument shows neither does, given Kingma’s own concessions.
What this does not say
- That parthood is wrong. The skim read it so, and NOTE-115 corrects it: the paper keeps parthood and rejects only parthood under substance ontology. It also denies that its view is “just a version of the Parthood View”, since it puts “transition instead of composition”.
- That the Containment View is incoherent. Only the Parthood View is charged with contradiction; Containment fails on evidence.
- What a count between one and two is. No measure, no degree function, no account of non-additivity beyond a citation, and no engagement with the vagueness literature. The paper runs together “both” one and two with “neither strictly one nor strictly two”. The river analogy carries the claim, and the paper says “Identity is not to be asked of an analogy” (fn. 53).
- That the positive view is worked out. “Explicating the details is a separate task for future work” (fn. 52).
- Anything about abortion, surrogacy or moral status. Raised in footnotes and not pursued; no normative conclusion is the author’s.
- That it holds beyond placental mammals. The scope is set for heuristic reasons (fn. 7); wider application is asserted in fn. 69.
Connections
- QUESTION-035 asks when a combined form is one system. This account constrains the answer: in a clear case, the right count may not be a natural number, so a criterion may need to return a degree rather than a verdict of one or two. It does not supply the criterion.
- Biological individuality. Wilson and Barker (THEORY-443) let one organism be part of another and note process ontology as a challenge without adopting it; this paper is that challenge applied. Bourrat’s graded and description-relative individuality (LIT-005, LIT-049) fits its rejection of an all-or-nothing count; the parallel is NOTE-115’s.
- Overlap and counting. Lewis (THEORY-476) counts overlapping persons by keeping identity sharp and letting them share parts; Meincke gives up substance counting instead. Olson’s map (THEORY-417) lists partial twinning under the population question.
- The ethics survey (THEORY-464) reports that the abortion debate assumes each of us was once a fetus, which is what foster–neonate identity is about.
- Organisational closure. The process view rests on autopoiesis; the record’s accounts of what makes an organism self-producing are THEORY-221 and THEORY-072.
- Mereology. SEP’s mereology entry (LIT-124, §5) separates indeterminate parthood, de re or de dicto. Meincke claims an indeterminate count and leans de re, “flows naturally from the processual constitution”, without using that machinery.