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Full Idea
We do not calculate the weight of something by summing the weights of all its parts - weigh bricks and the molecules of a wall and you will get the wrong result, since you have weighed some parts more than once.
Gist of Idea
The weight of a wall is not the weight of its parts, since that would involve double-counting
Source
Ryan Wasserman (Material Constitution [2009], 2)
Book Ref
'Stanford Online Encyclopaedia of Philosophy', ed/tr. Stanford University [plato.stanford.edu], p.5
A Reaction
In fact the complete inventory of the parts of a thing is irrelevant to almost anything we would like to know about the thing. The parts must be counted at some 'level' of division into parts. An element can belong to many different sets.
| 16065 | Constitution is identity (being in the same place), or it isn't (having different possibilities) [Wasserman] |
| 16067 | Constitution is not identity, because it is an asymmetric dependence relation [Wasserman] |
| 16069 | There are three main objections to seeing constitution as different from identity [Wasserman] |
| 16068 | The weight of a wall is not the weight of its parts, since that would involve double-counting [Wasserman] |
| 16074 | Relative identity may reject transitivity, but that suggests that it isn't about 'identity' [Wasserman] |