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Full Idea
I accept the principle of Unrestricted Composition: whenever there are some things, no matter how many or how unrelated or how disparate in character they may be, they have a mereological fusion. ...The trout-turkey is part fish and part fowl.
Gist of Idea
I say that absolutely any things can have a mereological fusion
Source
David Lewis (Mathematics is Megethology [1993], p.07)
Book Ref
-: 'Philosophia Mathematica' [-], p.7
A Reaction
This nicely ducks the question of when things form natural wholes and when they don't, but I would have thought that that might be one of the central issues of metaphysicals, so I think I'll give Lewis's principle a miss.
| 10807 | Mathematics reduces to set theory, which reduces, with some mereology, to the singleton function [Lewis] |
| 10806 | Megethology is the result of adding plural quantification to mereology [Lewis] |
| 10808 | Mathematics is generalisations about singleton functions [Lewis] |
| 10809 | We can accept the null set, but not a null class, a class lacking members [Lewis] |
| 10810 | I say that absolutely any things can have a mereological fusion [Lewis] |
| 10812 | The null set is not a little speck of sheer nothingness, a black hole in Reality [Lewis] |
| 10811 | The null set plays the role of last resort, for class abstracts and for existence [Lewis] |
| 10813 | What on earth is the relationship between a singleton and an element? [Lewis] |
| 10814 | Are all singletons exact intrinsic duplicates? [Lewis] |
| 10815 | We don't need 'abstract structures' to have structural truths about successor functions [Lewis] |
| 10816 | We can use mereology to simulate quantification over relations [Lewis] |