Boolean Mereology

Abstract

Abstract Most ordinary objects - cats, humans, mountains, ships, tables, etc. - have indeterminate mereological boundaries. If the theory of mereology is meant to include ordinary objects at all, we need it to have some space for mereological indeterminacy. In this paper, we present a novel degree-theoretic semantics - Boolean semantics - and argue that it is the best degree-theoretic semantics for modeling mereological indeterminacy, for three main reasons: (a) it allows for incomparable degrees of parthood, (b) it enforces classical logic, and (c) it is compatible with all the axioms of classical mereology. Using Boolean semantics, we will also investigate the connection between vagueness in parthood and vagueness in existence/identity. We show that, contrary to what many have argued, the connection takes neither the form of entailment nor the form of exclusion.