Next: mereological overlaps and Kant

Talked with Steve last night. Mereology and epistemology are indeed the starting-points.

Parts is the right book for mereology, and Steve might have an extra copy! In mereological terms, scale-and-abstraction is not actually about part-whole relationships but about overlap relationships, and our hierarchies—e.g.: blade of grass, putting green, hole, golf course—are not actually "mereological chains," but something else (last night we called them frankensteins!). This is because for a relationship to be part-whole, the part must lie completely within its whole. But our insight is precisely that there are parts or properties of the putting green that lie outside of the hole object; for example, many specific characteristics of its constituents: A given blade of grass may be bent this way or that, of this or that shade of green, even of one species or another, and this detail of information, this part or property of the blade of grass, is not in fact a part of the hole object. Scale-and-abstraction is the insight that relationships considered to be part-whole are often (always?!) actually overlap relationships. Mereology gives us formalisms for all this, so we are headed in the right direction here.

But if frames are arbitrary frankensteins (overlap chains? fuzzy hierarchies?), then what is fixed? What is the mereological atom? Here's where I invoke unprocessed experience, and Steve confirmed Jeremy's sign-post: Kant. Transcendental Idealism. Phenomena and noumena. So besides Parts, the plan is to read Descartes, Hume, and Kant's Prolegomena (and maybe Locke and Berkeley, time permitting), and see about taking Engstrom's Kant class at Pitt next fall.

Thanks Jeremy, and thanks Steve. :^) Feed back to Chad Whitacre.