Skip to main content

Generalized mereology failure

One of the streams in the early development of set theory was an attempt to use mereology, a formal theory of parthood, as a foundational tool. The first such attempt is due to  Stanisław Leśniewski (1886–1939). The attempt failed, but there is another, prima facie more promising attempt by Jerzy Słupecki (1904–1987), who employed his generalized mereology to build mereological foundations for type theory. I have recently written a paper explaining what generalized mereology is and why it still fails as a foundation tool. The paper is available in History and Philosophy of Logic, but if you don't have access to that, a draft is available here.

Comments

CJ said…
If Lesniewski's definition of a set is as you report, then the fusion of all left legs of Canadians counts as a set of Canadians, because every ingredient of the fusion has an ingredient (itself) which is an ingredient of a Canadian. Is this due to a typo in your draft, or is his definition inadequate?