Mereology (from Greek μέρος 'part' (root: μερε-, mere-, 'part') and the suffix -logy, 'study, discussion, science') is the philosophical study of part-whole relationships, also called parthood relationships.[1][2] As a branch of metaphysics, mereology examines the connections between parts and their wholes, exploring how components interact within a system. This theory has roots in ancient philosophy, with significant contributions from Plato, Aristotle, and later, medieval and Renaissance thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus.[3] Mereology gained formal recognition in the 20th century through the pioneering works of Polish logician Stanisław Leśniewski, who introduced it as part of a comprehensive framework for logic and mathematics, and coined the word "mereology".[2] The field has since evolved to encompass a variety of applications in ontology, natural language semantics, and the cognitive sciences, influencing our understanding of structures ranging from linguistic constructs to biological systems.[1]
Mereology challenges traditional set theory by offering an alternative that focuses on the least inclusive whole comprising its parts, proposing that individuals or objects are mereological sums of their parts.[3] Despite some controversies and counterexamples, particularly concerning organic wholes,[4] the theoretical framework continues to be influential.[2] Notably, mereology is used in discussions of entities as varied as musical groups, geographical regions, and abstract concepts, demonstrating its broad applicability and ongoing relevance in philosophical and scientific discourses.[1]
Mereology has been explored in various ways as applications of predicate logic to formal ontology, in each of which mereology is an important part. Each of these fields provides its own axiomatic definition of mereology. A common element of such axiomatizations is the assumption, shared with inclusion, that the part-whole relation orders its universe, meaning that everything is a part of itself (reflexivity), that a part of a part of a whole is itself a part of that whole (transitivity), and that two distinct entities cannot each be a part of the other (antisymmetry), thus forming a poset. A variant of this axiomatization denies that anything is ever part of itself (irreflexivity) while accepting transitivity, from which antisymmetry follows automatically.
Although mereology is an application of mathematical logic, what could be argued to be a sort of "proto-geometry", it has been wholly developed by logicians, ontologists, linguists, engineers, and computer scientists, especially those working in artificial intelligence. In particular, mereology is also on the basis for a point-free foundation of geometry (see for example the quoted pioneering paper of Alfred Tarski and the review paper by Gerla 1995).
In general systems theory, mereology refers to formal work on system decomposition and parts, wholes and boundaries (by, e.g., Mihajlo D. Mesarovic (1970), Gabriel Kron (1963), or Maurice Jessel (see Bowden (1989, 1998)). A hierarchical version of Gabriel Kron's Network Tearing was published by Keith Bowden (1991), reflecting David Lewis's ideas on gunk. Such ideas appear in theoretical computer science and physics, often in combination with sheaf theory, topos, or category theory. See also the work of Steve Vickers on (parts of) specifications in computer science, Joseph Goguen on physical systems, and Tom Etter (1996, 1998) on link theory and quantum mechanics.