How is a Collection Related to its Members?

Antony Galton

In Barry Smith, Riichiro Mizoguchi, and Sumio Nakagawa (editors), Interdisciplinary Ontology, Vol. 3, Proceedings of the Third Interdisciplinary Ontology Conference (InterOntology10), February 27th-28th, 2010, Tokyo. Keio University, Open Research Center for Logic and Ontology, 2010, pages 9-17.
ISBN 978-4-904239-03-2

Abstract

It is increasingly recognised that a comprehensive upper ontology should provide an account of collections as well as individual entities. A prerequisite for this is to characterise the relationship between a collection and its members. In this paper various possible accounts are discussed, including eliminativism, constitution, and four-dimensionalism. In particular, the idea of making a distinction between synchronic and diachronic identity relations, which has mostly been regarded with disfavour by philosophers and ontologists, is explored.

Preprint
Slides from the conference presentation

Antony Galton

Last modified: Wed Mar 7 17:33:30 GMT 2012