Mereocausality & Causal Mereotopology: A New Concept
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Abstract. How is causality/causation associated with parthood? And do parts and their whole interact in distinct causal manners? I introduce a novel concept I call ‘mereocausality’ and its cognates, merging two foundational topics in theoretical and practical disciplines: causality and parthood (or mereology). Topology is often associated with the latter yielding mereotopology. These two topics have been of great personal intellectual interest, and after a few years of sitting on this idea (and papers), I here express it. I apply inquiry into causality and formal causal relations to mereology, developing a new formal concept: mereocausality, mereocausation, causal mereo(topo)logy, etc. This paper offers a preliminary exploration, offering broad concepts, research questions and terminology for what can be a new branch of inquiry; casual mereology and causal mereotopology. Future work will involve a more structured and rigorous investigation, developing the basic ideas presented here. For this project and study, I hope to produce a conceptual system for exploring the intersection of causality, mereology and topology. A contribution of this work is the creation of a new concept and associated terminology. This work is relevant for a variety of disciplines and activities: philosophy, such as metaphysics; conceptual analysis and development; formal and applied/computational ontology; knowledge representation and reasoning in artificial intelligence; conceptual modeling; semantic data modeling; psychology and linguistics; etc. As an unfunded project to date, formal support and collaborations are desired to pursue this promising line of research. Interested readers should contact the author.
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