Against Quantitative Primitivism : On Mereology and Metricality

Zee R. Perry (Rutgers University - New Brunswick)

This talk motivates and develops a fully reductive account of the structure of certain physical quantities in terms of their mereology. I argue, that is, that quantitative relations like ”longer than” or ”3.6-times the volume of” can be analyzed in terms of necessary constraints those quantities put on the mereological structure of their instances. The resulting account, I argue, is able to capture the intuition that these quantitative relations are intrinsic to the physical systems they’re called upon to describe and explain.