Johanna Seibt

The present volume is the first comprehensive reference work for research on part-whole relations--or better... a substantive part of such a project. The guiding idea, developed by Burkhardt and Seibt more than a decade ago, was to offer an inclusive presentation of contemporary research on part-whole relations that would draw out systematic, historical, and interdisciplinary trajectories, show the subject's fecundity, and inspire future explorations. In particular, the editors wants to impress that mereology is much more than the study of axiomatized reasoning systems. The relationship between part and whole is one of the most basic schemata of cognitive organization; it is not only a phenomenon at the level of language processing and propositional thought, but also at the level of sensory input processing, especially visual and auditory. In all research disciplines, part-whole relations organize all three core components of research: data domains, methods, and theories. In short, part-whole relations play a fundamental role in how we perceive and interact with nature, how we speak and think about the world and ourselves, as societies and as individuals.--From publisher.

This chapter suggests that contemporary research in process ontology can be sorted into two varieties. The radical strategy, implemented in General Process Theory, takes our reasoning of processes to motivate a comprehensive rejection of a network of traditional presumptions in ontology (“substance paradigm”). More recent work on processes displays a more conservative approach where the traditional research paradigm is not replaced but expanded. One pivotal disagreement between the radical and conservative strategy is, it is suggested, the traditional tenet that all concrete individuals must be particulars. With focus on recent work by Stout and Steward the chapter argues that convincing arguments for the individuality of processes are undermined by the fact that such process individuals are conceived of as particulars. Such approaches are focused on the distinction between processes and “events” but fail to acknowledge an important distinction among processes that is an integral part of the data for process ontology.

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce an outline of general process theory (GPT), a non-Whiteheadian systematic process ontology, and to provide some pointers on how this framework could be applied in philosophy of biology to clarify questions of individuality, composition, and emergence. GPT is a mono-categorial framework based on the new category of more or less generic (non-particular) dynamic individuals called ‘general processes’ or ‘dynamics’. According to GPT, the world is the interaction of (more or less generic) dynamics. The chapter sets out some elements of a non-standard mereology (with non-transitive part relations) on processes and introduces the five-dimensional classification system of GPT. It is shown how the theoretical predicates of homeomereity and automereity can be used to distinguish between developments and ‘non-developmental’ or ‘dynamically stable’ temporally unbounded activities that persist in time by literal recurrence.

This chapter argues that standard interpretations do not pay sufficient attention to Sellars’s commitment to a process monism where different types of processing occur at different levels of complexity. Sellars explicitly acknowledged that linear mechanistic causation is only one of many forms of process architectures, next to nonlinear causation and other feedback structures. Sellars’s treatment of sensory consciousness and intentionality can be better understood once we work out his pointers at processual emergence along a normativity gradient. Within human organisms, processing at the level of mechanistic causation is embedded in a series of more encompassing emergent process architectures associated with sensing, map-making, navigating, imaging, mental languaging, verbal languaging, and scientific research. The logical irreducibility of normative content is merely temporary, but only with an ontology of pure processes can one solve the deepest problem for a naturalist approach: how to bring information—from difference-making to normative content—into nature.

The paper presents some essential heuristic and constructional elements of Free Process Theory (FPT), a non-Whiteheadian, monocategoreal framework. I begin with an analysis of our common sense concept of activities, which plays a crucial heuristic role in the development of the notion of a free process. I argue that an activity is not a type but a mode of occurrence, defined in terms of a network of inferences. The inferential space characterizing our concept of an activity entails that anything which is conceived of as occurring in the activity mode is a concrete,dynamic, non-particular individual. Such individuals, which I call ‘free processes’, may be used for the interpretation of much more than just common sense activities. I introduce the formal theory FPT, a mereology with anon-transitive part-relation, which contains a typology of processes based on the following five parameters relating to: (a) patterns of possible spatial and temporal recurrence (automerity); (b) kinds of components (participant structure); (c) kinds of dynamic composition; (d) kinds of dynamic flow (dynamic shape); and (e) dynamic context. I show how these five evaluative dimensions for free processes can be used to define ontological correlates for various common sense categories,and to draw distinctions between various forms of agency(distributed, collective, reciprocal, entangled) and emergence (weak, strong,as ‘autonomous system’ (Bickhard/christensen)).

General Process Theory (GPT) is a new (non-Whiteheadian) process ontology. According to GPT the domains of scientific inquiry and everyday practice consist of configurations of ‘goings-on’ or ‘dynamics’ that can be technically defined as concrete, dynamic, non-particular individuals called general processes. The paper offers a brief introduction to GPT in order to provide ontological foundations for research programs such as interactivism that centrally rely on the notions of ‘process,’ ‘interaction,’ and ‘emergence.’ I begin with an analysis of our common sense concept of activities, which plays a crucial heuristic role in the development of the notion of a general process. General processes are not individuated in terms of their location but in terms of ‘what they do,’ i.e., in terms of their dynamic relationships in the basic sense of one process being part of another. The formal framework of GPT is thus an extensional mereology, albeit a non-classical theory with a non-transitive part-relation. After a brief sketch of basic notions and strategies of the GPT-framework I show how the latter may be applied to distinguish between causal, mechanistic, functional, self-maintaining, and recursively self-maintaining interactions, all of which involve ‘emergent phenomena’ in various senses of the term.