Can the strange “odd universe” result be defused by rethinking how parts, wholes, and counting fit together, rather than by giving up on common-sense mereology?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Meg Wallace is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Kentucky, and specialize in metaphysics and ontology.
Check out her book, "Parts and Wholes"!
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C94RMGVM
2. Book Summary
In Parts and Wholes, Meg Wallace uses the “odd universe argument” as a hook: from a small package of seemingly intuitive assumptions about parthood, composition, and counting, you can (purportedly) derive a priori that the universe contains an odd number of things—a conclusion that feels both wild and philosophically revealing. She treats that “something has gone weirdly wrong” reaction as a diagnostic tool: it pushes us to locate which assumption (or background method) is responsible, and Section 1 supplies the needed toolkit—basic mereology plus plural-logic resources for talking carefully about “the parts, taken together” versus “the whole.”
Section 2 turns to two big structural questions: composition (building up) and decomposition (breaking down). On the composition side, Wallace frames the Special Composition Question (SCQ) and walks through the familiar triad: universalism (“always” compose), nihilism (“never” compose), and moderation (“sometimes” compose). Universalism threatens to look “ontologically explosive,” but she sketches ways it can be tamed—e.g., by identifying the right sums with ordinary objects, or by pairing it with a view that preserves parsimony (eventually, her favored route goes through composition-as-identity). Nihilism gets its standard “arranged mug-wise” style defense and the idea that ordinary talk can still work without rampant error theory, while also facing serious worries about self-defeat if there are, strictly speaking, no speakers, utterances, or other composites. Moderation is initially tempting, but Wallace presses the familiar problems: proposed conditions for composition can look arbitrary or anthropocentric, and once vagueness/jumpiness enters, you risk getting a pervasive indeterminacy about how many things there are. On the decomposition side, she asks whether reality bottoms out in finitely many simples (one of the odd-universe assumptions), infinitely many simples, or gunk; and she shows how changing these “all the way down” options can generate further surprising cardinality results (e.g., pressures toward uncountably many objects).
Section 3 argues (with “a healthy bias”) for composition as identity (CI) and uses it to reframe what looked like runaway ontological commitments: if the whole just is the parts (in the relevant plural sense), then universalism can be “ontologically innocent,” double-counting worries dissolve, and familiar puzzles about coincidence and overdetermination lose their bite. But CI attracts “numerical” objections (cardinality, counting-style arguments, and puzzles involving “is-one-of” plus Leibniz’s Law), and Wallace’s core reply is methodological: our standard, singular way of counting bakes in the very “extra object” result that makes CI look impossible, so we should reconsider how numerical predicates attach—moving away from singular counting toward an alternative (she discusses “relative counting”). In the Conclusion she makes her preferred diagnosis explicit: accept simples, unrestricted composition (universalism), and count—but deny that count commits us to singular counting—and accept CI (rejecting “composition is not identity”), which blocks the odd-universe derivation.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:40 - Book on mereology
02:45 - Odd universe argument
10:35 - Finitely many simples?
16:14 - Unrestricted composition
25:52 - Different senses of “object”
28:30 - Composition as identity
35:46 - Different properties
41:18 - Perdurantism
45:35 - Modal parts
50:05 - Worries
55:57 - Modal views
59:52 - Indeterminate constitution
1:03:26 - Problem of the many
1:10:20 - More objects?
1:18:21 - Value of philosophy
1:19:55 - Conclusion
