Timeline for Why hasn't mereology succeeded as an alternative to set theory?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
26 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 6, 2023 at 10:55 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 1 character in body; edited tags
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| Nov 20, 2018 at 21:59 | answer | added | Zuhair Al-Johar | timeline score: 1 | |
| Oct 14, 2018 at 12:07 | answer | added | lewisian | timeline score: 2 | |
| Jan 26, 2017 at 18:27 | answer | added | Thomas Benjamin | timeline score: 7 | |
| Jan 19, 2017 at 14:24 | answer | added | Todd Trimble | timeline score: 11 | |
| Jan 26, 2016 at 11:11 | vote | accept | godelian | ||
| Jan 26, 2016 at 2:20 | history | edited | Joel David Hamkins | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Corrected spelling in title
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| Jan 26, 2016 at 2:03 | answer | added | Joel David Hamkins | timeline score: 43 | |
| Apr 11, 2013 at 10:44 | answer | added | mitch smith | timeline score: 2 | |
| Aug 18, 2012 at 0:44 | comment | added | Todd Trimble | @Hans: I haven't read Scharlau's work, but it sounds like he's referring to things like Grothendieck's Sketch of a Program, which is well worth reading. IIRC, section 5 is where he discusses "tame topology". | |
| Aug 17, 2012 at 18:56 | answer | added | Rafał Gruszczyński | timeline score: 10 | |
| Aug 15, 2012 at 19:51 | comment | added | Hans-Peter Stricker | I just read Winfried Scharlau's highly recommended biography of Alexander Grothendieck (part III) and there it is told, that Grothendieck was planning (in the early eighties) a new foundation of topology: based not on points but on shapes (or figures). That reminded me of mereology. | |
| Aug 15, 2012 at 14:49 | comment | added | JSE | I have certainly met analytic philosophers who think about mereology. It may be one of those things like psychoanalysis, which turned out to be of more use for literary criticism than psychotherapy; maybe mereology comes from math but is more interesting in philosophy than in mathematics! | |
| Aug 15, 2012 at 14:24 | answer | added | Andreas Blass | timeline score: 26 | |
| Aug 15, 2012 at 14:02 | answer | added | Rafał Gruszczyński | timeline score: 26 | |
| May 9, 2011 at 2:40 | comment | added | godelian | @ Pete: Whatever my motivation for asking the question might be (which you can or cannot consider worth the while), the question asks precisely about why mereological foundations are not suitable, compared to set theory; which is a rather technical matter (certainly mathematics). | |
| May 9, 2011 at 2:04 | comment | added | Pete L. Clark | This may sound harsh, but: where is the math question here? The OP's motivations for considering mereology seem to be a mixture of psychological and philosophical -- "mereology is built upon what I consider conceptually more elementary" -- but what would be a putative mathematical advantage of having mereological foundations? Note that the majority of working mathematicians are not only happy with set theory as a foundation: moreover, they don't want to think about foundational issues at all, and the (naive) concept of a set is something they have accepted since their school days. | |
| May 9, 2011 at 0:34 | comment | added | David Roberts♦ | Actually ZFC doesn't need to postulate the empty set, only the existence of a set. Then the empty set can be recovered as the subset of this satisfying an always false statement (this might assume consistency of the ZFC axioms!) Otherwise you don't know that you have any sets at all. | |
| May 9, 2011 at 0:04 | answer | added | Sridhar Ramesh | timeline score: 13 | |
| Mar 15, 2011 at 13:55 | comment | added | Robert Haraway | @Qiaochu: A comment from Eric Raymond on Plan 9 may be in order here: "Compared to Plan 9, Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough." The same could be said of bases for doing mathematics. | |
| Mar 15, 2011 at 5:23 | comment | added | Yemon Choi | Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold / Mere ology is loosed upon the world... | |
| Mar 15, 2011 at 1:58 | answer | added | Jeremy Shipley | timeline score: 23 | |
| Mar 15, 2011 at 1:52 | comment | added | godelian | @ Qiaochu: If ZFC axioms can be interpreted by some mereology-based axiomatization, it sounds reasonable to consider it as an alternative provided the motivation for the axioms is clearer. @ Mariano: Really? How sad...Because I'd really love to hear of some serious thoughts about it. | |
| Mar 15, 2011 at 1:38 | comment | added | Mariano Suárez-Álvarez | I guess you did not read sci.math on USENET much... There we had quite a bit of mereology-related crankness! :) | |
| Mar 15, 2011 at 1:29 | comment | added | Qiaochu Yuan | It doesn't have to have no success; even if it has the same success, there's still no incentive to switch. It needs to have greater success in order to make a switch seem like a good idea, and meanwhile we have category theory...! | |
| Mar 15, 2011 at 0:47 | history | asked | godelian | CC BY-SA 2.5 |