Event Detail

Abstract:
All of the current leading theories of location are parsimonious: they have at most one locative primitive, and the definitions of all of the other locative relations appeal to nothing beyond that primitive, mereological properties and relations, and basic logic. I argue that any such theory is incompatible with the possibility of any case in which an object is contained within a simple region that is larger than it. More precisely, these theories are incompatible with some cases in which some region, r, and some object, x, are such that every subregion of r fails to be completely free of x, yet x fails to fill r. Generation of the cases I will use requires positing extended simple regions. I argue that we ought to reject the analytic possibility of such regions, and I discuss how we might do so.