Mereocausality & Causal Mereotopology: A New Concept

Abstract. How is causality/causation associated with parthood? Do the parts of a whole interact in distinct causal manners? I introduce a novel concept I call ‘mereocausality’ and its cognates, merging two foundational topics used in both theoretical and practical disciplines: causality and parthood (or mereology). Topology is often associated with mereology, yielding mereotopology to which this conceptual synthesis also applies. I apply inquiry into causality and formal causal relations to mereology, developing a new formal concept: mereocausality, mereocausation, causal mereo(topo)logy, and cognates. This paper offers a preliminary exploration, introducing broad concepts, research questions and terminology for what can be a new branch of inquiry: casual mereology and causal mereotopology. Future work will involve a more structured investigation, developing and applying the basic ideas presented here. I hope to produce a conceptual system for exploring the intersection of causality, mereology and topology. A contribution of this work is the creation of a new concept and associated terminology. This work is relevant to a variety of disciplines and activities: philosophy, such as metaphysics; conceptual analysis and development; formal and applied/computational ontology (ontology engineering, knowledge engineering); topics in ontology development, such as foundational (upper or top-level) ontology development; knowledge representation and reasoning in artificial intelligence; conceptual modeling; semantic data modeling; psychology and cognitive science; linguistics; etc.