Mereology and the metaphysics of bits and pieces
Traditional metaphysics is that part of philosophy that deals with first causes, the nature of being, and the unchanging. Without getting diverted by problems found with traditional metaphysics, it is probably enough to acknowledge that mereology—a theory concerned with the relationship between parts and wholes—emerged as a part of the traditional metaphysics associated with Ancient Greece. And the idea of traditional metaphysics is that it provides a kind of bedrock, on which all our understanding and experiencing of reality is built.
Before going any further—for those who might not have come across mereology before—I should point out that it is itself, a highly complex topic, aligned with set theory and things that are beyond the understanding of this graphic designer. So what follows will almost certainly be simplistic, but hopefully articulated at a level where it can be used to help us to design things that can communicate.
That said, we might ask what does mereology have to say about our humble Lego model? Thinking about parts—in mereology, there are parts that are attached to a greater whole, and parts that are detached but still a part of a greater whole. In the model of the Willis Tower the parts (the bricks) are attached. But they are also detachable—unless one commits the sacrilege of the use of super glue that is. And so, the bricks could become a part of a completely different whole. And this is part of the allure of Lego, that it has the potential to represent almost anything, even if we don’t ever disassemble the model of the tower.
Not all parts have to be attached, of course, individual glyphs in a tray of letterpress characters are not attached but are still a part of the typesetter’s font. Some letters are attached to each other and these we know as ligatures, or diphthongs.
The question of what the model of the Willis Tower is made of is also touched on by mereology. Yes the tower is made of Lego bricks, which are made of molecules, that are made of atoms, that are made of sub-atomic particles. And this is accounted for in the transitive parthood relation, so that if a plastic molecule is a part of a Lego brick, and an atom is a part of the plastic molecule, then the atom is part of the Lego brick.
But then it gets more complicated, since when we think of the brick in the tower we can think of it as a part of the Willis Tower model, but at the same time we can think of it as a member of the category of Lego bricks. It is very easy to confuse these two different kinds of relationships. The first is mereological—a part-whole relationship where one thing is part of another for example, the second is taxonomic—to do with kinds or types, where one thing is a member of a larger category.
As a designer when you choose one thing to stand for another, could it be because it is part of a larger object—the ’10’ on the door in Downing Street standing for the whole building? Or, could it be because it is a member of the category ‘door numbers’? Whether it is one, the other, or both, might come down to the context in which it is presented, a newspaper article about the Prime Minister suggests one interpretation, an advertisement for door numbers another.
Another thing to consider is how might this work in terms of a chain of signification? So, for example, the ’10’ might stand for the building in Downing Street, then ’10 Downing Street’ stands for the Prime Minister, then the ‘Prime Minister’ stands for the UK Government.