A bronze statue and the lump of bronze constituting it share exactly the same atoms right now. The constitutionalist view holds that:
AThey are identical — identity is determined entirely by material composition at a time
BThey are distinct objects — the statue would be destroyed by squashing while the lump would not, revealing different persistence conditions
CWhether they are identical is an empirical question that science will eventually settle
DThe statue just is the lump, and talk of 'two objects' is a grammatical confusion
The constitutionalist distinguishes constitution from identity. The statue is constituted by the lump (same matter) but is not identical to it, because they have different modal properties — the statue cannot survive squashing; the lump can. Two objects can share all their parts at a moment without being the same object. This is the central puzzle of composition: same parts, yet different objects.
Question 2 Multiple Choice
The transitivity of parthood means that if a handle is part of a hammer, and the hammer is part of a toolkit, then:
AThe handle is part of the toolkit — though this may sound odd, it follows from the formal axiom
BThe handle is adjacent to the toolkit, but not properly a part of it
CTransitivity does not apply here because 'part of' changes meaning across different scales
DThe handle is part of the toolkit only if it is permanently attached to both
Transitivity is a formal axiom of mereology: if A < B and B < C, then A < C. The handle is part of the hammer; the hammer is part of the toolkit; therefore the handle is part of the toolkit. This follows mechanically from the axiom, even though 'the handle of the toolkit' sounds odd in natural language. The oddness reveals that commonsense 'part of' talk is not fully transitive — a divergence between formal mereology and everyday usage.
Question 3 True / False
According to mereological uniqueness of composition, if a collection of parts composes a whole, they compose exactly one whole — no two distinct objects can consist of precisely the same parts at the same time.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: True
Uniqueness of composition is a standard mereological principle: composition is a function from pluralities of parts to at most one whole. This creates tension with the statue/clay case: if the statue and the clay are distinct objects made of the same parts simultaneously, uniqueness fails. Constitutionalists must either reject uniqueness or carefully distinguish composition from constitution.
Question 4 True / False
Spatial contiguity — the parts being physically connected or touching — is both necessary and sufficient for composition to occur.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: False
Neither necessary nor sufficient. Not sufficient: a random pile of touching objects doesn't obviously form a further whole. Not necessary: we readily acknowledge scattered objects as wholes (a bikini has spatially separated parts; an archipelago consists of non-touching islands). What conditions are actually sufficient for composition is the Special Composition Question — and spatial contiguity is not the answer.
Question 5 Short Answer
What is the difference between composition and constitution, and why does the distinction matter for the statue/clay puzzle?
Think about your answer, then reveal below.
Model answer: Composition is the relation between parts and the whole they make up (atoms compose the clay). Constitution is the relation between two objects that share the same matter at a time (the clay constitutes the statue). The puzzle arises because the statue and the clay share all their parts yet seem to have different persistence conditions. Distinguishing these relations allows constitutionalists to say the same matter both composes one thing (the clay) and constitutes another (the statue) without contradiction.
If composition and constitution were the same relation, then same parts would imply same object, and the statue would be identical to the clay. But they behave differently modally — one survives what destroys the other — which is strong evidence for their distinctness. Teasing apart these two relations is one of the core contributions of analytic mereology to the philosophy of material objects.