I am looking for any information about the academic study of parts and wholes and the relationships between parts and parts as well as parts and wholes. I am interested in these entities especially from a philosophical, psychological and cognition point of view. I would be extremely grateful if anyone could share their knowledge in this area and their knowledge of sources on this topic.
I am not qualified on the subject. However here are a few references of the subject as applied to different domains.
Dear Nagewara,
Thank you so much for the references and for the attachments. Paul
I'm mostly familiar with this question as it pertains to the philosophy of science (i.e., reductionism vs. emergence) and complex systems, but I'm not sure how much any of that kind of research would be of use to you. They concern the age-old debate/notion that "the whole is more than the sum of its parts". A main exception is meronomic structure of construction grammars in cognitive linguistics). My sources such as the following are vastly more limited:
Peterson, M. A., & Rhodes, G. (2003). Perception of Faces, Objects, and Scenes: Analytic and Holistic Processes (Advances in Visual Cognition). Oxford University Press.
With that caveat (and just in case any of the following contain something useful), here is a sample of titles from the literature I have:
Kafatos, M., & Nadeau, R. (2000). The Conscious Universe: Parts and Wholes in Physical Reality. Springer.
Nisbett, R. E., Peng, K., Choi, I., & Norenzayan, A. (2001). Culture and systems of thought: holistic versus analytic cognition. Psychological review, 108(2), 291.
Tononi, G. (2008). Consciousness as integrated information: a provisional manifesto. The Biological Bulletin, 215(3), 216-242.
Findlay, S. D., & Thagard, P. (2012). How parts make up wholes. Frontiers in physiology, 3.
Green, R., Bean, C. A., & Myaeng, S. H. (Eds.). (2002). The Semantics of Relationships An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Information Science and Knowledge Management Vol. 3). Springer.
Abrams, R. L., & Greenwald, A. G. (2000). Parts outweigh the whole (word) in unconscious analysis of meaning. Psychological Science, 11(2), 118-124.
Bohm, D. (1980). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Routledge.
Pylkkänen, P. T. (2007). Mind, Matter and the Implicate Order (The Frontiers Collection). Springer.
Hohwy, J., & Kallestrup, J. (Eds.). (2008). Being Reduced: New Essays on Reduction, Explanation, and Causation. Oxford University Press.
Horst, S. W. (2007). Beyond Reduction: Philosophy of Mind and Post-Reductionist Philosophy of Science (Philosophy of Mind). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Macdonald, C., & Macdonald, G. (Eds.). (2010). Emergence in Mind (Mind Association Occasional Series). Oxford University Press.
Aurnague, M., Hickmann, M., & Vieu, L. (Eds.). (2007). The Categorization of Spatial Entities in Language and Cognition (Human Cognitive Processing). John Benjamins.
Burns, B. (1992). Percepts, Concepts and Categories (Advances in Psychology Vol. 93)
Wheeler, W. (2006).The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture. Lawrence And Wishart.
Seevinck, M. P. (2004). Holism, physical theories and quantum mechanics. Studies In History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies In History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 35(4), 693-712.
Collier, J. (2011). Holism and Emergence: Dynamical Complexity Defeats Laplace's Demon. South African Journal of Philosophy, 30(2).
As Andrew said, this question is sometimes more related with philosophy. I suggest "Edgar Morin - The Method" for you, and you can improve your knowledge about this subject. Specifically this author appoints that the holistic blindness (only the view of the whole) is a similar problem that the cartesian point of view (the considering only parts without relations). In this case, both approaches are relevant and must to be additional. Good studies
What do people think about Husserl's third Investigation (Logical Investigation, volume 2)? Although his examples pertain to perception, the work is considered to be an important philosophical treatment of part-whole relationships.
Thank you Andrew, these are a great set of sources. I will take time to look at these. The Findlay, Aurnague and Burns articles looks especially interesting.
Gibson, thanks for this reference, I will look it up as I am not aware of this work.
Unfortunately, I do not know this work Davood. Perhaps someone else can pass an opinion? Andrew?
I have been looking for Morin's The Method but I am unable to find this in English. What is the central thesis of this book? Are any of his other works pertinent?
There's an extensive discussion of parts ad wholes in D.A. Cruse's "Lexical Semantics" and an updated one "Cognitive Linguistics" by William Croft and D.A. Cruse. In addition, Cruse has published a couple of papers on his construal-and-constraints approach to polysemy in which part-whole relations also figure.
If you want to consider one more, I would suggest:
Simon, H.A. (1962). The architecture of complexity, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 106, 467-482.
This essay explores how complex systems can resemble hierarchical structures; how such structures of systems evolve; their decomposition into parts; and the ways in which they can be described. The paper has been around for over 50 years but is still a really good read, I think.
in psych of perception check the Gestalt school and in Tversky and Hemenway 1984 for psycholinguistics also more recently Zacks:Psychol Bull. 2001 Jan;127(1):3-21. Event structure in perception and conception. Zacks JM1, Tversky B.
Yeah, I'd definitely recommend reading Wolfgang Köhler's "Gestalt Psychology" and Kurt Koffka's "Principles of Gestalt Psychology". They're both quite old, and in some respects dated, but they're still very good reads.
Josita, Thank you for the references. I knowZacks, Tversky and Hemenway's work but I am not sure if I know the article you mention. I'll check this out.
Hi Kim, I agree with you about the Gestalt psych work being interesting but dated in some ways. However, as I commented in my book from last year on visual perception, and has been increasingly commented upon by others, Gestalt psychology's dictums seem to represent a useful framework within which to conduct and analyse neuroscientific work on perception. Do you have any thoughts about this?
I do not know if that's what you're looking for. I wrote this, but it is only a draft.
https://www.academia.edu/7502438
It is a translation of a part of a work for now only available in Italian (https://www.academia.edu/6783625). On page 5 I expose a method to describe in general the concept of structure to apply it to cognition.
Devis, many thanks for this. I have checked the links work and they do, so I will read what you posted. Paul
Hi,
not sure if it is what you are looking for, but I happened to be looking for articles about downward causation (causality from the whole to it's own parts) and found this article which is interesting. Also worth to look at the references :
A Turing test for Emergence
F Boschetti, R Gray - Advances in applied self-organizing systems, 2013 - Springer
I share my understanding about the parts and wholes. These are two separate techniques to solve a problem. Split a problem into parts and seek solution for each part. This is also known as partial fraction. Whereas in whole as the name says, you attempt to solve the entire problem at once which seldom works, I think so.
here is the full reference :
[2]F. Boschetti, and R. Gray, "A Turing Test for Emergence," Advances in
Applied Self-organizing Systems, Advanced Information and
Knowledge Processing M. Prokopenko, ed., pp. 349-364: Springer
London, 2008.
From my knowledge, this topic is quite multidisciplinary : complexity science, computer science, artificial intelligence, biology, etc. and also philosophy. If you look for "strong emergence" or "downward causation" on google scholar you will find plenty of similar approaches.
Another good discussion about the topic, with some links :
http://philosophyofbrains.com/2007/04/05/examples-of-downward-causation.aspx
from there you can also find a nicely written article from Carver's.
This is truely one of the most interesting topic in my opinion, there is much to be done and I think can have great consequences on any area of research that look at conplex systems.
Phenomenologist Edmund Husserl has a very full and rigorous discussion of parts and wholes in his book Logical Investigations (1900).
I am not sure how far into the study of parts and wholes you are at this point so my suggestions may or may not be helpful. That said, I think the Ivry and Robertson (1998) monograph on global (whole) and local (part) processing is an excellent introduction to the cognitive science underlying part/whole perception.
Ivry, R.B. & Robertson, L.C. (1998). The two sides of perception. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
From your description of interest, you might also look at the developmental literature on part/whole perception. This topic received a lot of attention in the developmental literature some decades ago, as researchers debated whether part or whole processing was primary (and some related questions). My own sense is that the adult cognitive science and neuropsychological literature laid a good framework for a reexamination of this developmental question and many developmental papers have since been written beginning with the Ivry/Robertson framework.
The part/whole question has also been of great interest to researchers who study autism spectrum disorders. While many questions remain, I think it is fairly clear that an atypical perception of parts and wholes is characteristic of the ASD phenotype though not part of the definition of the disorder.
Again, if you are just beginning and somewhat distant from the cognitive literature then I think at least for the cognitive perspective the Ivry/Robertson monograph is a great start.
This topic is one of my favorites. An earlier reference to mereology seems to hint at the mathematical and philosophical importance of this topic. The Polish mathematicians, Leśniewski and Tarski, discussed this topic, and the relationship to set theory, as the foundation of mathematics. See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mereology
Conceptually, the set is a whole and its elements are the parts. More recently, John Bell has a brief analysis of the topic. See http://publish.uwo.ca/~jbell/PARTS.pdf
The results also carry over to ongoing work on the continuum problem, Bell also discusses the topic of the continuum, which is synonymous with "the set of Real numbers". Can a continuum be considered a whole with numbers as parts? This can boggle the mind, but the philosophical and epistemological importance is undeniable. See http://publish.uwo.ca/~jbell/New%20lecture%20on%20infinitesimals.pdf
There is lively debate on these topics and their impact on philosophy. It is fairly well summarized in Stewart Shapiro's (2005) "The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mathematics".
I hope that you enjoy these references as much as I do.
Dear Paul,
Are we allowed to know why you are interested in parts and wholes? Looking at all the suggestions so far two things strike me. Firstly not many people have said what they actually think a part and a whole are, or what the opinions of there cited authors are. Secondly, it is clear that there are a huge range of probably unrelated meanings implied. Sets and members and not parts and wholes in the way that parts make a whole car or that elements of a subjective image make an experience - etc etc.
As I have said before, my philosophical source of preference is Leibniz and Leibniz more or less disposes of parts and wholes. In a dynamic view of the world, which is the only one physics can really give us, it is unclear what parts and wholes could mean other than terms of convenience for chunking ideas when using a natural language or a mathematical formalism. As far as I can see modern physics confirms Leibniz's claim that the only real relations are between indivisible simples and the universe. Aggregates give rise to new indivisibles, but these are not wholes with aggregated parts - the intuitive idea falls short. And although an experience seems to be a 'whole' in the Gestalt sense I am very doubtful that it has 'parts. Would the movement of a tree in the wind be a part?
What moves you to ask?
Jonathan, sorry to take time to reply. You ask about my interests in parts and wholes. I am interested in all of the opinions and suggestions that have been offered to this question. My main interests are however in experiential wholes and not in sets, set theory, members, etc., but in how parts make a whole.
To explain this a little more, I am interested in the form of parts and how they act the way they do in constituting wholes. Categories come into my understanding a great deal in the ways in which sub-categories of super-ordinate categories act independently to form combinational wholes.
For example, in human behaviour, an experience of an object may have parts that relate to an entities hardness, colour, shape, etc. However, there may also be a part of the experience that relates to the use of the object, whilst there may be another part that relates to social aspects associated with the object.
Each of these parts may have a different form for example, weight may be a linear construct ranging from heavy to light, whilst, their may be a part of the object experience that relates to ownership of the object that is either "I own" or "I do not own". The usage part of the experience of the object may constitute qualitatively distinct parts of, for example, where I use the object (office, home, in town, etc). All of these different experiential parts will combine to form a total experience whilst preserving the individual forms of the parts' roles.
If we think of perceiving an art image, the person may perceive the colour, tones, forms, narrative, dimensionality, humour, etc. These will form separate parts of the whole painting's experience and each of these parts will have a different form: e.g., tone = linear: light to dark; colour = qualitative: red, green blue, etc... The first task in understanding parts and wholes is to recognise the whole that you are interested in. Then the parts needs to be exhaustively identified as do their forms and how the combination of these parts form the hole.
I hope that gives you an understanding of my perspective.
Jonathan,
There has been a different way of thinking, after Leibniz, since Lesniewski established the field of mereology (theory of parts and wholes) which is an attempt to avoid the problems of set theory.
Problems with sets containing themselves, which is sometimes paradoxical, sometimes not.
Some expressions become simpler in mereology, e.g. sums of squares instead of sums of x so that x is a square etc.
Yes Martin, what I have read of Leibniz and Lesniewski has been important in my thinking.
Dear Martin, (first because responding to Paul will need some further thought)
Leibniz's objection to parts and wholes goes much deeper than the problems of sets. The basic issue is that if all that we can know of in this world is dynamic relation, as Leibniz claims, and I believe correctly so, then there are no 'objects' to have 'parts'. The whole exercise of quantification in logic is merely a tool for computation, nothing to do with reality itself. It is an arbitrary convention to say A is a part of B because it is arbitrary to posit A and B as 'things' in the first place. For Leibniz all that existed were dynamic relations between indivisible units of action and the universe. Everything else is convenient 'chunking' for practical discourse purposes. Although this would seem rather austere, and even bonkers, my experience in science has led me to the same conclusion and I think Leibniz got it right.
Many people since Leibniz have tried to row back to something more comforting, with objects and such like, but my impression is that they only do so because they miss the main point. Lesniewski may be very good for constructing reliably interpretable logical statements, but I am more interested in what is really going on, and I suspect Paul may be too!!
The religion of the Hindus is based on four Vedas. End part of Vedas is called Vedanta. Vedanta is based on three groups of texts; Upanishads, Bhagavat Gita and Brahma Sutra. According to Vedanta, universe arises from the fundamental substance called Brahm(a). This Brahm is perfectly motionless and does not interact with any modification of itself which is the universe. Therefore it is perceived as empty space. This Brahm is indivisible infinite motionless consciousness. When it begins to move, it gives out discrete quanta of consciousness which physicists call energy. This energy has the property of wave particle duality of quantum physics. The wave property indicating indivisibility and the particle property indicatiing apparent multiplicity. This is how one becomes many, the absolute becomes relative, the whole becomes parts. The process is reversible. More details in the article "Consciousness and energy."
Chapter Consciousness and energy
Dear Paul,
I see you are interested in the most difficult and interesting question of all. Angels fear to tread here, but RG is not for Angels. And maybe you like to play Socrates too. You ask deceptively simple questions, to which you already know a lot of answers. Absolutely fair enough, RG is ideal for TImaeus, Meno and Theaetetus to come along.
All I can offer here is that like you I have pondered over this and got at least as stuck as you. We probably do have to pretend there are some parts - at least as something to start our explanation from, even if in the end we may be able to cancel the parts out of the equation. One worry I have to start with is that neuropsychological studies tend to suggest that individual experiences, thoughts, ideas or whatever one calls them are much leaner in content than we tend to think. The brain's mechanism for answering 'what were you thinking about just then' probably draws on short term memory files that have a wider capacity. So a 'thought file' may be a bit like the memory stick a photographer comes home with after a photoshoot. There are close ups and scenic shots and in some the model is tossing her hair and in others she is looking pensively to the side. If you stand in front of a Turner seascape or an Arshile Gorky mid period fantasy, maybe there is a torrent of shifting ideas in your head as the photographer dances around the subject going zap zap zap zap. Nonetheless, it does seem that there are elements that are fused in complex ways in the individual shapshots - they must be mustn't they?
The only other point I might offer is that since whatever part of the inside of the brain gets the final signal input that gives the image/thought will not get this input optically, we should not expect the input to be in a form anything like pixels in a printed picture. One might think 'how the heck does a signal encode belonging?'. I am a great fan of belonging, too. It is central to our understanding of the world but does not exist in physics. But I think the error is to think that signifying belonging is any more weird than signifying red or a movement to the left, or the smell or stale tobacco smoke. All rules we are used to are useless. The only thing I can get a handhold on is that the number of 'elements' or 'aspects' of the thought ought to match up with a number of independent signal inputs, on the basis that there is no free lunch.
Before we can get any further I think we actually need to pin down where in the brain, and at what structural level, all this happens. That is what I spend my time pondering on but getting hard empirical evidence is a long way off.
I think a lot of thinking about this concepts in psychology can be found summarized in the "gestalt psychology principle"
take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology
Yes, Jonas, I think you are right there. Interestingly, the wikipedia entry on Gestalt ends with the criticism:
The physiological theory of the gestaltists has fallen by the wayside, leaving us with a set of descriptive principles, but without a model of perceptual processing. Indeed, some of their "laws" of perceptual organisation today sound vague and inadequate. What is meant by a "good" or "simple" shape, for example?
But I am not sure that the Gestalt principle has in fact fallen by the wayside. I think most people in neuropsychology see that it is fully valid. They just do not have a biophysical explanation for the processing in volved. That to my mind is not a criticism of Gestalt but a reflection of neurobiologists' failure to address the question of what sort of processing would actually get you the effect we all know to be the case. Some neurobiologists are now trying to tackle the problem, but my impression is that they are constructing models that fail on basic principles of locality - and simly because there is a taboo about there being anywhere in the brain that 'receives' the 'Gestalt image'. My own view is that there are millions of such places and they are individual neurons. The Gestalt aspect fits with what we know about physics at the immediate or most proximal level of interaction - its is indivisibly complex. But there remain huge practical problems in 'decoding' neural signals into experience in any specific way and that may remain so for a very long time.
Being a membrane biochemist cum cell biologist I had been passionate to learn about the relation between the cells and the totality of our body. With the help of yoga and meditation I tried to gain subjective knowledge and reached the goal over a long time. I am glad to share my understanding of this holistic relationship in my recent article (attachment) included in my RG publications.
Stephan,
Thank you for your 2 postings. I know of Lesniewski's work and of mereology. However, I am not aware of the literature in the area of informatics and I do not know of Bjorner's work. So, thanks, I will look into this and get back to you as needed. Do your work in ontology or mereology? What is your interest?
Paul
Dear Paul,
My favorite biologist of all time is the embryologist, Conrad Waddington. I think his greatest work is the Strategy of the Genes in which he summarizes his view on the genotype/phenotype relation. That is, he applies a cognitive approach to morphology for its situatedness, and formulates a theory of the epigenetic landscape, which explains how certain forms arise through genetic interactions. That this problem deals with interactions between parts and wholes are summarized in the following. I give a long quote to illustrate how penetrating his thought process was:
“Those who argue that living organisms are fundamentally different to inanimate things usually stress three separate, though perhaps ultimately related, points of divergence: Mind, Form and End. I shall not attempt, in this short essay, to say anything about the first of these, but shall confine myself to the two latter, which are easier to handle in that they are undoubtedly expressed within the realm of the material.
All living organisms, except possibly some of the very simplest, though even that exception is doubtful, are characterized by possessing a characteristic form or shape. This is not a mere static configuration, in which the organism happens to be produced and which it simply retains, as a stone or a mass of iron might do. The form of a living plant or animal is continuously kept in being in spite of the fact that material is passing all the time through the system. The form is not only, in many cases, a complex one, but the entity by which it is expressed is more nearly comparable to a river than to a mass of solid rock. Finally, organic forms have a quality, difficult to express precisely in words, but rather definitely recognizable in practice, which is often referred to as ‘wholeness’ or ‘integration’. This is almost an aesthetic quality- a character of self-sufficiency and completeness. But it is not solely aesthetic…
Most biologists in recent years have argued that an understanding of organization is, in Sinnott’s words, ‘the biological problem to which every other is subordinate and contributory’…We can make some progress towards analyzing the concepts of ‘organism’ or ‘organisation’ by starting from the consideration that these words are intended to imply some kind of coherence within the entity referred to; that is to say, they are concerned with the relation between the thing and its parts…
The degree of organization is the extent to which the entity is internally coherent, in the sense that the properties of its parts are essentially dependent on the relations between the parts and the whole. The relation between the part and the whole is spoken of as the function of the part.
Now an entity can be divided into parts in innumerable different ways. We might use the word ‘organisation’ to refer to the relation between the whole and the parts, when the latter were derived in any way at all. But this is not the common usage, and it is doubtful if anything could be found which is at all highly organised in that sense…Thus, ‘organised’ must always mean ‘organised when regarded from a certain point of view’…"
~ Conrad Waddington, The Strategy of the Genes; Form, End and Time
Dear Jerry, Many thanks for this quotation. It raises some very interesting aspects about part-whole relationships. You have indeed whetted my appetite for Waddington and I have ordered The Strategy of Genes from our library.
dear paul , here are the publications :
http://aum.dartmouth.edu/~larry/ucsc_classes/UCSC_CLASSES_2011_2012/Music_150x/readings/week_6_temporal_gestalts/rock_palmer_gestalt_psychology.pdf
http://worldu.edu/library/PolkinghorneNarrativeSelfConcept.pdf
https://www.google.co.th/books?hl=en&lr=&id=T432HyCzw2oC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=gestalt+part+whole&ots=_pj_04Vtuu&sig=k_cOsiDpTdqLp06aqXIHvJqu8ow&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=gestalt%20part%20whole&f=false
hope they help
a.
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