Locating Gunky Water and Wine

Abstract

Can material objects be weakly located at regions of spacetime and yet fail to be exactly located anywhere? In this paper, I discuss a case which, at least according to one interpretation, answers affirmatively: the case of blending gunky water and wine, in gunky space. Perhaps after such a blend, the water and wine aren't exactly located anywhere while being weakly located at the location of the blend and any region which overlaps it. I show that the case is interesting and complicated, and has consequences for some ideas found in papers by

How to Make a Gunky Spritz

“…Parsons () sees in it a threat to Exactness and his system @ S . Leonard () takes it to be expressible only at the cost of accepting multiple primitive locative notions and brute metaphysical necessities. However, if what I have argued in this paper is on the right track, the theory of location that I have labelled ‘ xx @ > S ’—which takes pervasive location as its only primitive notion—is perfectly able to both express the possibility of gunky Spritz and to validate principles like Precision and (39)–(41) which appear to be sufficiently close to the central principles of Parsons's @ S .…”

“…The wine is so scattered and discontinuous that it will not exactly fit any of the continuous regions of Nolanian space. […] if Nolanian Stoic blends are coherent, Exactness is not a conceptual truth (Parsons , p. 208).As Leonard () has efficaciously argued, however, the possibility of a gunky Spritz is actually not expressible given the definitions employed in S @ and S @ o . Recall, in fact, that, as stated in the passage just quoted, in order to have a gunky Spritz the following must be the case:…”

“…As Leonard () claims, one way to express the possibility of a gunky Spritz may be that of taking both weak and exact location as primitives. However, regardless of whether this option can be ultimately successful, the moral of our story seems to be that gunky Spritz cannot possibly quench the thirst of location theorists that don't have a taste for multiple primitive locative notions.…”

“…The general question behind the possibility of gunky Spritz is not new in the contemporary debate on theories of location . It is discussed, among others, by Daniel Nolan (), Josh Parsons (), and more recently by Matt Leonard (). In particular, Leonard () has argued that the extant theories of location, assuming just one primitive locative relation, cannot express the possibility of the kind of mixture characterizing a gunky Spritz.…”

What is mereological harmony?

“…I take these examples from Parsons (2007). Another case noted in Parsons (2007) and Nolan (2006), which was first shown by Shieva Kleinschmidt to have consequences for the thesis that everything with a weak location has an exact location, is the case of stoic gunk, though see Leonard (2014) for why this case is a bit more complicated than the three examples mentioned above. 11 See Simons (1987) on classical mereology, though also see Hovda (2008).…”