Title: Partial Houses, Entire Tourists, and Integrity Conditions
By Giorgio Lando (L’Aquila, Philosophy)
Date: Thursday, November 20, 2025
Time: 1530-1700
Room: H-232
Abstract: We often speak about partial houses or partial chess matches. The things to which we attribute partialhood are also those that may be counted fractionally, by saying, for example, that at the moment two-and-a-quarter houses have been built along a road and that three-and-a-quarter matches have been played in a tournament. Fractional counting is the subject matter of a puzzle elaborated by Nathan Salmon, and, because of this puzzle, is often thought to be utterly different from standard, non-fractional counting, in particular as fractional counting claims are not directly amenable to logical paraphrases in terms of identity and logical language. Partialhood, on the other hand, has been recently shown by David Liebesman to be an interesting metaphysical notion, which Liebesman suggests to be primitive. In this talk, I will defend a reductive account of partialhood and fractional counting in terms of mereology and modality. According to this account, partial houses are possible parts of houses and, when involved in fractional counting, are measured with respect to merely possible houses. The logical form of fractional counting claims is continuous with that of non-fractional claims. The account explains why some kinds of things are not involved in partialhood and are not fractionally countable, and others (like tourists) are only marginally involved in these phenomena. The account is exposed to the risk of overgenerating partial things, but I will show that this risk can be contained. At the end, I will suggest that, in order to make sense of some interpretations of fractional counting claims, an integrity condition for partial things is needed.
About the speaker: Giorgio Lando is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Language at the University of L’Aquila. His work focuses on related issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of logic – in particular, issues in the metaphysics of parts and wholes. His work has appeared in such journals as Erkenntnis, the Monist, Philosophical Studies and Synthese, and he has authored several books, including Mereology: A Philosophical Introduction (2017, Bloomsbury) and (with Massimiliano Carrara, Ciro de Florio, and Vittorio Morato) Introduzione alla Metafisica Contemporanea (2021, Il Mulino).
Organized by the Department of Philosophy
