Midwinters, end games, and body parts: A classification of part-whole relations

Abstract

This paper deals with the conceptual part-whole relation as it occurs in language processing, visual perception, and general problem solving. One important long-term goal is to develop a naive or common sense theory of the mereological domain, that is the domain of parts and wholes and their relations. In this paper, we work towards such a theory by presenting a classification of part-whole relations that is suitable for different cognitive tasks and give proposals for the representation and processing of these relations. In order to be independent of specific tasks like language understanding or the recognition of objects, we use structural properties to develop our classification. The paper starts with a brief overview of the mereological research in different disciplines and two examples of the role of part-whole relations in linguistics (possessive constructions) and knowledge processing (reasoning about objects). In the second section, we discuss two important approaches to mereological problems: the “Classical Extensional Mereology” as presented by Simons and the meronymic system of part-whole relations proposed by Winston, Chaffin and Hermann. Our own work is described in the third and last section. First, we discuss different kinds of wholes according to their inherent compositional structure; complexes, collections, and masses. Then partitions induced by or independent of the compositional structure of a whole are described, accompanied by proposals for their processing. © 1995 Academic Press, Inc.