An Abstract Mereology for Meinongian Objects

The purpose of this paper is to examine how any domain of Meinongian objects can be structured by a special kind of mereology. The basic definition of this mereology is the following: an object is part of another iff every characteristic property of the former is also a characteristic property of the latter. (The notions of domain of Meinongian objects and characteristic property will be carefully explained in the paper.) I will show that this kind of mereology ends up being very powerful for dealing with Meinongian objects. Mereological sums and products are not restricted in any way in a domain of Meinongian objects: there is a sum and a product for any pair of Meinongian objects. With the mereological operations of sum, product and complement, and two special Meinongian objects (a total object having every characteristic property and a null object having no characteristic property), we can define a full boolean algebra on Meinongian objects. Moreover, this kind of mereology is atomic and extensional: an atom is a Meinongian object having just one characteristic property and two objects are identical iff the same atoms are parts of both of them. A Meinongian object can finally be defined in mereological terms as the sum of the atoms of its characteristic properties.