Metapattern as situationist mereology

Pieter Wisse

The Greek word meroς means part. Mereology deals with parts constituting wholes. While mereology has been applied to express ontology, it has so far been largely overlooked how some ontology first of all determines mereology.
The traditional brand of mereology seems to be grounded on logical atomism. On that basis, a part is atomic when it may no longer be considered a whole, i.e. is not decomposable into yet further parts.
Such ontology implies an ultimately static world view. For the inquiry effectively stops at being. Atomic parts are taken as the ultimate ‘beings.’ They can be configured as wholes, equally static. One whole may act as part of the next whole, etcetera.

Metapattern involves a different ontology. It is essentially dynamic. Rather than being, its critical concept is behaving.
It can now be recognized that an atomic part up to whatever whole doesn’t just exist statically. It displays behavior.
It follows that attention must be directed at differences, too. There’s the tension between experiencing different behaviors, yet attributing those to a single object. With Metapattern, such tension is not resolved, that is, variety is not reduced, but productively accommodated.
Any part, or whole, for that matter, is no longer treated as part-of-whole, but as object-in-situation. Then, the same object in a different situation unambiguously accounts for different behavior. It amounts to what may be called situationist mereology.

Metapattern as situationist mereology facilitates requisite variety of infrastructure for information exchange at the widest scale imaginable for social interaction. It succeeds as the critical semantic technology by squarely leaving a minimalistic existential paradigm behind and adopting an open, relativistic behavioral paradigm.
Behaviors and ‘their’ objects are interdependent, with situations mediating. In hindsight, albeit resulting in a qualitatively different logic, that is logical for understanding reality and behaving in it from, and promoting, equity.