• Korean Journal of Logic
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.167-201
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• 2010

This paper aims to scrutinize the possibility of mereology as philosophically satisfiable metalogic. Motivation for this is straightforward. As I see, a traditional approach to metalogic presented in the name of mathematical logic posits the existence of mathematical entities such as sets, functions, models, etc. to give definitions of logical concepts like logical consequence. As a result, whenever logic is used in any individual sciences, this set-theoretical metalogic cannot but add these mathematical entities to the domain of them. This fact makes this approach contradict to the ontological conservativeness of logic. Mereology, however, has been alleged to be ontologically innocent, while it is a formal system very similar to set theory. So it may well be that some people thought of mereology as a good substitute for set theoretic metalanguage and concepts for ontologically neutral metalogic. Unfortunately, when we look into argument for the ontological innocence of mereology, we can find that mereological entities such as mereological sums or fusions are not ontologically neutral. Thus we can conclude that mereological approach to metalogic is not promising at all.