Title: A Mereology of Powers? Three Ideas

 Abstract: There’s a new kid on the block — an upstart rival to the dominant Humean paradigm — a dispositional or powers-based metaphysics, according to which the world’s fundamental qualitative entities are non-categorical or inherently modal. In an explosion of new literature (Vetter 2015, McKitrick 2018, Williams 2019), philosophers are starting to address questions surrounding the internal structure of complex powers. One key issue: do powers have parts? In this paper, I explore three ways of formalizing a mereology of powers. The first way adapts Fine’s (1999) Theory of Embodiments, requiring a distinction between rigid and variably embodied powers. I motivate this distinction and show how it leads to a well-behaved mereology. The second way is to adapt the graph-theoretic theory of Bird and Tugby and utilize a ‘structured’ approach to mereology from Mormann (2010). The final way is thoroughly carving-based, and uses a new framework to model carving an interconnected space of powers along its most natural joints.