Giorgio Lando

are formal features enough to isolate a subject matter? In the specific case of parthood, the answer seems to be: no, they are not enough. There are also intuitive constraints on what counts as parthood.

Formal features allow for a discrimination within an already limited domain of relations that have something to do with containment and being in.

The formal constraints, inspired by prototypical, spatial cases of literal parthood, allow us to discriminate genuine relations of parthood within this intuitively constrained domain.