Vector Parthood

Phil Pickering, Sam Baron, John Tanner

Published Jan 15, 2026• 0 citations

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to outline a viable notion of parthood for vectors. The importance of vector parthood has come to the fore in discussions of quantum mechanics, with two accounts existing already. We show that both fail to preserve the transitivity of parthood. We thus present a new account of vector parthood that preserves transitivity and is applicable to quantum systems. We close by suggesting some applications for the notion we present here that go beyond quantum mechanics, including ordinary sinusoidal waves (e.g., water or sound waves).

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