CONCEPT
The Mereological Fallacy
The technical name for the confusion Midgley spent sixty years correcting — attributing to a component what can only be attributed to the whole system.
The mereological fallacy is the philosophical term for the error of attributing to a part what can only be attributed to the whole it belongs to. It is the error of saying that a carburetor drives to work. Carburetors do something essential; cars drive to work. The distinction matters because confusing the component with the system means making decisions about the system based on the component, and the decisions are wrong in ways invisible from inside the confusion. Midgley's entire methodology — philosophical plumbing, the whole-animal argument, the distinction between cleverness and integration — can be understood as the systematic exposure of mereological fallacies in the popular understanding of mind, biology, and now AI.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The term was given its contemporary philosophical prominence by Peter Hacker and Max Bennett in their 2003 book Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, where they argued that much of neuroscience commits a version of the fallacy by attributing to brains what can only be