 These representational issues are not idle with respect to differing explanations, both past and present, because the same line of argument about the non-independence of organismal parts constituted reasons for treating the organism from a non-reductionist standpoint (Aristotle, Parts of Animals II.3; Owen, Hunterian Lectures [1837] in Sloan 1992, 213–4). Individuation of parts and their explanatory relationship to wholes is critically dependent on the principles utilized in representing them (Love 2012). Wimsatt (1974, 1986, 1997, 2007) has claimed that reduction and emergence are compatible within the context of explaining organizational complexity in living systems, going so far as to argue that reductionist methodology can identify emergence when specific conditions of aggregativity are delineated. Different failures of aggregativity result when different conditions are not met, which yields a subtle taxonomy of compositional relations, as well as highlighting that different decompositions produce distinct fulfillments and/or violations of those conditions that can be methodologically exploited by scientists for the purpose of causal discovery.