 and this would suffice to block the inference to (36) while keeping with the spirit of standard mereology. This strategy is not uncommon, especially in the mathematically oriented literature (see e.g. Mormann 2000, Forrest 2002, Pontow and Schubert 2006), and we shall briefly return to it in Section 4.4 below. In general, however, mereologists tend to side with traditional wisdom and steer clear of (P.10) altogether.