A Formal Study on the Transitivity of the Part-Whole Relations

Transitivity is an important property used in logical reasoning. However, Part-Whole (PW) relations usually do not satisfy the property. Wiston and Odell partitioned PW relations into six sub-PW relations respectively, such that the transitivity property is held in each sub-class and each different sub-PW denotes a kind of PW relations with special meanings. This paper studies the composition of different sub-PW relations given by Wiston and Odell in following three aspects: (I) Does the composition relation of two different sub- PW relations make sense?(2) Is the transitivity still held for the composition relations of two different sub- PW relations; (3) which sub-PW class does the composition relation belong to. Different from former study, a formal discussion is carried for above issues.