ABSTRACT
This chapter shows the ways in which Borges prefigures the crucial move made in American post-analytic philosophy toward conceptual relativism. It shows how Borges pioneered in his work the use of mereology. Putnam asserts, if people are mereologists, one can certainly avoid positing the mereological sums as "real objects". By postulating the existence of mereological objects Borges suggests a defense of conceptual relativity. "Brodie's Report" got started with Borges's typical framing devices, that of a found manuscript. "Averroes's Search" revolves around the twelfth-century Spanish Muslim philosopher Averroes's failed attempt to come up with the meaning of the enigmatic Greek terms tragedy and comedy as they appear in Aristotle's Poetics. In Max Black's view, the words in a metaphorical expression interact with one another to produce a meaning that is a resultant of that interaction. Borges sees Hume's writings as completing Berkeley's idealism. He suggests that people consider Chuang Tzu's dream both from Berkeley's and Hume's points of view.
