Eduction

The teasing out of a thing into existence by way of act upon matter.

E.g., instead of the chair emerging out of arranging parts, the chair is educed out of the matter by way of acting upon the material which will comprise it to prime it to receive that act as form.

The conceptual difference between emergence and eduction is facially difficult, but it is the key difference between reverse vs. normal mereological essentialism. In reverse ME, the whole is prior in existence to its parts; whereas, ME states that the parts are prior to the whole. For example, the ME theorist will posit that the chairs parts exist prior to the chair and only by assembling the parts do you then cause something new to emerge from them (i.e., the chair); whereas, the RME theorist will posit that the act of assembly caused the material to become parts and this unified act is what provides that material with the whole (i.e., the chairness). For RME, everything in actuality can only be changed by way of something already in act actualizing a potential of another entity (e.g., the cold coffee is made hot by way of an act which actualizes the coffee’s real potential to be heated). Thusly, the chair as a whole is already present in the act of assembling the parts upon completion; and those parts are not parts until they are fully assembled into the chair: the chair, by way of the act of assembly, imposes onto those materials in such a manner as to make them its parts. This is a subtle but stark metaphysical difference between ME and RME: e.g., the deer’s soul is what acts upon its matter and is the unity which subordinates the material as parts of the whole (deer) in RME, whereas in ME the deer is just emergent from the processes of the material constituents as the bi-product of that collection.