An ontological analysis of the relationship between a mother and her child

• Nakayama Yasuo

抄録

From an ontological viewpoint, the relationship between a mother and her child is especially interesting. During a pregnancy, the mother and her child are spatially continuous. After the birth, a separation process between them begins. This process is temporally seamless and coincides with the individuation process of the child. To analyze this separation process, we use an ontological framework, i.e., Four-Dimensional Mereology described in Nakayama (2009, in Japanese). Vertebrate animals take different strategies in order to preserve their own species. Fishes produce a huge amount of offspring, but only some of them become mature. In contrast, mammals produce only a small number of children and bring them up very carefully, so that the survival rate becomes high. For this reason, the mother-child-relationship is especially strong for mammals. As examples of mammals, we describe child rearing of kangaroos and Japanese macaques. We introduce, then, a concept of system and analyze the relationship among a mother system (SM), a child system (SC), and a mother-child system (SM+C). For humans, beside the biological process of individuation, we should take a psychological and a social process of individuation into consideration. The biological individuation starts with the birth of a child. However, the psychological and the social individuation take a long time before they are completed. We also discuss death of a child. In a mother-child system, survival of the child is one of its goals. So, the mother continues to perform actions in order to achieve this goal. Thus, when a child dies, the mother-child system totally collapses and the mother loses one of her goals of life. The discussions in this paper show that it is not appropriate to treat humans as isolated beings. They are often involved in systematic interactions among them. Sometimes, their behaviors can be properly explained by interpreting them as components of one system.

収録刊行物

• Osaka Human Sciences

  Osaka Human Sciences 3 83-97, 2017-03

  Graduate School of Human Sciences, Osaka University

キーワード

• mother and child
• ontology
• system
• evolutionary strategy
• species

詳細情報

• CRID: 1390290699784916224
• NII論文ID: 120006027663
• NII書誌ID: AA12727839
• DOI: 10.18910/60589
• HANDLE: 11094/60589
• 本文言語コード: en
• データソース種別:
  • JaLC
  • IRDB
  • CiNii Articles
  • KAKEN