ERIS Rivista internazionale di argomentazione e dibattito www.eris.unipd.edu.it eris@gmail.com Economic Reasoning and Fallacy of Composition, Part IV: Some Parting Words John Woods Eris, Vol. 1, n. 2, pp. 57-61 (2016) ISSN 2421-6747 57 Economic Reasoning and Fallacy of Composition, Part IV: Some Parting Words John Woods University of British Columbia john.woods@ubc.ca ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ 1. Over-abstraction Parting words are sometimes final, but these ones of mine are not. They are an invitation to keep on thinking about the matters to which Finocchiaro has engagingly directed our attention. One of the things that our present discussion helps make clear is the disoriented state in which we find the present literature on composition, in both logic and economics alike. Also much appreciated are Finocchiaro’s clarifications of some of the points I was confused about in my commentary, and for the further occasion they’ve given me to sort out my own thoughts about the matters under review here. Finocchiaro’s examples disclose two significant omissions, one on the part of logicians and the other on the part of economists. Logicians of the present day who take the occasion to mention composition arguments rarely trouble to negotiate the interrelations among the variables P, W and Q of composition claims in canonical notation. Notably absent are analyses of the underlying part-whole relations that deliver a property of all the parts to the whole of which they are its parts, notwithstanding the efforts otherwise of the 1977 paper. Economists, on one hand, simply will not address the compositionality in the terms in which it is presented in canonical notation. Finocchiaro is right to emphasize that his economics examples are presented for our consideration, not necessarily  or even for the most part  with his endorsement. But, upon consideration, they are strikingly informative examples, perhaps surprisingly so. To take an example close to my heart, one of the virtues of Finocchiaro’s inspection of the logic textbook literature is its exposure of difficulties with the textbook treatments of Woods-Walton (and later Irvine) treatment of economically compositional contexts in the three editions of Argument. In the 2004 edition, it is claimed that economic reasoning “is inherently liable to the fallacy of composition” (p. 251), and that – to quote Finocchiaro’s paraphrase – “this liability is connected with the fundamental division between microeconomics and macroeconomics and the problematic relationship between the two.” On the basis of Finocchiaro’s data-sets, I find that I have changed my mind about these claims, or at least lessened the confidence with which I first advanced them. At the heart of