Abstract
Artifacts are often said to be things intentionally created to serve a certain function, where function plays the dominant role in classifying artifacts into artifactual kinds. Here I argue, however, that artifacts need not have intended functions and that even when they do, that does not always play a core role in artifactual classification. Artifacts, I argue, must have intended features, but these may include not only functional but also structural, perceptible, or even receptive and normative features regarding how the object is to be regarded, used, or treated. Indeed, I argue that members of public artifact kinds depend on the existence of public norms of treatment. Recognizing the role of receptive and normative features in public artifact kinds enables us to provide a better account of artifact categorization, solve old puzzles about exaptation and minimal creation, and provide a better understanding of the significance of artifacts in our lives and in the social sciences.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Though I do not mean to be attributing all of these views to Baker herself.
- 2.
Kornblith himself does not make it clear, however, what sense of function (intended function, actual functional capacities, proper function, or some other notion) he has in mind.
- 3.
This use of “tool” as opposed to “artifact” is related to Dipert’s (1993, pp. 27–29). “Use-object” is Husserl’s term for an object useful for some individual’s purposes, but he does not restrict the term to artifacts – natural objects (such as lumps of coal) may also be use-objects in his sense (1989, p. 197).
- 4.
There has, of course, been substantive debate about whether the functions of artifacts should be understood as their intended functions, actual causal capacities, proper functions (in something like Millikan’s (1984) sense of functions acquired in virtue of their history of production), or in some other way. I do not intend to enter that debate here, as I am here more narrowly focused on arguing against the requirement that artifacts have an intended function. For a careful and thorough discussion of the debate about artifact functions, see Preston (2009).
- 5.
Where an essentially artifactual kind is a kind that necessarily has in its extension all and only artifacts – considered as intended products of human action.
- 6.
Thanks to Simon Evnine for this point.
- 7.
Heidegger of course is no friend of talk about individual intentions, but we may nonetheless find much of use in his way of understanding the defining features of the objects we live and work with.
- 8.
“So in the environment, certain entities become accessible which are always ready-to-hand, but which, in themselves, do not need to be produced” (Heidegger 1962, p. 100).
- 9.
Are they (also) hair sticks? Here, I think (if properly informed about the origins and home use of such things), we’d naturally dither – we might say: “They were meant to be chopsticks, but we use them as hair sticks” – or “they’re hair sticks to us.” We can of course also allow that in our context, we can engage in a kind of minimal making of a new kind of artifact (hair sticks) exapting the prior ones as – in this context – there are no conflicting norms of use for these things to interfere with others recognizing my imposed norms of use on these things (when I use them to hold up my hair). But to the extent that we think of them as hair sticks, I think, we are thinking of Westerners who adopt them for this purpose as engaging in a kind of minimal making of a new artifactual type, intending them (placed in the proper context: the hair care aisle) to be recognizable as subject to new norms.
- 10.
For example, debates concern whether we should understand collective intentionality in terms of we-form intentions in individual minds (Searle 1995), in terms of individual states related in the right sorts of way (Bratman 1999), in terms of states attributable to plural subjects (Gilbert 1996), etc. For a helpful summary of the debate, see Tollefsen (2004).
- 11.
Rather (by placement and arrangement), the work invokes art-regarding norms and retains some (e.g., that it is to-be-interpreted, to-be-contemplated), while it rejects others (by adding a sign suggesting it as to-be-eaten).
References
Baker, L. (2008). The shrinking difference between artifacts and natural objects. In P. Boltuc (Ed.) Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers. American Philosophical Association Newsletters, 07(2), 2–5.
Bloom, P. (1996). Intention, history and artifact concepts. Cognition, 60, 1–29.
Bratman, M. (1999). Faces of intention. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Dickie, G. (1971). Aesthetics: An introduction. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
Dipert, R. (1993). Artifacts, art works and agency. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Gilbert, M. (1996). Living together: Rationality, sociality, and obligation. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). San Francisco: Harper.
Hilpinen, R. (1992). On artifacts and works of art. Theoria, 58, 58–82.
Hilpinen, R. (1993). Authors and artifacts. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 93, 155–178.
Hilpinen, R. (2008). Artifact. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.) The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Stanford: Stanford University. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/artifact/
Husserl, E. (1989). Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy. Second Book (R. Rojcewicz & A. Schuwer, Trans.). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Ingarden, R. (1989). The ontology of the work of art. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Kornblith, H. (1980). Referring to artifacts. Philosophical Review, LXXXIX(1), 109–114.
Levinson, J. (2007). Artworks as artifacts. In Creations of the mind: Theories of artifacts and their representation (pp. 74–82). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Margolis, E., & Laurence, S. (2007). Introduction. In Creations of the mind: Theories of artifacts and their representation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Millikan, R. (1984). Language, thought and other biological categories: New foundations for realism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Preston, B. (2009). Philosophical theories of artifact function. In A. Meijers (Ed.), Philosophy of technology and engineering sciences (Vol. 9, pp. 213–233). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Searle, J. (1995). The construction of social reality. New York: The Free Press.
Thomasson, A. L. (2003). Realism and human kinds. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 67(3), 580–699.
Thomasson, A. L. (2007). Artifacts and human concepts. In E. Margolis & S. Laurence (Eds.), Creations of the mind: Theories of artifacts and their representation (pp. 52–73). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tollefsen, D. (2004). Collective intentionality. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/coll-int/
Weiand, J. (1980). Defining art and artifacts. Philosophical Studies, 38, 385–389.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Simon Evnine, Beth Preston, and the editors for very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Thomasson, A.L. (2014). Public Artifacts, Intentions, and Norms. In: Franssen, M., Kroes, P., Reydon, T.A.C., Vermaas, P.E. (eds) Artefact Kinds. Synthese Library, vol 365. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00801-1_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00801-1_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-00800-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-00801-1
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)