Abstract
Amie Thomasson and other proponents of author-intention-based accounts of artifacts hold that an artifact is what its original author(s) intended it to be. By contrast, according to the user-based framework developed by Beth Preston, an artifact’s function is determined by the practices of users and reproducers. In this chapter, I argue that both author-intention-based and user-based frameworks suffer from an overly agent-centric orientation: despite their many interesting differences, both approaches run into difficulties with scenarios in which the attitudes or dispositions of the relevant agents, whether they are authors, users or reproducers, do not serve as a reliable guide on which to base an artifact’s classification as a member of a certain artifact kind. Such alternative categorizations, which conflict with both author-intentions and user-practices, demonstrate the need for a more object-centered alternative perspective concerning prototype production and the nature of artifacts more generally.
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Notes
- 1.
Preston (2013) describes a prototype as “the first full-scale model of a type or design of thing to be produced” (ibid: 164). While many prototypes do not involve significant innovation, as Preston notes, some of them do, namely prototypes which either implement a completely novel function or those which implement an existing function in a completely novel way (ibid: 165). In what follows, my focus is primarily on such novel, i.e., genuinely innovative, prototypes.
- 2.
The concern that insufficient restrictions are placed on artifact-creation is examined in more detail, specifically as it pertains to Lynne Rudder Baker’s account, for example, in Baker (2002), (2004), (2007); Evnine (2016, especially pp. 110-118); Koslicki (2021); Sider (2002); and Zimmerman (2002).
- 3.
For further discussion of the phenomenon of mass-production and the difficulties it raises for author-intention-based accounts, see Evnine (2019).
- 4.
The example is borrowed from Carrara & Vermaas (2009: 135), who suggest that the above description is historically accurate.
- 5.
- 6.
We will have occasion below to consider in more detail a non-intention-based account of artifacts developed in Preston (2013), according to which questions concerning an artifact’s kind-membership are resolved by appeal to user-practices, rather than by looking to the content of the intention guiding an artifact’s original author in their creative act. (See also, for example, Preston (2009), (2018))
- 7.
The example and Evnine’s inspiration here come from a passage from Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, though the character speaking in the passage in question in fact intends to poke fun at the notion of “historicity”, the idea that “a thing has history in it” (Dick, 1962: 63).
- 8.
Evnine’s notion of “counter-use” is modeled after Sara Ahmed’s notion of “queer-use”, which concerns “how things can be used in ways other than for which they were intended or by those other than for whom they were intended” (Ahmed, 2019: 199).
- 9.
Preston’s account is intended to apply not only to artifacts but to the broader category of “items of material culture”. This category, for Preston, includes items that are made by human agents (viz., artifacts) as well as natural things that are not made, but used, by human agents (Preston, 2013: 4-6). Preston uses the term, “designer”, to refer to agents I have been calling “authors”; and her term for “author-intention-based accounts” is “the centralized control model”.
- 10.
- 11.
Cases of this sort are also discussed, for example, in Baker (2007), particularly in connection with the phenomenon of malfunction (ibid: 55-57); in Evnine (2016) (see especially Section 4.1.2 on “failures”, pp. 125-128); and in Preston’s work, particularly under the heading of what she calls “phantom function” (Preston (1998), (2009), (2013), (2018)). Preston’s notion of phantom function is also taken up, for example, in Holm (2017) and Parsons (2016).
- 12.
Note that the function that is falsely ascribed to so-called “amulets” is not that the items in question make people believe that they have the power to protect agents who wear them from harm caused by evil spirits. This latter condition is one that, in the scenario described, truly applies to the items in question. However, given our hypothesis, this latter condition is not what drives the original author’s creative act or the subsequent practice of use and reproduction.
- 13.
The proposed alternative classification of so-called “amulets” as mere pieces of jewelry with a purely ornamental value is intended merely as an illustration of how one might classify the artifacts in question in a way that conflicts with the function these artifacts are taken to have by their original author as well as by their subsequent users and reproducers. As noted earlier, my primary goal, in the present context, is to argue for the negative point that neither author-intentions nor user-practices seem to yield the correct result concerning the classification of so-called “amulets” and we should therefore be open to exploring alternative strategies for determining an artifact’s kind-relevant features. Any such positive proposal concerning the classification of these artifacts, which diverges from those considered here, will of course require its own separate defense (see Koslicki and Massin (2023) for further discussion).
- 14.
Of course, regardless of how these questions concerning the correct classification and function ascription are resolved, agents can (and very well may) continue to refer to the artifacts in question as “amulets”; and, quite possibly, in the minds of these agents, the meaning of the term, “amulet”, is definitionally tied to the satisfaction of a condition (e.g., “being capable of protecting a person from evil spirits, when worn around the person’s neck”) which reflects their attitudes and dispositions towards items to which they apply the term, “amulet”. But these semantic facts do not by themselves answer the ontological question of whether there in fact is a genuine and distinct artifact kind to which the term, “amulet”, applies; or, if so, what function (if any) should be ascribed to the items that belong to it.
- 15.
The analysis of phantom functions offered in Preston (2013) diverges from her earlier treatment of this phenomenon in Preston (1998), according to which function ascriptions should be based on successful performances of a trait, even if in some cases this leads to the consequence that users and reproducers are mistaken in their attribution of a function to an artifact. Thus, following Preston’s earlier account, while bug zappers lack the proper function of specifically killing mosquitoes that is mistakenly attributed to them, it is possible to ascribe to them the proper function of killing other types of insects, since the latter corresponds to a effect they in fact successfully bring about (Preston, 1998: 246).
- 16.
A further possibility, which Evnine considers in the section devoted to “failures” (ibid: Section 4.1.2, pp. 125-128), is that an attempt at engaging in an intentional creative act may fail by resulting in what Hilpinen (1993) calls “scrap” (Evnine, 2016: 127-128). The category of scrap, as Evnine understands it, includes, on the one hand, residue that is generated as a side-effect of what may be a successful act of creation, e.g., wood shavings that come about as a by-product of successfully crafting a piece of furniture. On the other hand, scrap also encompasses what is left over when nothing at all is in fact produced, e.g., wood that is left over when an agent attempts to make a piece of furniture but does not succeed in bringing a new object into existence. As the passage just cited brings out, however, Evnine does not take this option to be relevant to the case of so-called “amulets”, since he allows that in this case a new artifact and a new artifact kind can be brought into existence.
- 17.
Baker, Evnine, and Preston emphasize that, in the case at hand, it appears to be physically impossible to carry out the kind-associated function that is falsely ascribed to the artifacts in question. A similar observation might apply more generally not only to other cases involving the alleged presence of supernatural powers (e.g., voodoo-dolls, evil eyes, and the like); but also to cases, such as so-called “perpetual motion machines”, which do not require the alleged presence of supernatural powers. The fact that the falsely attributed powers, if manifested, would violate the actual laws of nature, however, strikes me as a detachable feature of these cases. An illustration of what I have in mind might be provided by the so-called “Baghdad Battery”, brought to my attention by Ludger Jansen (personal communication). As reported for example in Eggebrecht (2016), the case in question involves ancient clay pots which were found by archeologists in Iraq in 1936 and which seem to be able to function as batteries, despite the fact that they were fashioned and used long before any sophisticated scientific understanding of electricity was developed. If the items in question are in fact correctly classified as batteries, as at least some archeologists seem to hold, then the kind-relevant features in question cannot be read off the attitudes and dispositions of agents who were engaged in the practice of producing, using, or reproducing the items in question. Nevertheless, the manifestation of the capacities in question does not violate any actual laws of nature, as is shown by our acceptance of modern-day batteries as a respectable artifact kind. Due to the highly complex and controversial nature of this case, I defer a more detailed examination of the very interesting issues it raises to a future occasion.
- 18.
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Koslicki, K. (2023). Artifacts and the Limits of Agentive Authority. In: Garcia-Godinez, M. (eds) Thomasson on Ontology. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23672-3_10
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