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Artifacts
Edited by Nurbay Irmak (Bogazici University)
About this topic
| Summary |
One can divide the debates over the ontology of artifacts into two different questions: the existential question and the question about the nature of artifacts. The existential question is simply the question whether there are artifacts, or whether artifacts are among the constituents of reality. The following questions on the nature of artifacts are important to settle the existential question. Are artifacts mind-independent entities, and if not, does that make them less ‘real’ than natural kinds? Do artifacts have essential properties like their intended functions or the material that they are made out of? The answers to these questions are also significant for our theory of reference for artifactual kind terms. |
| Key works | For negative answers to the existential question on the grounds of parsimony, causal adequacy, and other metaphysical principles/virtues see Van Inwagen 1990, Merricks 2001, and Sider 2001. Wiggins 2001, Baker 2007, Thomasson 2007, Elder 2004 and more recently Korman 2010 provide a very different kind of defenses for the existence of artifacts. For a discussion on the theory of reference for artifactual kind terms see Kornblith 1980, Schwartz 1977 and Thomasson 2003. |
| Introductions | Hilpinen 1999 provides a very nice introduction to the philosophical problems surrounding artifacts, including ontological questions mentioned above. See also Korman 2011, though the scope of his article is wider than artifacts. Margolis & Laurence 2007 is a good collection for different theories of artifacts. |
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Related
Siblings
- Coincident Objects (189)
- Composition as Identity (133)
- Contingent Identity (75)
- Hylomorphism (32)
- Material Constitution (315)
- Mereological Universalism (143)
- Mereological Nihilism (179)
- Monism (135)
- Problem of the Many (66)
- Stuff (147)
- Three- and Four-Dimensionalism (425)
- Vague Objects (115)
- Eliminative Conceptions of Material Objects (86)
- Permissive Conceptions of Material Objects (68)
- Material Objects, Misc (146)
Contents
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| 1 — 50 / 261 |
- Artifact's ontology.C. R. Braida - manuscriptThis paper aims to defend a theory of artifacts based on the concept of field of action as an alternative to functionalist, intentionalist, and double-nature theories. The proposed theory is realist about the existence of entities that are artifacts and praxiological about the nature of such entities. The basis for the theory is the concept of action. The concepts of field of action and of participants in a field of action, such as agents, supports and objects, are introduced by abstraction (...)Remove from this listExport citation
Bookmark - History of memory artifacts.Richard Heersmink - manuscriptHuman biological memory systems have adapted to use technological artifacts to overcome some of the limitations of these systems. For example, when performing a difficult calculation, we use pen and paper to create and store external number symbols; when remembering our appointments, we use a calendar; when remembering what to buy, we use a shopping list. This chapter looks at the history of memory artifacts, describing the evolution from cave paintings to virtual reality. It first characterizes memory artifacts, memory systems, (...)
- Nature and kinds of Artifact, with a look at metaphysical and ontological aspects of artifactual world.Faghihian Mehrdad - manuscriptRemove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Trusting and punishing artifacts.Eduoard Machery & Lévan Sardjevéladzé - manuscriptRemove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Teleological functional explanations: a new naturalist synthesis.Mihnea Capraru - forthcoming - Acta Biotheoretica.The etiological account of teleological function is beset by several difficulties, which I propose to solve by grafting onto the etiological theory a subordinated goal-contribution clause. This approach enables us to ascribe neither too many teleofunctions nor too few; to give a unitary, one-clause analysis that works just as well for teleological functions derived from Darwinian evolution, as for those derived from human intention; and finally, to save the etiological theory from falsification, by explaining how, in spite of appearances, the (...)
- Artifact Concept Pluralism.Alper Güngör - forthcoming - Dialectica.We have a rough idea of what artifacts are: artifacts are objects made to serve a certain purpose. However, there is no consensus on how to specify this definition. Essentialists argue that objects are grouped into artifact kinds by sharing non-trivial artifact essences, while anti-essentialists argue that there is no such essence to be found. However, the prominent essentialist and anti-essentialist accounts suffer from extensional and definitional problems. I argue that the problems current essentialist and anti-essentialist accounts face mainly stem (...)
- The dysfunctionality of everyday things:-on stress, design and artefacts.Sara Ilstedt Hjelm - forthcoming - Techne:: Design Wisdom.
- The Mess We Make: On the Metaphysics of Artifact Kinds.Nurbay Irmak - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-17.According to natural kind essentialism, there are certain properties essential to natural kinds. A similar view, artifact kind essentialism, is commonly held for artifactual kinds. According to artifact kind essentialism, artifactual kinds have essential properties that determine their conditions of membership. In this paper, I explore and defend the possibility of a nonessentialist alternative for artifactual kind membership.
- Type Realism Reconsidered.Nurbay Irmak - forthcoming - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism:1-11.Realism about types is the view that types are abstract and repeatable objects. Although type realists seem to agree that types, unlike properties, are objects in their own right, they argue that there is a metaphysically intimate tie between the existence conditions of types and properties. In particular, most type realists believe that types are, in a certain sense, determined by the properties that underlie them. I argue that this is a mistake, especially for those type realists who believe that (...)
- A Dual-Aspect Theory of Artifact Function.Marc Artiga - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (4):1533-1554.The goal of this essay is to put forward an original theory of artifact function, which takes on board the results of the debate on the notion of biological function and also accommodates the distinctive aspects of artifacts. More precisely, the paper develops and defends the Dual-Aspect Theory, which is a monist account according to which an artifact’s function depends on intentional and reproductive aspects. It is argued that this approach meets a set of theoretical and meta-theoretical desiderata and is (...)
- Artifacts and fields of action.Celso R. Braida - 2023 - Filosofia Unisinos Unisinos Journal of Philosophy 24 (2):1-15.The aim of this paper is to defend a theory of artifacts based on the concept of field of action, as an alternative to functional, intentional and double-nature theories. The proposed theory is realistic about the existence of entities that are artifacts, and praxiological about the nature of such entities. The basis of the theory is the concept of action; from this concept, the concepts of field of action and participants in a field of action, namely, agents and objects, are (...)
- Aristotle on Artifactual Substances.Phil Corkum - 2023 - Metaphysics 6 (1):24-36.It is standardly held that Aristotle denies that artifacts are substances. There is no consensus on why this is so, and proposals include taking artifacts to lack autonomy, to be merely accidental unities, and to be impermanent. In this paper, I argue that Aristotle holds that artifacts are substances. However, where natural substances are absolutely fundamental, artifacts are merely relatively fundamental—like any substance, an artifact can ground such nonsubstances as its qualities; but artifacts are themselves partly grounded in natural substances. (...)
- Sellars, practical reality, and practical truth.Stefanie Dach - 2023 - Theoria 89 (5):571-591.Wilfrid Sellars is usually read as claiming that only the unobservable, theoretical objects which science would postulate at the ideal end of inquiry are real. Against this, Willem deVries has suggested that we can develop a notion of practical reality in the context of Sellars's philosophy which would pertain primarily to commonsense objects. I use deVries's suggestion as a foil to clarify Sellars's own commitments about the practical. I show that the notion of practical reality is not necessary to secure (...)
- Technology and Neutrality.Sybren Heyndels - 2023 - Philosophy and Technology 36 (4):1-22.This paper clarifies and answers the following question: is technology morally neutral? It is argued that the debate between proponents and opponents of the Neutrality Thesis depends on different underlying assumptions about the nature of technological artifacts. My central argument centres around the claim that a mere physicalistic vocabulary does not suffice in characterizing technological artifacts as artifacts, and that the concepts of function and intention are necessary to describe technological artifacts at the right level of description. Once this has (...)
- Bodies, Functions, and Imperfections.Sherri Irvin - 2023 - In Peter Cheyne (ed.), Imperfectionist Aesthetics in Art and Everyday Life. Routledge. pp. 271-283.The culturally pervasive tendency to identify aspects of the body as aesthetically imperfect harms individuals and scaffolds injustice related to disability, race, gender, LGBTQ+ identities, and fatness. But abandoning the notion of imperfection may not respect people’s reasonable understandings of their own bodies. I examine the prospects for a practice of aesthetic assessment grounded in a notion of the body’s function. I argue that functional aesthetic assessment, to be respectful, requires understanding the body’s functions as complex, malleable, and determined by (...)
- Artifacts and the Limits of Agentive Authority.Kathrin Koslicki - 2023 - In Miguel Garcia-Godinez (ed.), Thomasson on Ontology. Springer Verlag. pp. 209-241.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 (...)
- The Metaphysics of Artifacts: a critical rationalist approach.Alireza Mansouri & Emad Tayebi - 2023 - Journal of Philosophical Investigations 17 (42):151-167.Artifacts are ubiquitous and influential in our world, but their nature and existence are controversial. Several theories have been proposed to explain the ontology of artifacts. Drawing on Popper's theory of three worlds, this paper suggests a metaphysics for artifacts along the line of a critical rationalist (CR) approach. This theory distinguishes between three realms of reality: the physical world (World 1), the mental world (World 2), and the world of objective knowledge (World 3). The paper argues that artifacts have (...)
- Considerazioni sul continuum natura/tecnica. Il cibo come artefatto ibrido.Erica Onnis - 2023 - Bollettino Filosofico.Feeding is a fundamental physiological need that falls within the realm of what we consider natural. However, throughout history, human beings have developed and employed several techniques to produce and manipulate food. Therefore, if the classical metaphysical distinction between natural and artefactual entities must be accepted, our food seems to predominantly fall into the latter category. Yet, discussions of artefacts do not typically involve organisms but rather material objects that cannot be found “in nature”. Thus, food may appear as a (...)
- Aristotle’s Ontology of Artefacts.Marilù Papandreou - 2023 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.It is commonly believed that Aristotle merely uses artefacts as examples or analogical cases. This book, however, shows that Aristotle gives a specific, coherent account of artefacts that in various ways owes much to Plato. Moreover, it proposes a new, definitive solution to the problem of artefacts' substantiality, which comprises two controversial positions: (i) that Aristotle holds a binary view of substantiality according to which artefacts are not substances at all; (ii) that artefacts fail to be substances because they exhibit (...)
- Truth About Artifacts.Howard Sankey - 2023 - Symposion: Theoretical and Applied Inquiries in Philosophy and Social Sciences 10 (1):149-152.Truth in a correspondence sense is objective in two ways. It is objective because the relation of correspondence is objective and because the facts to which truths correspond are objective. Truth about artifacts is problematic because artifacts are intentionally designed to perform certain functions, and so are not entirely mind independent. Against this, it is argued in this paper that truth about artifacts is perfectly objective despite the role played by intention and purpose in the production of artifacts.
- Atos e Artefatos: além do Estético e do Semântico.Celso R. Braida - 2022 - Guarapuava - Boqueirão, Guarapuava - PR, Brasil: Apolodoro Virtual Edições.This book is a reflection on contemporary arts and techniques, with the purpose of rethinking the terms in which they are thought and presented in philosophical contexts, with the art of dance as the plumb line by which theorizations are evaluated. The approach is based on the thesis that the artistic is directly anchored in action and interagency. The aim is to think of works of art no longer as objects, but rather as triggers of action and interaction that require, (...)
- Artifactual Normativity.Christopher Frugé - 2022 - Synthese 200 (126):1-19.A central tension shaping metaethical inquiry is that normativity appears to be subjective yet real, where it’s difficult to reconcile these aspects. On the one hand, normativity pertains to our actions and attitudes. On the other, normativity appears to be real in a way that precludes it from being a mere figment of those actions and attitudes. In this paper, I argue that normativity is indeed both subjective and real. I do so by way of treating it as a special (...)
- Human uniqueness in using tools and artifacts: flexibility, variety, complexity.Richard Heersmink - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6):1-22.The main goal of this paper is to investigate whether humans are unique in using tools and artifacts. Non-human animals exhibit some impressive instances of tool and artifact-use. Chimpanzees use sticks to get termites out of a mound, beavers build dams, birds make nests, spiders create webs, bowerbirds make bowers to impress potential mates, etc. There is no doubt that some animals modify and use objects in clever and sophisticated ways. But how does this relate to the way in which (...)
- Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art.Sherri Irvin - 2022 - Oxford University Press.Contemporary art can seem chaotic: it may be made of toilet paper, candies you can eat, or meat that is thrown out after each exhibition. Some works fill a room with obsessively fabricated objects, while others purport to include only concepts, thoughts, or language. Immaterial argues that, despite these unruly appearances, making rules is a key part of what many contemporary artists do when they make their works, and these rules can explain disparate developments in installation art, conceptual art, time-based (...)
- Essentialism vs. Potentialism: Allies or Competitors?Kathrin Koslicki - 2022 - Philosophisches Jahrbuch 129 (2):325-338.Do essence-based accounts of necessity and Vetter’s potentiality-based account of possibility in fact lead to the same result, viz., a single derived notion of necessity that is interdefinable with possibility or vice versa? And does each approach independently have the ability to reach its desired goal without having to rely on the primitive notion utilized by the other? In this essay, I investigate these questions and Vetter’s responses to them. Contrary to the “separatist” position defended by Vetter, I argue that (...)
- Multifunctional Artefacts and Collocation.David-Hillel Ruben - 2022 - Metaphysics 5 (1):66-77.There appear to be multifunctional artefacts of a type such that none of their functions can be attributed only to some proper part of the artefact. I use two examples of allegedly multifunctional artefacts of this kind in what follows, one due to Lynne Rudder Baker (aspirin) and another of my own (a spork). The two examples are meant to make the same point. I discuss her aspirin example, since its discussion has entered the literature, but without its being dealt (...)
- A Dual-Aspect Theory of Artifact Function.Marc Artiga - 2021 - Erkenntnis:1-22.The goal of this essay is to put forward an original theory of artifact function, which takes on board the results of the debate on the notion of biological function and also accommodates the distinctive aspects of artifacts. More precisely, the paper develops and defends the Dual-Aspect Theory, which is a monist account according to which an artifact’s function depends on intentional and reproductive aspects. It is argued that this approach meets a set of theoretical and meta-theoretical desiderata and is (...)
- Varieties of artifacts: Embodied, perceptual, cognitive, and affective.Richard Heersmink - 2021 - Topics in Cognitive Science (4):1-24.The primary goal of this essay is to provide a comprehensive overview and analysis of the various relations between material artifacts and the embodied mind. A secondary goal of this essay is to identify some of the trends in the design and use of artifacts. First, based on their functional properties, I identify four categories of artifacts co-opted by the embodied mind, namely (1) embodied artifacts, (2) perceptual artifacts, (3) cognitive artifacts, and (4) affective artifacts. These categories can overlap and (...)
- Authorship and Creation.Nurbay Irmak - 2021 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 79 (2):175-185.Artworks have authors. According to Christy Mag Uidhir, this simple assumption has significant consequences for the ontology of artworks. One such consequence is that artworks cannot be identified with abstract entities: if there are works of art, they are concrete entities. Therefore, one cannot create an abstract work of art. Mag Uidhir presents a novel challenge against abstract creationism, the view that certain kinds of art objects are abstract artifacts. This article has two aims. First, it provides a defense of (...)
- A Bundle Theory of Words.J. T. M. Miller - 2021 - Synthese 198 (6):5731–5748.It has been a common assumption that words are substances that instantiate or have properties. In this paper, I question the assumption that our ontology of words requires posting substances by outlining a bundle theory of words, wherein words are bundles of various sorts of properties (such as semantic, phonetic, orthographic, and grammatical properties). I argue that this view can better account for certain phenomena than substance theories, is ontologically more parsimonious, and coheres with claims in linguistics.
- How Ficta Depend.Michele Paolini Paoletti - 2021 - Esercizi Filosofici 16 (1):3-25.I shall elaborate in this article on the connection between ficta and metaontological pluralism, i.e., the view according to which there are irreducibly many dependence relations. More precisely, I shall consider the main tenets of an artifactualist theory of ficta and show how they can be expressed from the standpoint of a pluralist theory of dependence that accepts irreducibly many Respect-of-Dependence relations (in short, RD-relations). In Section 2, I shall introduce the artifactualist theory at stake and, in Section 3, I (...)
- Aristotle’s Take on Inadvertently Made Objects.Marilù Papandreou - 2021 - Esercizi Filosofici 16 (1):26-41.The way metaphysicians conceive of inadvertently made objects has consequences for their understanding of the relation between intentions and kinds. Indeed, the very possibility of concrete material objects produced without human intention shakes the common identification of an object’s kind and the intentions of the maker. The disruptive potential of inadvertently made objects also affects historians of philosophy, who have often failed to engage with the issue. In this paper, I shall reconstruct Aristotle’s account of inadvertently made objects and the (...)
- How to Test the Ship of Theseus.Marta Campdelacreu, Ramón García-Moya, Genoveva Martí & Enrico Terrone - 2020 - Dialectica 74 (3).The story of the Ship of Theseus is one of the most venerable conundrums in philosophy. Some philosophers consider it a genuine puzzle. Others deny that it is so. It is, therefore, an open question whether there is or there is not a puzzle in the Ship of Theseus story. So, arguably, it makes sense to test empirically whether people perceive the case as a puzzle. Recently, David Rose, Edouard Machery, Stephen Stich and forty-two other researchers from different countries have (...)
- Why can’t I change Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony?David Friedell - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (3):805-824.Musical works change. Bruckner revised his Eighth Symphony. Ella Fitzgerald and many other artists have made it acceptable to sing the jazz standard “All the Things You Are” without its original verse. If we accept that musical works genuinely change in these ways, a puzzle arises: why can’t I change Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony? More generally, why are some individuals in a privileged position when it comes to changing musical works and other artifacts, such as novels, films, and games? I give (...)
- On Inadvertently Made Tables: a Brockean Theory of Concrete Artifacts.Jeffrey Goodman - 2020 - Acta Analytica 36 (1):1-9.There has been a lot of discussion recently regarding abstract artifacts and how such entities (e.g., fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes, and mythological planets like Vulcan), if they indeed exist, could possibly be our creations. One interesting aspect of some of these debates concerns the extent to which creative intentions play a role in the creation of artifacts generally, both abstract and concrete. I here address the creation of concrete artifacts in particular. I ultimately defend a Brock-inspired, heterodox view on (...)
- Extended mind and artifactual autobiographical memory.Richard Heersmink - 2020 - Mind and Language 36:1-15.In this paper, I describe how artifacts and autobiographical memory are integrated into new systemic wholes, allowing us to remember our personal past in a more reliable and detailed manner. After discussing some empirical work on lifelogging technology, I elaborate on the dimension of autobiographical dependency, which is the degree to which we depend on an object to be able to remember a personal experience. When this dependency is strong, we integrate information in the embodied brain and in an object (...)
- Varieties of the extended self.Richard Heersmink - 2020 - Consciousness and Cognition 85:103001.This article provides an overview and analysis of recent work on the extended self, demonstrating that the boundaries of selves are fluid, shifting across biological, artifactual, and sociocultural structures. First, it distinguishes the notions of minimal self, person, and narrative self. Second, it surveys how philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists argue that embodiment, cognition, emotion, consciousness, and moral character traits can be extended and what that implies for the boundaries of selves. It also reviews and responds to various criticisms and (...)
- Narrative niche construction: Memory ecologies and distributed narrative identities.Richard Heersmink - 2020 - Biology and Philosophy 35 (5):1-23.Memories of our personal past are the building blocks of our narrative identity. So, when we depend on objects and other people to remember and construct our personal past, our narrative identity is distributed across our embodied brains and an ecology of environmental resources. This paper uses a cognitive niche construction approach to conceptualise how we engineer our memory ecology and construct our distributed narrative identities. It does so by identifying three types of niche construction processes that govern how we (...)
- The problem of creation and abstract artifacts.Nurbay Irmak - 2020 - Synthese 198 (10):9695-9708.Abstract artifacts such as musical works and fictional entities are human creations; they are intentional products of our actions and activities. One line of argument against abstract artifacts is that abstract objects are not the kind of objects that can be created. This is so, it is argued, because abstract objects are causally inert. Since creation requires being caused to exist, abstract objects cannot be created. One common way to refute this argument is to reject the causal inefficacy of abstracta. (...)
- The Metaphysics of Establishments.Daniel Z. Korman - 2020 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (3):434-448.I present two puzzles about the metaphysics of stores, restaurants, and other such establishments. I defend a solution to the puzzles, according to which establishments are not material objects and are not constituted by the buildings that they occupy.
- The threat of thinking things into existence.Kathrin Koslicki - 2020 - In Luis R. G. Oliveira & Kevin Corcoran (eds.), Common Sense Metaphysics: Essays in Honor of Lynne Rudder Baker. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 113-136.According to the account of artifacts developed by Lynne Rudder Baker, artifacts have a certain “proper function” essentially. The proper function of an artifact is the purpose or use intended for the artifact by its “author(s)”, viz., the artifact’s designer(s) and/or producer(s). Baker’s account therefore traces the essences of artifacts back indirectly to the intentions of an artifact’s original author (e.g., its inventor, maker, producer or designer). Like other “author-intention-based” accounts (e.g., those defended by Amie Thomasson, Simon Evnine, and others), (...)
- On the individuation of words.J. T. M. Miller - 2020 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (8):875-884.ABSTRACT The idea that two words can be instances of the same word is a central intuition in our conception of language. This fact underlies many of the claims that we make about how we communicate, and how we understand each other. Given this, irrespective of what we think words are, it is common to think that any putative ontology of words, must be able to explain this feature of language. That is, we need to provide criteria of identity for (...)
- The ontology of words: Realism, nominalism, and eliminativism.J. T. M. Miller - 2020 - Philosophy Compass 15 (7):e12691.What are words? What makes two token words tokens of the same word-type? Are words abstract entities, or are they (merely) collections of tokens? The ontology of words tries to provide answers to these, and related questions. This article provides an overview of some of the most prominent views proposed in the literature, with a particular focus on the debate between type-realist, nominalist, and eliminativist ontologies of words.
- Tra il foglio vuoto e lo schermo. Type e token alla prova dell’arte post-mediale.Francesco Ragazzi - 2020 - In Giovanni Argan, Maria Redaelli & Timonina Alexandra (eds.), Taking and Denying. Challenging Canons in Arts and Philosophy. Edizioni Ca' Foscari. pp. 277-299.What kind of entities are works of art from an ontological point of view? This question has become canonical in the framework of analytic philosophy. One way of answering the puzzle seemed to be conclusive. It is the hypothesis that all, or the majority of artworks can be identified with types embedded into tokens. To begin with, I will survey how the type-token distinction transitioned from semiotics to ontology. Secondly, I will consider how some contemporary art forms contributed to questioning (...)
- The Ship of Theseus Puzzle.David Rose, Edouard Machery, Stephen Stich, Mario Alai, Adriano Angelucci, Renatas Berniūnas, Emma E. Buchtel, Amita Chatterjee, Hyundeuk Cheon, In-Rae Cho, Daniel Cohnitz, Florian Cova, Vilius Dranseika, Angeles Eraña Lagos, Laleh Ghadakpour, Maurice Grinberg, Ivar Hannikainen, Takaaki Hashimoto, Amir Horowitz, Evgeniya Hristova, Yasmina Jraissati, Veselina Kadreva, Kaori Karasawa, Hackjin Kim, Yeonjeong Kim, Min-Woo Lee, Carlos Mauro, Masaharu Mizumoto, Sebastiano Moruzzi, Christopher Y. Olivola, Jorge Ornelas, Barbara Osimani, Alejandro Rosas, Carlos Romero, Massimo Sangoi, Andrea Sereni, Sarah Songhorian, Paulo Sousa, Noel Struchiner, Vera Tripodi, Naoki Usui, Alejandro Vázquez Del Vázquez Del Mercado, Giorgio Volpe, Hrag A. Vosgerichian, Xueyi Zhang & Jing Zhu - 2020 - In Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy Volume 3. Oxford University Press. pp. 158-174.Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all since the case has an obvious solution. To assess these proposals, we conducted a cross-cultural study involving nearly 3,000 people across twenty-two countries, speaking eighteen (...)
- Folk teleology drives persistence judgments.David Rose, Jonathan Schaffer & Kevin Tobia - 2020 - Synthese 197 (12):5491-5509.Two separate research programs have revealed two different factors that feature in our judgments of whether some entity persists. One program—inspired by Knobe—has found that normative considerations affect persistence judgments. For instance, people are more inclined to view a thing as persisting when the changes it undergoes lead to improvements. The other program—inspired by Kelemen—has found that teleological considerations affect persistence judgments. For instance, people are more inclined to view a thing as persisting when it preserves its purpose. Our goal (...)
- Artifacts and fiat objects: two families apart?Massimiliano Carrara & Marzia Soavi - 2019 - In Richard Davies (ed.), Natural and Artifactual Objects in Contemporary Metaphysics: Exercises in Analytic Ontology. Bloomsbury Academic.
- Mental acts, externalism and fiat objects: an Ockhamist solution.Riccardo Fedriga - 2019 - In Richard Davies (ed.), Natural and Artifactual Objects in Contemporary Metaphysics: Exercises in Analytic Ontology. Bloomsbury Academic.
- How navigation systems transform epistemic virtues: Knowledge, issues and solutions.Alexander Gillett & Richard Heersmink - 2019 - Cognitive Systems Research 56 (56):36-49.In this paper, we analyse how GPS-based navigation systems are transforming some of our intellectual virtues and then suggest two strategies to improve our practices regarding the use of such epistemic tools. We start by outlining the two main approaches in virtue epistemology, namely virtue reliabilism and virtue responsibilism. We then discuss how navigation systems can undermine five epistemic virtues, namely memory, perception, attention, intellectual autonomy, and intellectual carefulness. We end by considering two possible interlinked ways of trying to remedy (...)
- An Ontology of Words.Nurbay Irmak - 2019 - Erkenntnis 84 (5):1139-1158.Words are indispensable linguistic tools for beings like us. However, there is not much philosophical work done about what words really are. In this paper, I develop a new ontology for words. I argue that words are abstract artifacts that are created to fulfill various kinds of purposes, and words are abstract in the sense that they are not located in space but they have a beginning and may have an end in time given that certain conditions are met. What (...)
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