Metaphysics > Objects > Material Objects > Artifacts

Artifacts

Edited by Nurbay Irmak (Bogazici University)
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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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  1. How to Test the Ship of Theseus.Marta Campdelacreu Arques, Ramón García Moya, Genoveva Martí & Enrico Terrone - manuscript
    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 (...)
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  2. Nature and Kinds of Artifact, with a Look at Metaphysical and Ontological Aspects of Artifactual World.Faghihian Mehrdad - manuscript
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  3. Trusting and Punishing Artifacts.Eduoard Machery & Lévan Sardjevéladzé - manuscript
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  4. Artifactual Normativity.Christopher Frugé - forthcoming - Synthese.
    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 (...)
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  5. The Dysfunctionality of Everyday Things:-On Stress, Design and Artefacts.Sara Ilstedt Hjelm - forthcoming - Techne:: Design Wisdom.
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  6. Bodies, Functions, and Imperfections.Sherri Irvin - forthcoming - In Peter Cheyne (ed.), Perfection and Imperfection in Art and Everyday Life. Routledge.
    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 (...)
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  7. 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 - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy 3.
    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 (...)
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  8. 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 (...)
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  9. On Inadvertently Made Tables: A Brockean Theory of Concrete Artifacts.Jeffrey Goodman - 2021 - 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 (...)
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  10. 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 (...)
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  11. 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 (...)
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  12. The Problem of Creation and Abstract Artifacts.Nurbay Irmak - 2021 - 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. (...)
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  13. The Threat of Thinking Things Into Existence.Kathrin Koslicki - 2021 - In Luis R. G. Oliveira and Kevin J. Corcoran (ed.), Commonsense Metaphysics: Essays in Honor of Lynne Rudder Baker. New York, NY, USA: pp. 113-136.
    According to Lynne Rudder Baker, our everyday world is populated, among other things, by what she calls “intention-dependent objects” (“ID objects”), i.e., objects which “could not exist in a world lacking beings with beliefs, desires, and intentions” (Baker (2007), p. 11). Baker’s claim that what exists, at least in part, depends on human activity opens her up to the concern, or so her critics have argued, that new objects and new kinds of objects can apparently be “conjured” into existence, given (...)
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  14. 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.
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  15. 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 (...)
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  16. 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 (...)
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  17. 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 (...)
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  18. 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 (...)
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  19. 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 (...)
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  20. 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 (...)
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  21. 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.
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  22. The Ontology of Words: Realism, Nominalism, and Eliminativism.J. T. M. Miller - 2020 - Philosophy Compass 15 (7).
    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.
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  23. 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 (...)
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  24. 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 (...)
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  25. 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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  26. Artifacts and Artefacts: A Methodological Classification of Context-Specific Regularities.Vadim Keyser - 2019 - In History and Philosophy of Technoscience: Perspectives on Classification in Synthetic Sciences: Unnatural Kinds. London, UK: pp. 63-77.
    Traditionally, in the literature on robustness analysis objects are classified as genuine phenomena (natural objects, events, and processes) or artifacts (results produced in error). But much of biological measurement requires the manipulation of local experimental conditions in order to produce new effects. These types of intervention-based regularities are neither natural objects nor artifacts; characterizing them as either fails adequately to address key ontological properties as well as their role in scientific practice. It is argued that a new classification, based on (...)
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  27. Form, Matter, Substance. [REVIEW]Daniel Z. Korman - 2019 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
    In Form, Matter, Substance, Kathrin Koslicki articulates and defends her preferred brand of hylomorphism, weighing in on how we should conceive of the matter and the form of such compounds, and on how they can qualify as fundamental “substances” despite being ontologically dependent on their components. I review Koslicki’s principal claims and conclusions (§1), and then raise some concerns about her master argument for “individual forms” (§2) and her criticism of standard essentialist accounts of artifacts (§3).
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  28. La hermenéutica artefactual de Daniel Dennett: Una defensa.Malena León & Diego Lawler - 2019 - Argumentos de Razón Técnica 1 (22):120-137.
    La actitud del diseño es una estrategia interpretativa propuesta por Dennett, que consiste en tratar al sistema, cuyo “comportamiento” se quiere predecir, bajo el supuesto de que sus partes cumplen funciones que obedecen a un diseño satisfactorio. Sin embargo, estudios recientes sobre atribución funcional en artefactos técnicos consideran que la actitud del diseño supone una estrategia inadecuada para entender qué hace un artefacto técnico. En particular, dos críticas han ganado visibilidad. Por una parte, Vermaas et al. (2013) señalan una inconsistencia (...)
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  29. On the Individuation of Words.J. T. M. Miller - 2019 - 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 (...)
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  30. Hylomorphism Without Forms? A Critical Notice of Simon Evnine’s Making Objects and Events.Michael J. Raven - 2019 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (5):652-669.
    Simon Evnine’s Making Objects and Events: A Hylomorphic Theory of Artifacts develops amorphic hylomorphism. I critically discuss three of its main themes. One theme is its attempt to do the work of form without forms. A second theme is the requirement that hylomorphs have ‘metabolisms at work’. A third theme is the use of artifacts as the paradigms for hylomorphs. I will raise some criticisms of each of these themes. Although the themes might at first appear disconnected, I believe the (...)
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  31. Necessity of Origins and Multi-Origin Art.Joshua Spencer & Chris Tillman - 2019 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (7):741-754.
    ABSTRACTThe Necessity of Origins is the thesis that, necessarily, if a material object wholly originates from some particular material, then it could not have wholly originated from any significantly non-overlapping material. Several philosophers have argued for this thesis using as a premise a principle that we call ‘Single Origin Necessity’. However, we argue that Single Origin Necessity is false. So any arguments for The Necessity of Origins that rely on Single Origin Necessity are unsound. We also argue that the Necessity (...)
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  32. The Cognitive Ontogeny of Tool Making in Children: The Role of Inhibition and Hierarchical Structuring.Gökhan Gönül, Ece Kamer Takmaz, Annette Hohenberger & Michael Corballis - 2018 - Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 1 (173):222-238.
    During the last decade, the ontogeny of tool making has received growing attention in the literature on tool-related behaviors. However, the cognitive demands underlying tool making are still not clearly understood. In this cross-sectional study of 52 Turkish preschool children from 3 to 6 years of age, the roles of executive function (response inhibition), ability to form hierarchical representations (hierarchical structuring), and social learning were investigated with the hook task previously used with children and animals. In this task, children needed (...)
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  33. Introduction to the Symposium on Christy Mag Uidhir's Art and Art-Attempts.Sherri Irvin - 2018 - Journal of Aesthetic Education 52 (2):1.
    Christy Mag Uidhir’s Art and Art-Attempts begins from two deceptively simple observations: artworks are the product of intentions, and intentions are the kinds of things that can fail to be realized successfully. Drawing on these observations, he argues that most contemporary theories of art must be rejected because they are not substantively intention-dependent: that is, they do not account for the fact that an attempt to make an artwork can fail. From his view that artworks must be the product of (...)
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  34. Repeatable Artworks and the Relevant Similarity Relation.Sherri Irvin - 2018 - Journal of Aesthetic Education 52 (2):30.
    Repeatable artworks, such as novels and musical works, have often been construed as universals whose instances are particular printings or performances. In Art and Art-Attempts, Christy Mag Uidhir offers a nominalist account of repeatable artworks, eschewing talk of universals. Mag Uidhir argues that all artworks are concrete, and artworks that we regard as repeatable are simply unified by a relevant similarity relation: we use the name Beloved to refer to two concrete printed novels because they are relevantly similar to each (...)
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  35. Form, Matter, Substance.Kathrin Koslicki - 2018 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    In _Form, Matter, Substance_, Kathrin Koslicki defends a hylomorphic analysis of concrete particular objects (e.g., living organisms). The Aristotelian doctrine of hylomorphism holds that those entities that fall under it are compounds of matter (hulē) and form (morphē or eidos). Koslicki argues that a hylomorphic analysis of concrete particular objects is well-equipped to compete with alternative approaches when measured against a wide range of criteria of success. A successful application of the doctrine of hylomorphism to the special case of concrete (...)
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  36. Artifact.Beth Preston - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  37. Contrast and Constitution.Peter van Elswyk - 2018 - Philosophical Quarterly 68 (270):158-174.
    The pluralist about material constitution maintains that a lump of clay is not identical with the statue it constitutes. Although pluralism strikes many as extravagant by requiring distinct things to coincide, it can be defended with a simple argument. The monist is less well off. Typically, she has to argue indirectly for her view by finding problems with the pluralist's extravagance. This paper offers a direct argument for monism that illustrates how monism about material constitution is rooted in commonsense as (...)
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  38. Saving the Ship.John Biro - 2017 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 13 (2):43-54.
    In defending the startling claim that that there are no artifacts, indeed, no inanimate material objects of the familiar sort, Peter van Inwagen has argued that truths about such putative objects can be paraphrased as truths that do not make essential reference to them and that we should endorse only the ontological commitments of the paraphrase. In this note I argue that the paraphrases van Inwagen recommends cannot meet his condition. Read one way, they lose us some truths. Read another, (...)
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  39. Cultural Artefacts and Neglect of the Materials From Which They Are Made.Terence Rajivan Edward - 2017 - Abstracta 10:35-44.
    This paper discusses an explanation, offered by Tim Ingold, for why social and cultural anthropologists have so far paid little attention to the materials from which artefacts are composed. The explanation is that these anthropologists accept a certain argument. According to the argument, what an anthropologist should focus on when examining an artefact is the quality that makes it part of a culture, and this is not the materials from which the artefact is composed. I show that Ingold has not (...)
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  40. Artefacts as Mere Illustrations of a Worldview.Terence Rajivan Edward - 2017 - Symposion: Theoretical and Applied Inquiries in Philosophy and Social Sciences 4 (2):241-244.
    This paper responds to an argument against a kind of anthropology. According to the argument, if the aim of anthropology is to describe the different worldviews of different groups, then anthropologists should only refer to material artefacts in order to illustrate a worldview; but the interest of artefacts to anthropology goes beyond mere illustration. This argument has been endorsed by key members of the ontological movement in anthropology, who found at least one of its premises in Marilyn Strathern’s writing.
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  41. Wie Aneignung durch Artefaktizität legitimierbar ist. Zu einer Artefakttheorie des originären Eigentumserwerbs materieller Sachen.Nicolas Kleinschmidt - 2017 - In Jürgen H. Franz & Kartsten Berr (eds.), Die Welt der Artefakte. Berlin, Deutschland: pp. 109-120.
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  42. Hypertext. Eine Schrift für vernetzte, dynamische Schreibmaschinen (1965).Christian Vater - 2017 - In Christian Vater, Ludger Lieb, Christian Witschel & Michaela Böttner (eds.), 5300 Jahre Schrift. Heidelberg: Wunderhorn. pp. 166-169.
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  43. New Perspectives on Artifactual and Biological Functions.Marc Artiga - 2016 - Applied Ontology 11 (2):89-102.
    In this essay I introduce the question of artifactual functions in the context of the recent debate on the notion of function. I discuss some of the desiderata a satisfactory account should fulfill and compare them to the desiderata for a theory of biological functions. Finally, within this general framework, I briefly present the three papers included in this volume.
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  44. Book Review: Making Objects & Events: A Hylomorphic Theory of Artifacts, Actions, and Organisms. [REVIEW]Theptawee Chokvasin - 2016 - Suranaree Journal of Social Science 10:167-169.
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  45. Making Objects and Events: A Hylomorphic Theory of Artifacts, Actions, and Organisms.Simon J. Evnine - 2016 - Oxford University Press UK.
    Simon J. Evnine explores the view that some objects have matter from which they are distinct but that this distinctness is not due to the existence of anything like a form. He draws on Aristotle's insight that such objects must be understood in terms of an account that links what they are essentially with how they come to exist and what their functions are. Artifacts are the most prominent kind of objects where these three features coincide, and Evnine develops a (...)
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  46. The Metaphysics of Cognitive Artifacts.Richard Heersmink - 2016 - Philosophical Explorations 19 (1):78-93.
    This article looks at some of the metaphysical properties of cognitive artefacts. It first identifies and demarcates the target domain by conceptualizing this class of artefacts as a functional kind. Building on the work of Beth Preston, a pluralist notion of functional kind is developed, one that includes artefacts with proper functions and system functions. Those with proper functions have a history of cultural selection, whereas those with system functions are improvised uses of initially non-cognitive artefacts. Having identified the target (...)
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  47. The Metaphysics of Cognitive Artefacts.Richard Heersmink - 2016 - Philosophical Explorations 19 (1):78-93.
    This article looks at some of the metaphysical properties of cognitive artefacts. It first identifies and demarcates the target domain by conceptualizing this class of artefacts as a functional kind. Building on the work of Beth Preston, a pluralist notion of functional kind is developed, one that includes artefacts with proper functions and system functions. Those with proper functions have a history of cultural selection, whereas those with system functions are improvised uses of initially non-cognitive artefacts. Having identified the target (...)
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  48. What Do We See in Museums?Graham Oddie - 2016 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 79:217-240.
    I address two related questions. First: what value is there in visiting a museum and becoming acquainted with the objects on display? For art museums the answer seems obvious: we go to experience valuable works of art, and experiencing valuable works of art is itself valuable. In this paper I focus on non-art museums, and while these may house aesthetically valuable objects, that is not their primary purpose, and at least some of the objects they house might not be particularly (...)
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  49. It’s All in Your Head: A Solution to the Problem of Object Coincidence.Graham Renz - 2016 - Philosophia 44 (4):1387-1407.
    It is uncontroversial that artifacts like statues and tables are mind-dependent. What is controversial is whether and how this mind-dependence has implications for the ontology of artifacts. I argue the mind-dependence of artifacts entails that there are no artifacts or artifact joints in the extra-mental world. In support of this claim, I argue that artifacts and artifact joints lack any extra-mental grounding, and so ought not to have a spot in a realist ontology. I conclude that the most plausible story (...)
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  50. The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences.Brian Epstein - 2015 - Oxford University Press.
    We live in a world of crowds and corporations, artworks and artifacts, legislatures and languages, money and markets. These are all social objects — they are made, at least in part, by people and by communities. But what exactly are these things? How are they made, and what is the role of people in making them? In The Ant Trap, Brian Epstein rewrites our understanding of the nature of the social world and the foundations of the social sciences. Epstein explains (...)
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