![]() For and introduction see Margolis and Laurence 2007 Houkes and Vermaas 2009 Thomasson 2009 Verbeek, and Vermaas 2009). Gelman 1988 Bloom 1998 Gelman and Bloom 2000 Malt and Sloman 2007a, b Kelemen & Carey 2007) and philosophers (e.g. The challenge posed by the issue of artifact categorization has been recently taken up by both psychologists (e.g. How is that possible? What pieces of information do we rely on to make such decisions? Are we guided by the form of the object, by its function (in some sense of function), by a combination of these two, or by something else? More generally, how do we categorize artifacts? In a similar vein, many people are able to distinguish a screwdriver from a voltage tester, even if the two objects may look very much alike. To exploit the chair example a little more, when confronted with items so different as a saddle chair, a glider and a hanging chair, one can infer that people are promptly able both to distinguish and name each of them, and to group them as belonging to the same kind chair. Footnote 2ĭespite this variety, people seldom have doubts regarding how they should categorize a certain artifact. Dining chairs, swivel chairs, saddle chairs, zaisu: the list is very far from being exhaustive. Variety also lies in what people identify as a common or typical chair, as that depends, among other things, on the culture and country of origins (think, for instance, to western dining chairs as opposed to zaisu chairs). Again, along with “common” chairs, typically used to rest on, swivel chairs make office work easier, wheelchairs help people move, hanging chairs-sort of hybrids between a chair and a swing-enhance relaxing. The variety is overwhelming: along with chairs having four legs, a seat and a back, there are swivel chairs, with only one central leg (and castors), saddle chairs, that don’t have backs, and Japanese zaisu, without legs. To make this vivid, consider something as ordinary and simple as a chair. The result is that we live in a world where not only artifacts, but also kinds, and kinds of kinds of artifacts seem to be countless. Just to exemplify, after the first industrial revolution, in 1869, over 500 types of hammers were produced in the Birmingham area (Basalla 1988) at the end of three industrial revolutions, 4 years ago, US supermarkets were estimated to contain some 39,000 types of products (FMI 2011). Each of such processes led to a bootstrapping increase in the complexity and diversification of human artifacts. Footnote 1 Much closer to the present, other ones were given by the invention of the heavy plow, and by the three industrial revolutions (that were triggered by steam power, mass production, and information technology respectively). The first one dates around 12,000 years ago and includes, among other things, the introduction of containers. The result should give us an overall picture of the possible answers to (G).Ĭreation of artifacts started relatively early in human evolutionary history, and often proceeded by what we may call “technological bounces”. The semantic reading of (G) is: (S) What kind of reference do artifact kind terms have, if any? In this editorial we expand on the different answers to (O), (E) and (S) that are given in the selected literature on the topic. ![]() (G) thus becomes: (E) How can we know that artifact a belongs to kind K? Finally, (G) can also be read as a question concerning the semantics of artifact kind terms. According to the ontological reading, asking (G) is equivalent to asking in virtue of what properties, if any, a certain artifact is an instance of some artifact kind: (O) What is it for an artifact a to belong to kind K? According to the epistemic reading, when we ask (G) we are investigating what properties of the object we exploit in order to decide whether a certain artifact belongs to a certain kind. The general question (G) How do we categorize artifacts? can be subject to three different readings: an ontological, an epistemic and a semantic one.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |