Artifacts

“Aristotle divided existing things into those that “exist by nature” and those existing “from other causes.” The former include “animals and their parts, … and the plants and the simple bodies (earth, fire, air, water)”, the latter include “a bed and a coat and anything of that sort, qua receiving these designations, i.e., in so far as they are products of art.””

“Aristotle makes here a distinction between natural objects and artifacts (“artificial products”, ibid., 192 b 28), and describes the latter as products of the art of making things.”

“The art of making something involves intentional agency; thus an artifact may be defined as an object that has been intentionally made for some purpose.”

“An artifact has necessarily a maker or an author; thus artifact and author can be regarded as correlative concepts (Hilpinen 1993, 156–157):

(A1) An object is an artifact if and only if it has an author.”

“in the anthropological and archaeological literature the word is sometimes used in a wider sense for all objects produced by human activities.”

“Artifacts in the wide sense form an ontologically heterogeneous collection of entities which extends across the traditional philosophical boundaries between concreta and abstracta, and substantial objects, events, and processes. (Cf. Thomasson 1999, xii, 117–120.)”

NOTES

I. On the Concept of Artifact Aristotle — division: 1) that which “exist[s] by nature”, and 2) that which exists “from other causes”.

The things in category 2) are “products of art”, that is, the “artificial products” of the world and its processes, apart from the natural objects said to exist independently of cause. The artificial object, then, is made, which “involves intentional agency,” which so entails that it was “intentionally made for some purpose.”

“[A]rtifact and “author” are “correlative concepts.”

So:

“(A1) An object is an artifact if and only if it has an author.”

Products can be separated into “intended” and “unintended” products.

II. Artifact, Work, and the Ontology of Artifacts

“Ontologically, an artifact can be a singular, concrete artifact … an instance of a type … or an abstract object.”

Singular artifacts can be “dependent” or “independent” from a “substrate.”

Typological artifacts (“kinds”; instances or abstractions) can be “identified by a common description or concept” and “evolve over time.”

Artifact classification:

1. Form
2. Production
3. Material
4. Style
5. Utility
6. Other

The “concept of [a] work” can be distinguished from an “artifact” in that a work, such as novel, requires the production of a material manuscript, the “artifact” proper. The manuscript is an “instance[] of a type” and thus, as an instance, is “singular,” “particular,” and “concrete.”

III. Making Objects: Productive Action

“A singular object which is an artifact in a narrow sense is usually made from some pre-existing object or objects by successive intentional modifications.”

Forms of production:

1. Separation: “the separation of an object from another object so that one (or both) of the resulting objects can be used for some purpose”
2. Reshaping: “changing the shape or structure of an object (either a natural object or an artifact) without separating any part from it or adding anything to it”
3. Conjunction: “join[ing] a number of objects together
4. Other: “removal,” “forming,” and “assembly”

“Complex artifacts are usually made by sequences of these (and possibly other) basic actions types. Given a number of productive action types A1, …, Ai, …, An, an artifact can be defined quasi-inductively as an object intentionally produced from some natural or artificial “parent” object or objects by means of the actions Ai (i = 1, …, n). In this case the intentionality of production can be taken to mean that the author performs the actions Ai intentionally; this need not require an intention to produce an object of any pre-determined type. An agent may simply be playing or experimenting with the materials available to him. The resulting object may show “human workmanship and modification”, even if it is not an instance of any previously known artifact type.”

These forms of production can be “instantiated in different cases” through different “routines.”

IV. Productive Intention

“[P]roductive intention has as its content some description of the intended object, and the author’s intention “ties” to an artifact a number of predicates which determine the intended character of the object.”

“The existence and some of the properties of the artifact are dependent on its intended character.”

The “Dependence Condition” (Hilpinen):

• “(DEP) The existence and some of the properties of an artifact                depend on an author’s intention to make an object of certain kind”

“The causal tie between an artifact and its intended character—or, strictly speaking, between an artifact and its author’s productive intention—is constituted by an author’s actions, that is, by his work on the object.”

“The actual properties of an artifact constitute its actual character.”

“[P]roductive intention is often expressed by cognitive artifacts”—models, lists, precepts.

Bonaventure’s Degrees of Authorship:

1. Scriptor: “copies the works of others”
2. Compilator: “combines the texts of other[s]”
3. Commentator: “writes both others’ work and his own, but with others’ work in the principal place”
4. Auctor: “writes both his own work and others’ but his own work in a principal place”

V. On the Characterization and Evaluation of Artifacts

“An object that has been made for a certain purpose F may be termed ‘an F-object.’”

“The properties of an F-object can be divided into two classes: (i) those relevant to the functioning of the object as an F-object, and (ii) the properties irrelevant to the purpose F.”

Evaluations of object “goodness”:

1. “(E1) The degree of fit or agreement between the intended character and the actual character of an object”
2. “(E2) The degree of fit between the intended character of an object and the purpose F, in other words, the suitability of an object of the intended kind for the purpose F”
3. “(E3) The degree of fit between the actual character of an object and the purpose F, that is, the suitability of an artifact for F.”

The “Success Condition” (Hilpinen):

• “(SUC) An object is an artifact made by an author only if it satisfies some sortal description included in the author’s productive intention.”

The “Acceptance Condition” (Hilpinen):

• “(ACC) An object is an artifact made by an author only if the author accepts it as satisfying some sortal description included in his productive intention.”

VI. Artworks

“[A]rtifactuality is often regarded as one of the defining characteristics of works of art”

George Dickie: a work of art is an “artifact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public”

“To avoid the paradoxical consequence that some artworks lack authors, the concepts of authorship and artifactuality must be interpreted in this context in such a way that the choice of an object for “presentation to the artworld public” is sufficient to make the presenter the author of the object qua work of art, that is, as an object of aesthetic appreciation.”

“Artifacts in the wide sense form an ontologically heterogeneous collection of entities which extends across the traditional philosophical boundaries between concreta and abstracta, and substantial objects, events, and processes. (Cf. Thomasson 1999, xii, 117–120.)”