Andrés Vaccari

In the last three decades or so, analytical philosophy seems to have rediscovered technology. Among the various aspects that have received attention, the ontology of artifacts stands out as a key concern. A salient feature of this body of work is a strong consensus on a basic axiom:

“Artifacts are objects intentionally made to serve a given purpose” (Baker 2004, 99).

“An artifact may be defined as an object that has been intentionally made or produced for a certain purpose” (Hilpinen 2004).

“… it seems part of the very idea of an artifact that it must be the product of human intentions” (Thomasson 2007, 52).

“Artifacts, whatever exactly they are, belong to a genus of artificial entities. These are entities that are, in some sense, made—they are products of intentional behavior” (Dipert 1995).

This view, which I will call ‘intentionalism,’ admits of various flavors and degrees of ontological commitment; but it consists, minimally and essentially, in the assertion that the ontology of artifacts is somehow dependant on human intentionality. What an artifact is, its singular mode of being in the world, is determined by an intrinsic and constitutive reliance on certain mental states – intentionality being the aboutness of such states. This ostensible dependence has led realist philosophers to discount artifact kinds as somewhat ephemeral or uninteresting (see Thomasson 2003 for a discussion and critical reply). The difference between an artifact and an object (not just ‘natural’ objects but also those resulting from the accidental or collateral effects of human action) is that the former was designed with a purpose, i.e., a function. The notion of function is a linchpin of intentionalist accounts, acting as a mediating term between intention and the object (e.g., Thomasson 2007). In this way, a function can be expressed as a proposition, and this proposition applies to, and somehow shapes, the mode of being of that object in the world.

I’m developing a series of criticisms to this position. What follows are three main aspects (which I’m working on for two forthcoming papers, one on the Dual Nature of technical Artifacts Program): (1) the notion of artifact and its limits, (2) the problematic link between intended character and actual features of artifacts, and (3) the establishment of a parasitic relationship between the philosophy of technology and the philosophy of mind.

1) The first issue is how intentionalism can be accommodated into the traditional problems and objects of the philosophy of technology. A focus on artifacts appears, at least on first sight, as both restricted and restrictive. The intentionalist literature focuses exclusively on corkscrews, screwdrivers, bottles and hammers; only artworks and symbolic technologies receive some attention, due to their more apparent relation to intentional states. Thus, the intentionalist enquiry is restricted to a narrow bandwidth, below which we find natural, animal, and symbolic technics; cognitive technologies and mnemotechnics; techniques of the body (Mauss 1934); technologies of the self (Foucault 1988); and other such forms of technics. Above ‘artifacts’ we have phenomena such as machines, tools and instruments, media technologies and sociotechnical systems. Tools and instruments, for example, imply specific modes of mediation that exceed the boundaries of the artifact in itself. And the more extended and organizationally complex the technological system (the more it enlists automatisms, programs, procedures, routines and operations), the more difficult it becomes to pinpoint causally significant intentions. In their efforts to defend its ontological specificity, intentionalism tends to reify the artifact and overlook the possibility that certain technological forms are constituted in the relations and processes they enter into, rather than by intended functions.

2) The most intractable problem of intentionalism arises from the central relationship between intended character and the material features (internal structure and composition, principles of action, etc.) of the manufactured object. Although this connection is proclaimed as constitutive, it is described mostly in murky metaphors such as dependence, inherence, embodiment, and ‘ties.’

“When a person intends to make an object, his productive intention has as its content some description of the intended object: the agent intends to make an object of a certain kind. An 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” (Hilpinen, 2004).

Artifacts cease to be philosophically interesting in their own right and come to acquire some of the metaphysical features of intentions. Artifacts are black-boxed. They are distinctive entities insofar as an original, and purely creative, act of naming has bestowed on them their principle of unity and of existence.

As the ultimate source, intentions, appear devoid of context; they are baptismal acts in which intended character is instantiated in opaque and pliant matter. Thomasson, for example, speaks of the inventor “imposing” intended features on the object (2003, 597). This position can be described as demiurgic inasmuch as it is modeled on divine creation. This designation is not superficial: the Christianized biology of Aristotle, developed during the thirteenth century, identified functional and intentional unity (see Des Chene 2001). In other words, according to this scheme, what gives an organ its principle of unity is the function it carries out, and this function has its origin in a divine intention. In the same manner, for intentionalism, functions always refer to the intentions that shaped them and continue to (somehow) sustain the artifact. As such, intentionalism is not a philosophy as much as a theology of technology, an inquiry concerned with first and final causes.

The categories of production and mediation have been traditional concerns of the philosophy of technology, and are deeply related to issues such as technical agency, instrumentality, and technical rationality. Hilpinen (2004) states that this dimension of material production is central to the intentionalist view:

“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” (Hilpinen 2004).

It is curious, then, to see little discussion of production and related concerns. As Malafouris (2007) argues, production reveals important material and non-intentional dimensions that the intentionalist framework has trouble accommodating. These dimensions of technical practice suggest a dynamic model more correlated with process and becoming, rather than with static essences and intentions.

3) Intentionalism argues that the ontology of artifacts should be subordinate to the metaphysics of mental events; that is, the philosophy of technology should employ concepts drawn exclusively from the philosophy of mind. In this manner, artifacts come to acquire a borrowed and derived mode of being. Dipert (1995) is quite candid about this problem, which amounts to passing the buck to notions that are controversial and on which there is little agreement:

“… there has been a tendency to ‘explain’ certain phenomena by stating analyses that casually invoke still less understood phenomena, such as cause, thought, belief, or action. In this vein, we might glibly assert that artifacts are objects that are intentionally made—without caring much about the further difficulties with ‘object’, ‘intentionally’, or ‘made’. … Most article-length “disentangling” of rich philosophical phenomena are at best masterpieces of packaging, in giving superficially appealing analyses or theories that bury the difficulties in the use of terms that happen now to be widely accepted (such as “S believes X”: but what is it, really, to believe?).”

And:

“An instrument is, I believe, the weakest notion in the same general family as artifacts. The complexity of the notions involved in the conceptualization is not great, and in particular, they involve beliefs or conceptions only about the “natural” object, and not beliefs or conceptions about other beliefs, concepts, or other mental states. It is important to highlight the concepts on which this weak notion of instrumentality depends. We need some notion of an “object” having properties, or a set of properties, and of “believing” that an object has properties. We require a notion of something being a “means” to an end, and of “believing” that something is a means to an end. We also need a notion of a conceptual structure called a “goal,” and a notion of what it is to “have” a goal. And finally, we need a notion of an agent’s “intentionally using” this (contemplated) object “because of” beliefs such as its being a means to an end “in order to” achieve a goal. Most of these notions are as yet poorly understood concepts about which there is extensive disagreement. Assent to my proposed definition of an instrument, or to richer notions of an artifact, thus constitute agreement only at a superficial structural level; indeed, when one is not agreeing to articulated characteristics of the underlying subconcepts, it is unclear what anyone is assenting to (emphasis mine.)”

(To be continued…)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baker, L. R. (1999). Unity without identity: A new look at material constitution. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 23, 144-165.

Baker, L. R. (2004). The ontology of artifacts. Philosophical Explorations, 7:2, 99-111.

Baker, L. R. (2006). On the twofold nature of artifacts. Studies In History and Philosophy of Science, 37, 132-136.

Des Chene, D. (2001). Spirits and clocks: Machine and organism in Descartes. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press)

Dipert, R. (1993). Artifacts, Art Works, and Agency (Philadelphia: Temple University Press)

Dipert, R. (1995). Some issues in the theory of artifacts: Defining ‘artifact’ and related notions. Monist, 78:2, 119-136.

Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the self. (In L H Martin, H Gutman & P. H. Hutton (Eds.), Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault (pp. 16-49) Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.)

Hilpinen, R. (2004). Artifact. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved July 2009 from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/artifact/

Hilpinen, R. (1993). Authors and Artifacts. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, 93, 155-178.

Malafouris, L. (2007). At the potter’s wheel: An argument for material agency. (In C. Knappett & L. Malafouris (Eds.), Material agency: Towards a non-anthropocentric perspective (pp. 19-36). New York: Springer).

Mauss, M. (1973). Techniques of the body. Economy and Society, 2:1, 70-88.

Thomasson, A. (2003). Realism and human kinds. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 67:3, 580-609.

Thomasson, A. (2007). Artifacts and human concepts. (In E. Margolis & S. Laurence (Eds.), Creations of the mind: essays on artifacts and their representation (pp. 52-73). Oxford: Oxford University Press.)