Abstract
My starting point is that discussions in philosophy about the ontology of technical artifacts ought to be informed by classificatory practices in engineering. Hence, the heuristic value of the natural-artificial distinction in engineering counts against arguments which favour abandoning the distinction in metaphysics. In this chapter, I present the philosophical equipment needed to analyse classificatory practices and then present a case study of engineering practice using these theoretical tools. More in particular, I make use of the Collectivist Account of Technical Artifacts (CAT) according to which there are different classificatory practices for natural, artificial, and social objects. I demonstrate that in the community studied, artificial kinds are marked by distinctive classificatory practices. The presence of these distinctive classificatory practices in engineering with regard to artificial kinds should inform discussions about the ontology of technical artifacts just as the distinctive classificatory practices in natural science inform discussions about natural kinds.
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I have switched here to talking about natural and social kind terms as opposed to natural and social kinds to stay in step with Kusch’s account. The distinction trades on a methodological commitment to analysing the words as they are used rather than metaphysical rumination upon the thing-in-itself.
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Some legal systems contain a principle of ‘common-law marriage’ or ‘marriage by habit or repute’. In these cases, the married couple may be legally recognized as married even though no official marriage ceremony is performed or marriage contract is entered into. This does not count against Barnes’ account. We should read ‘referencing practices’ broadly to include the kinds of behavior that would, ceteris paribus, be required for a couple to be properly referred to as married.
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The New York Times, May 21, 2010, p. A17.
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I am not denying that often microscope users have not, before the investigation, known each and every natural entity that they will use the microscope to see. Discoveries have been made with microscopes, of course. Even so, it remains the case that one must have a general conception of what things in one’s environment are natural and what things are artificial.
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The example of Madagascar as a case of reference switching is taken from Evans (1973). Evans’ suggestion is that when Marco Polo used the term to refer to the island we now call Madagascar, he intended to use it as it had been used by others, not introduce a new usage. The lesson I illustrate here is that once Polo did use it to refer to the island, and this stuck, the proper usage subsequently switches.
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That is, a world in which oil rigs, wells, tools, and many other artificial things are used to extract hydrocarbons (oil, water, and gas) from rock formations below sea level according to the needs and requirements of society. Similarly, the distinction is present in the children’s game ‘rock, paper, scissors’ from which I borrowed the title of this paper although it requires some imagination on the part of the reader as ‘rock’ is not a typical candidate for natural kind and paper ought to be read as writing, document, certificate, money, or the like (and thus a social kind).
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There were a total of 1708 references to ‘tool’ or ‘tools’ in a total of 914 pages or 1.87 references per page. Compare this frequency with the term ‘oil’ which one might expect to be a popular topic in petroleum engineering but in fact appears only 51 times in four of the selected documents. This equates to 0.09 references per page.
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Serra (1984) is not one of the texts analysed.
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Scientific Drilling International, Inc. (2009) is not one of the texts analysed.
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A timeline of which incident is currently available online at http://www.offshore-technology.com/features/feature84446/. 2010. Deepwater Horizon: A Timeline of Events. Offshore Technology (Net Resources International).
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Acknowledgments
The fieldwork research for this study was conducted primarily at the offices of Scientific Drilling International, Inc. in Thailand and other parts of Southeast Asia as part of my PhD dissertation. I would like to thank everyone there who let me observe their day-to-day work, interview them, and who instructed me in the basics of their work. I would also like to thank engineers at Chevron, Halliburton, and Schlumberger for allowing me to interview them and for their feedback on my project and development of the five referencing categories. I thank Maarten Franssen, Peter Kroes, and Pieter Vermaas for the invitation to contribute a chapter to this volume and for their astute comments and criticisms along the way. I would also like to thank David Bloor, Martin Kusch, Duncan Pritchard, and Pablo Schyfter for their insightful feedback and conversations on this project.
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Kerr, E.T. (2014). Engineering Differences Between Natural, Social, and Artificial Kinds. In: Franssen, M., Kroes, P., Reydon, T.A.C., Vermaas, P.E. (eds) Artefact Kinds. Synthese Library, vol 365. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00801-1_12
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