Abstract
This study addresses the issue of artifact kinds from a psychological and cognitive perspective. The primary interest of the investigation lies in understanding how artifacts are categorized and what are the properties people rely on for their identification. According to a classical philosophical definition artifacts form an autonomous class of instances including all and only those objects that do not exist in nature, but are artificial, in the sense that they are made by an artĭfex. This definition suggests that artifacts are classified primarily on the basis of the recognition of their artificial nature. Nevertheless, many psychological and cognitive studies maintain that artifacts are categorized mainly on the basis of the recognition of the function they have been made to accomplish. Since tools are also categorized primarily on the basis of their function, this would imply that artifacts and tools are represented in the same way. In the study participants categorized a set of objects (denoted by words) once as tools and once as artifacts. Results show that reaction times (RTs) are faster in the artifact categorization condition than in the tool categorization condition. This pattern indicates that artifacts and tools are not represented in the same way and that the identification of the members of each class is carried out in the basis of different criteria.
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Notes
On the classification of living and non-living things see Dellantonio et al. (2012).
In English the figure of the artĭfex is usually described using words like ‘creator’, ‘maker’ or ‘author’. The term ‘creator’, however, suggests the wrong notion since a creator is someone who creates from nothing, while the artĭfex only modifies something preexistent. ‘Maker’ renders the idea in a more precise way, even though in philosophy this term has also assumed very abstract meanings (such as e.g. truth-maker) which have distanced it from the practical and manual sense of the word artĭfex. The term ‘author’ (or ‘designer’) has an analogous problem since it often refers to the person who conceives and devises something, rather than to the one who practically realizes it. ‘Artisan’ or ‘manufacturer’ are more specific, but possibly also more precise in rendering the idea of the concrete acting of the artĭfex.
Studies like e.g. Brown 1990; McCarrell and Callanan 1995; Hespos and Baillargeon 2001; Mandler and McDonough 1998 provide evidence that toddlers and even infants are able to recognize the possible function of objects given their structural properties. Furthermore, other research on primates shows that they use tools in an opportunistic manner, choosing whatever object with the suitable shape they find for food retrieval (see e.g. Cummins-Sebree and Fragaszy 2005; Hauser 1997), even though, unlike humans, they don’t associate objects with any stable function (see e.g. Vaesen 2012, 4).
Actually, as already suggested before, not all tools are artifacts either. Indeed, there are natural objects that by virtue of their form and properties can be used as tools: a stone can be used to crack nuts or drive a nail; a stick can be used as a harpoon, a protruding root as a stool etc. However, one could answer that objects like these are not tools in a strict sense, but they are natural objects which can be of use for specific purposes. The only connection with tools would be that to understand their possible use, a person must be able to infer the function they might accomplish from their form and from the properties they exhibit.
One could rather maintain that works of art do have a function since they are produced with the aim of communicating something. However, their message—and therefore their function—might be nether immediate nor transparent. If so, it is implausible that the categorization of works of art as artifacts is carried out on the basis of the recognition of this function.
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Dellantonio, S., Mulatti, C. & Job, R. Artifact and Tool Categorization. Rev.Phil.Psych. 4, 407–418 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-013-0140-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-013-0140-9