Abstract
In this paper we use our work in the philosophy of technology to formulate a pluralist view on artefact categories and categorisation principles, as studied in cognitive science. We argue, on the basis of classifications derived by philosophical reconstruction, that artefacts can be clustered in more than one way, and that each clustering may be taken as defining psychological artefact categories. We contrast this pluralism with essentialism and super-minimalism on artefact categories and we argue that pluralism is coherent with experimental results regarding the context-dependence of artefact categorisation.
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Notes
Strevens (2000) limits his minimalism to biological and chemical categories. He conjectures that artefact categorisation requires a different explanation, in terms of what he calls ‘teleokinds’ (see: http://strevens.org/research/concepts.shtml; accessed March 2013).
To bring out the difference between what is under debate in cognitive science and what we derive from philosophy of technology, we specify how we use key terms in this paper. We refer to the cognitive act of grouping or differentiating artefacts as ‘(artefact) categorisation’; by contrast, we refer to our process of philosophical reconstruction as ‘classification’. ‘Category’ refers to a product of the cognitive act of categorisation, guided (perhaps) by one or more ‘principles of categorisation’; ‘class’ refers to the products of our philosophical reconstruction. ‘Kind’, to introduce one more term, refers to the real groupings of entities, under debate in metaphysics. This paper defends a view on categories, based on work about classes. It is not concerned with kinds.
Inspired by Michael Bratman’s characterisation of plans as ‘intentions writ large’ (1987: 29).
Interactions include physical manipulations (e.g., pressing, turning), remote causal interactions (e.g., accelerating space probes by means of Jupiter’s gravitational field), and observations (e.g., watching traffic lights).
Simon (1996) holds a similarly liberal view, in which designing is primarily about devising actions.
In (Houkes and Vermaas 2014) we have considered the possibility that one of the many elements of our classification systems may correspond to natural kinds, by exploring arguments that artefact kinds correspond to id made-product classes. This is not a return to Bloom’s psychological essentialism, but a project in metaphysics different to the current one of mapping our systems of classification onto psychological artefact categories.
As noted before, Strevens, the principal advocate of minimalism, agrees, and limits his view to biological and chemical kinds. This does not, of course, undermine Sloman and Malt’s argument against a hypothetical minimalism about artefact categorisation.
Bloom (2007) argues that essentialism is also compatible with the divergence between naming and artefact recognition, so compatibility with this divergence seems a minimal requirement for plausible views on artefact categorisation rather than a way to differentiate such views.
To make the task less time-consuming, subjects were asked to sort all items into piles rather than give pairwise similarity judgements; and subjects were asked to sort by only two out of the three sorting principles.
This resemblance is almost a prerequisite of the experimental set-up, because the morphed image has to resemble both types of item.
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Research by Wybo Houkes was made possible by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).
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Revised submission to the Review of Philosophy and Psychology special issue on artefact categorisation, guest-edited by Massimiliano Carrara and Daria Mingardo
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Houkes, W., Vermaas, P.E. Pluralism on Artefact Categories: A Philosophical Defence. Rev.Phil.Psych. 4, 543–557 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-013-0149-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-013-0149-0