Abstract
This chapter introduces the reader to the main difficulties that artefacts pose for ontology. Due to the possibilities of disassembly and reassembly, it is problematic to come up with clear identity conditions for artefacts. Due to the possibility of radical reassembly of parts to create an artefact of another kind, artefact classification is problematic when interpreted ontologically. Since the (re)assembly of artefact components is done by people with certain purposes in mind, artefact ontology seems to depend crucially, and from a metaphysical point of view problematically, on the mental states of humans. The chapter then summarizes how the various contributions in the book discuss aspects of these difficulties and explains how contributions that take an epistemological or ethnographic perspective show the common ground between the contributions that address the problem of artefact kinds from a traditional philosophical perspective and the contributions that focus on artefact classification and “ontology engineering” from an engineering perspective.
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Notes
- 1.
Hobbes at one time was personal secretary to Francis Bacon. Bacon famously opposed the logic of the Aristotelian Organon, which was still the dominant method of reasoning at the time, and proposed a new logic as more suitable for the investigation of nature in his New Organon (published in 1620 as part of his “great renewal of the sciences”, the Instauratio Magna). While this made Bacon one of the initiators of the Scientific Revolution, one of Bacon’s principal concerns was with artefacts. In the New Organon, he repeatedly emphasised that the investigation of nature should not primarily be seen as a goal in itself, but should stand in the service of constructing new kinds of artefacts that could be used to improve the living circumstances of the people. This focus on artefacts also plays a prominent role in Bacon’s utopian work, the New Atlantis which was written in 1610 but published only after Bacon’s death.
- 2.
Part 2, Chapter 11, Section 7. Citations are from the anonymous English translation published in 1656, which Hobbes authorised.
- 3.
Locke’s Essay, of course, also opposed the Aristotelian/Scholastic way of thought. See for Locke’s metaphysics also (Ayers 1991), in particular ch. 21 on ‘Artificial and other problematical objects’.
- 4.
The example is due to Allan Gibbard (1975).
- 5.
Notoriously, van Inwagen excludes living beings from his scepticism, and Merrick excludes persons. For more on these issues, see, e.g., Rea (1996).
- 6.
See on this issue esp. Thomasson (2007).
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Franssen, M., Kroes, P., Reydon, T.A.C., Vermaas, P.E. (2014). Introduction: The Ontology of Technical Artefacts. 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_1
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