Abstract
One of the peculiar features of our discourse with respect to technical artefacts is its richly evaluative and normative character. We speak routinely of good alarm clocks and poor corkscrews and of functioning mobile phones and malfunctioning TV sets. Elsewhere, I have argued that the normative character of this discourse is linked to the fact that artefacts figure in a context of human action, more in particular a context of use (Franssen 2006, 2009a). Technical artefacts owe their existence to the goal directness of much of human life; they have been designed to be used, in order for their users to achieve certain goals or achieve certain purposes. Given that we have certain goals or purposes, the qualities of artefacts give us reasons to use them or not to use them in order to achieve these goals and purposes. It is because the qualities of artefacts are reason-giving that evaluative statements are normative; they express to what extent the specific qualities of a particular artefact give someone a reason to use it, given this person’s reasonable goals. Of course, artefacts are not the only things whose properties can give us reasons to use them or reasons to act in a particular way with respect to them (treat them with care, avoid them, and what have you). We can use a nutcracker to crack open a nut or we can use a rock that happens to be at hand. We may consider both to be good for the job of cracking this nut. However, this fact makes the nutcracker a good nutcracker but not the rock a good rock. The nutcracker is good qua nutcracker: it was designed for being used to crack nuts. The goodness of the rock in this context is not its goodness qua rock, but neither is it its goodness qua nutcracker, since the rock is not a nutcracker. At most we can say that the rock is a good rock for cracking nuts with. Using it for cracking nuts does not ipso facto make the rock into a nutcracker.
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Notes
- 1.
This larger entity will typically be an artefact, but not necessarily, for example, in the case of implants in the human body.
- 2.
Here, I take a stand on how the function of artefacts is determined: I take it that artefact functions are determined through their design. This is quite commonly accepted. It is controversial whether the function of artefacts can also be determined by the use they are put to, irrespective of their design. I will not go into these matters here.
- 3.
In the philosophical literature, especially the metaphysical literature on kinds, the distinction between functional kinds and artefact kinds is not made at all. The typical term there is ‘artefact kind’, but the term is explained as functional kind, for example, a watch or a clock is taken to be ‘anything designed to tell the time’.
- 4.
Interesting borderline cases remain, however. A controlled way of tearing paper by first folding it sharply will result in straight-edged pieces. This is not considered cutting, perhaps because it does not involve a cutting instrument. A brief-opening knife operates according to just this principle, but this is called cutting open a letter, although brief openers are not so easily called knives, even if they are often shaped exactly as a knife, and cutting letters open is often done with a knife.
- 5.
In fact, I believe that the concepts of function and role are the same and that it is merely context and tradition that determine whether the one or the other term is used. But I will not defend this view here.
- 6.
Minimally because much more is necessary to unambiguously define a specific artefact kind. An unambiguous definition would refer to an artefact’s detailed description, its blueprint, or perhaps to a blueprint scheme if one wishes to allow for the classification of the enormous variety of existing brands and serial types of cell phones into the artefact kind ‘third-generation cell phone from the first decade of the twenty-first century’.
- 7.
- 8.
In talking about properties that an entity can have to some large or small extent, I am greatly simplifying. I am referring to quantities like ‘weight’, ‘sharpness’, and ‘balance’, which can have a value firm a range of possible values. Quantities are not properties but rather second-order attributes, whose instances are properties, such as the property of ‘having a weight of such-and-such value’. This is not the place to go into such niceties, however.
- 9.
See Franssen (2009a) for a more extensive treatment of the distinction between instrumental value and value in general.
- 10.
This technical formulation is explained in Franssen (2009a). The second part is almost equivalent to saying that the properties of the knife make it the case that if a person p has a reasonable wish for doing what a (standard) knife is designed for doing with, then p has a reason for using x to do this. The ‘doing what a knife is designed for doing with’ is definitely awkward, but it is crucial for my argument that this cannot be rendered as just ‘cutting’.
- 11.
I take the term from (Houkes et al. 2002) as I have at other occasions. However, the notion of the use plan of an artefact does not match the idea of a use plan as it was introduced there. Houkes et al. understand a use plan to be a plan that is drawn up – an activity that is to them the primary notion of engineering design – to advise someone how a particular end or goal can be realized. Such a plan may (but does not necessarily) involve the use of one or several artefacts (which may then have to be produced to make the plan executable), and for each phase where an artefact is to be used, a fragment of the larger use plan will tell the agent(s) how to execute this phase of the plan by telling them how to use the artefact. The use plan of an artefact is therefore only a part of what Houkes et al. conceive to be a use plan. To the question what the ‘use’ in their conception of use plan is use of I can see no answer.
- 12.
This could be thought overly restrictive. It could be argued that the features of the knife are reason-giving for someone who has the right abilities and is in the right circumstance but just does not know this. Such a person would have a reason to use the knife but would not know that he had a reason. Whether this is considered the case depends on the particular underlying theory of normativity and reason one holds. Such details are beyond this chapter. For more thoughts on this issue, see Franssen (2009a).
- 13.
Again, we simplify things. Until now, I have treated ‘good’ and ‘poor’ attributes that are either present or absent. As von Wright emphasizes, such evaluative judgements are more often relative: the functional criteria can be satisfied to some degree, such that one knife is better than another, and a particular knife may be the best of all available knives. The point judgement ‘good’ could then be introduced through setting a bottom line, as ‘good enough’.
References
Franssen, M. 2006. The normativity of artefacts. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 37: 42–57.
Franssen, M. 2009a. Artefacts and normativity. In Philosophy of technology and engineering sciences, Handbook of the philosophy of science, vol. 9, ed. A. Meijers, 923–952. Burlington/Oxford/Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Franssen, M. 2009b. The inherent normativity of functions in biology and technology. In Functions in biological and artificial worlds: Comparative philosophical perspectives, ed. U. Krohs and P. Kroes, 103–125. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hansson, S. 2006. Category-specified value statements. Synthese 148: 425–432.
Houkes, W., P.E. Vermaas, C.H. Dorst, and M.J. de Vries. 2002. Design and use as plans: An action-theoretic account. Design Studies 23: 303–320.
von Wright, G.H. 1963. The varieties of goodness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul/The Humanities Press.
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Franssen, M. (2013). The Goodness and Kindhood of Artefacts. In: de Vries, M., Hansson, S., Meijers, A. (eds) Norms in Technology. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5243-6_10
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