Diego Marconi

TITLE

Aspirin, copper wiring, and the Lenape potato: on the epistemology and metaphysics of artifactual kinds.

ABSTRACT

Amie Thomasson claimed that "the concepts and intentions of makers are constitutive of the nature of the [artifactual] kind [AK] they create" ('Artifacts and Human Concepts', in. Margolis, E., and S.Laurence (eds.), Creations of the Mind, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2007, pp. 63-4); hence, such a nature is known to them. Thomasson's claim appears to be challenged by the possibility of discoveries about AKs: e.g., the discovery that Aspirin slows blood clotting, so that it can be used to prevent ischemic attacks, infarction, etc.. It seems that if a property of an AK is both necessary and non-trivial, then it is constitutive of its nature; but some such properties may be unknown to the original makers and the object of later discovery. If there is no "epistemic privilege" of the makers, the road seems to be open to an externalist semantics for artifactual terms: for if even the makers' concept of AK may be inadequate, it is natural to conclude that nobody’s concept is guaranteed to determine the extension of ‘AK’. It remains that the extension is determined by what AKs are, whether or not the makers (or anybody else) happen to know. Against this conclusion, I will argue that though the makers' concept of AK may be epistemically inadequate, it is metaphysically adequate: though there may be properties of AK that the the makers are ignorant of, every property of AK we may discover will turn out to nomically depend on properties that are part of the makers' concept. In this sense, the makers of AK do know "what it is to be an AK".

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