Creations of the Mind is a volume in which a daring and much desired task is taken up. It contains sixteen new essays on the nature of artifacts by authors from the fields of philosophy, cognitive science, psychology, biology, and anthropology. It is daring since the topic of artifacts is indeed shared by different disciplines and moreover is not always a well-developed topic in these disciplines. The book is much-desired since, as the editors Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence observe, “we are literally surrounded by artifacts of all shapes and sizes, ranging from simple objects, such as tables and chairs, to vastly complicated feats of technology, including televisions, automobiles, computers, power grids, and water-treatment plants” (ix). Any increase of our understanding of the nature of that siege is to be welcomed, specifically because of the intimate and possibly unique connections between artifacts and the human mind. We are intentional tool-users par excellence: having an understanding of the tools we use has the additional promise of helping us to understand ourselves.
The daring nature of the volume shows in the richness of the essays with respect to the scope the authors adopt and the questions they address. Some authors focus on the core class of ordinary, middle-sized, utilitarian artifacts, such as tables and chairs, and develop their analyses and arguments from there. Others emphasize the variety noted by the editors and also consider artificial and purified natural substances, domesticated biological organisms, and social objects. And, in line with a second observation of the editors, artifacts are then not only utilitarian objects but also ones with cultural value. The volume is divided into four parts grouping, consecutively, essays on the metaphysics of artifacts, on conceptualization and categorization, on cognitive development in children, and on animal and prehistoric artifacts.
Initially the volume reads as naturalized philosophy. The first two parts contain predominantly philosophical essays in which questions in metaphysics and semantics are considered. The essays by Barbara Malt and Steven Sloman, and by Bradford Mahon and Alfonso Caramazza, are two scientific interruptions—yet they also survey the psychology and cognitive science findings on artifacts relevant to these philosophical issues. In these surveys artifacts are typically ordinary, middle-sized, utilitarian objects, while in the philosophical essays the scope alternates. Amie Thomasson presents her position that artifact kinds are mind-dependent kinds constituted by the intentions of the agents that make them. She analyzes the differences and similarities between the metaphysics, epistemology, and reference for artifact kinds and natural kinds, focusing on ordinary, middle-sized artifacts as made by artisans. Hilary Kornblith adopts by and large a similar narrow focus when he argues that the mechanisms of reference for artifactual kind terms, despite a possible mind-dependence, fit the causal theory in a similar way as does the mechanisms of references for proper names and natural kind terms. In both essays it is assumed that artifact kinds and natural kinds are taken as metaphysically different kinds of kinds, setting the stage to argue that there are enough similarities to nevertheless take both kinds as real kinds. This format is chosen also in the essay by Crawford Elder, but now artifact kinds, or at least some of them, are taken to be special cases of copied kinds, which also include other kinds of kinds, such as biological devices. For Elder these copied artifact kinds are real and mind-independent kinds, the members of which are characterized essentially by properties that cluster together, and that include qualitative make-up, proper function, and historically proper placement. Richard Grandy and Dan Sperber explicitly adopt a broad perspective on artifacts in their essays. Sperber rejects the contradistinction between artifact kinds and natural and biological kinds, and proposes a general evolutionary conceptual framework in which artifacts typically become culturally reproduced items, which may also be biological items: when animals are domesticated or grapes are manipulated to become seedless, one obtains biological cultural artifacts. Grandy argues for a solution to the problem that ordinary, middle-sized, utilitarian artifacts can persist even when they are temporarily disassembled. Yet he positions these artifacts on a larger continuum that includes, for instance, more elusive artifices such as roads, cities, and polystyrene, and natural kinds in chemistry and biology such as purified iron and grapes, arguing that there are no principled points on this continuum for drawing metaphysical distinctions.
The essays in the third and fourth parts of the volume originate from the sciences, and perspectives on artifacts again alternate. In the essay by Jean Mandler, focusing on ordinary, middle-sized, utilitarian artifacts, it is argued that infants at an age of seven months can already distinguish vehicles from animals, and then increasingly refine between kinds of vehicles and animals later in their cognitive development. Frank Keil, Marissa Greif, and Rebekkah Kerner take again the wider perspective and argue that the artifactual realm is a diverse one that is difficult to categorize for children. Increased ability to do so should, for instance, not simply be described as refinements; items can ‘jump’ categories, e.g., when an instance of jewelry is later recognized as a time-telling device, and items can become instances of artifact kinds that ‘co-mingle’ with natural kinds, e.g., hunting dogs. In the essays on animal artifacts and prehistoric artifacts the scope clearly broadens even more.
The scientific essays introduce a number of new issues. First Marc Hauser and Laurie Santos argue that the manufacturing and using of tools by animals does not entail straightforward evidence that those animals have the general concepts of tool and artifact: and the possibility of a ‘less-intentional’ notion of artifact is not confined to the animal kingdom. According to Steven Mithen, Neanderthals were skillful artifact makers, yet probably did not use language or external visual symbolism. Hence when taking their hand-axes as artifacts, one might assume a richer cognitive structure than the Neanderthals possessed. Second one can wonder on the basis of the essays whether artifacts actually form a cognitive meaningful category alongside natural and biological items. According to Mandler infants distinguish quickly between kinds of vehicles and kinds of animals. Yet she explains this ability in terms of the infants’ ability to contrast items that do not move or move only when other objects come in contact with them, and items that can move by themselves and interact with other objects from a distance. This latter contrast seems, however, a different one than the contrast between artifact and biological kinds: Mandler acknowledges that plants may end up being conceptualized as instances of the not-by-themselves-moving category, and one can add that some moving artifacts, say, automatic sliding doors, may end up as instances of the by-themselves-moving category. So maybe infants are initially developing other categories than those of animals and artifacts. Or maybe children correct their concepts later on leading to the category jumps that Keil, Greif, and Kerner describe. (Is this explaining why playing with automatic doors and other artifacts that move by themselves fascinates children?) These two issues have unfortunately barely found their way into the philosophical essays presented in the volume. Only Paul Bloom discusses the possibility that children categorize items as both natural and artifact kinds.
The third and most telling issue neglected by the philosophers is the conclusion drawn by Malt and Sloman. This essay surveys the finding in cognitive psychological research on how humans categorize artifacts, and ends with arguing that a coherent categorization of artifacts is not possible: there are different mental activities in which categorizations of artifacts arise, and each of these activities may yield different results. Naming activities, for instance, lead to discrete categorizations with bounded groupings of artifacts. Yet, the activity of humans of recognizing artifacts by connecting them to earlier stored knowledge, does not lead to such a discrete categorization, suggesting that concepts of artifacts lie within what Malt and Sloman call a continuous conceptual space (120). If there is any relevance of cognitive psychology to metaphysics, Malt and Sloman's conclusion challenges the very project of arguing for real artifact kinds. This conclusion, for instance, pries apart two of the three roles artifact kinds play in philosophy: the semantic role of supporting references and the epistemic role of allowing projective generalizations. These two roles seem to divide the realm of artifacts in different ways, leaving to ontology the problematic choice of taking either the semantic or epistemologically determined artifact kinds as real kinds. Moreover, Malt and Sloman focus on ordinary, middle-sized, utilitarian artifacts, i.e., on the very core of the topic.
The philosophers’ neglect of the scientific contributions may be explained by a more general lack of internal connections within the volume. The authors refer systematically to their disciplinary colleagues but cross-disciplinary references in the volume are limited and typically to earlier work of the authors involved. One philosopher even explicitly announces that he will leave some findings of psychological research “to the psychologists and the editors” since he wants to develop his understanding of artifacts as best as he can, and to focus on metaphysical issues, whereas later on he again refers to such findings to give support to his conclusions (20, 31–32). John Searle opens the volume with a description of the main line of the analysis of social objects as given in his monograph The Construction of Social Reality. Yet this analysis seems to play little role in the rest of the volume, as is indicated by Searle's absence in the index.
When reading the scientific essays, the impression of dealing with a volume of naturalized philosophy vanishes. It now seems a volume on the philosophy of the sciences of artifacts. The scientific essays collect results from research on artifacts and the philosophical essays aim at analyzing them. Many of the scientific results are not addressed by the philosophers, meaning that the philosophy of the sciences of artifacts is in its first phase of development. This alternative reading makes the volume in my view more interesting. When the essays are read in reverse order, they provide the reader with a wealth of information about artifacts. The last essays on animal and prehistoric artifacts describe how they are made and used for utilitarian goals and cultural goals, like sexual selection. In the psychology and cognitive science essays more detail is given about the cognitive mechanisms in play in human observation of, and reasoning about, artifacts, specifically ordinary, middle-sized, utilitarian artifacts. In the philosophical essays attempts are made to describe and analyze these results. Considering the volume in this reverse order also makes it more reasonable that it contains the essay by Jerrold Levinson on art, yet also defines lacunae. Artifacts are not only utilitarian objects, they can also have cultural value, calling for considering artwork in its various realizations ranging from the pure art that Levinson considers, to architecture and industrial design. Moreover, artifacts are not only observed and reasoned about, they are designed and manufactured, calling for also considering engineering and technology. Yet, work on artifacts originating in the philosophy of technology and engineering is completely ignored in the volume.
The volume consists of insightful essays that contain much richer discussions than my brief descriptions may suggest. Reading these essays as scientific and philosophical explorations of the topic of artifacts, makes it certain that this volume will end up on the shelves of all those who want to further a challenging new field for philosophical analysis.
