Topic: Origins of Art in the Stone Age
Topic: Artifacts and Artworks
Topic: Plato vs. Aristotle
Topic: The Institutional Theory of Art
Topic: Making the Mona Lisa
Encyclopedia of Science and Religion
J. Wentzel Vrede van Huyssteen
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Encyclopedia of science and religion / J. Wentzel Vrede van Huyssteen,
editor in chief. — 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-02-865704-7 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-02-865705-5 (v. 1 : alk. paper)
— ISBN 0-02-865706-3 (v. 2 : alk. paper)
1. Religion and science—Encyclopedias. I. Van Huyssteen, Wentzel.
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A RT, O RIGINS OF
nearby—felines, horses, bison, and mammoth—
some with incised markings. Personal decorations
appear even earlier. Some beads made from shells
from distant shores indicate something special
about the materials themselves. Some of the paintings in Chauvet Cave in France have been dated to
thirty thousand years before the present, and other
cave art may be just as old. Painted slabs from
South Africa’s Apollo Cave are more than twentyseven thousand years old, and Australian wall engravings, though less securely dated, may be forty
thousand years old. Early Aurignacian sites from
thirty-two thousand years ago have produced multiholed bone flutes. Percussion instruments are
nearly as old. Footprints beaten into the floors of
some Paleolithic caves may suggest dancing.
Over twelve thousand items of Paleolithic
portable art have been found in Western Europe
alone. There are now three hundred decorated
cave sites known, some with only a handful of figures, others with thousands. Humans have been
producing art for at least three hundred centuries,
portable and parietal, in varied materials, and in
widely separate parts of the world. Unfortunately,
it is not clear how much this knowledge reveals
about the origins of art.
Temporal beginnings and the nature of art
A RT, O RIGINS OF
Some thirty-three thousand years ago a human
being living in what is now Germany carved a figure like a man with a lion’s head from a piece of
mammoth tusk. Other ivory figurines were made
Even asking where and when art began is more
complicated than it seems. Because researchers depend on the vagaries of preservation and sometimes chance discovery, it is likely that many other
works were created but not (yet) found. Even
Chauvet Cave was unknown before 1994. A further
complication concerns what qualifies as art or can
be conceived as a “precursor” to art. The zoologist
Jane Goodall observed wild chimpanzees engaged
in a kind of rain dance. Desmond Morris found
that apes like to paint—they do so without rewards—and their paintings show balance, control,
and varied themes. John Pfeiffer detected among
Homo habilis (an extinct member of the human
genus that lived in Africa approximately 2.5 million
years ago) a possible a preference for green lava
and smooth pink pebbles, and the geologist and
anthropologist Kenneth Oakley notes that fossils
that may have been used as charms are common
in Paleolithic sites. A rough female form on a pebble from Berekhat Ram, Israel, dated to 230,000
years ago. Is this art or our own imagination? The
—29—
A RT, O RIGINS OF
amazingly early date makes it both more interesting and more difficult to accept.
Art is not easily defined. Robert Layton notes
an imprecise, shifting boundary, and different approaches that are hard to correlate, especially with
regard to the aesthetic perspective and to art as
communication. Anthropologists now commonly
shy away from using the term art. Margaret Conkey and Olga Soffer advocate not thinking of these
images as art but studying them as examples of
human symbolic behavior. Some forms of art, such
as song, dance, and storytelling, are transient, but
other art is more enduring, separating communication from the constraints of time and location. External symbolic storage is of inestimable value in
human history, and the arts were among the first
media so used.
Sources of art: cogitations, motivations,
adaptations, and inspirations
Just as fundamental as the timing and context of its
first appearance are the sources from which art
arose. Steven Mithin believes the dramatic development of culture, seen in some places as early as
fifty thousand years ago and established wherever
humans lived by thirty thousand years ago, represents a major redesign of the human mind. The
premodern mind had consisted of a suite of relatively separate, specialized intelligences (social, linguistic, natural historical, technical) and the rapid
appearance of art and religion is evidence that a
generalized intelligence, similar to that of modern
humans, allowed people to combine thoughts
from the formerly separate intelligences.
Psychological explanations had proliferated
even by 1900 when Yrjö Hirn’s The Origins of Art
reviewed many suggestions, from James Mark
Baldwin’s “self-exhibiting impulse” to Hirn’s own
preference for locating the art impulse in the
human tendency to externalize feeling states,
heightening the pleasure and relieving the pain of
these feelings and awakening similar feelings in
others. The nineteenth-century Russian novelist
Leo Tolstoy similarly saw art as a communication
of feelings, dependent upon and nurturing empathy. Jumping ahead many years and theories,
Nancy Aiken also attributes the origins of art to its
emotional effects. This need not involve beauty but
could engage any emotion. Some of the same stimuli (lines, shapes) that naturally trigger reactions
are used in art to trigger emotional responses that
are evaluated as aesthetic. This connection with
biologically built-in responses accounts for the universality of the human aesthetic response.
Many models are selectionist, proposing more
or less plausible scenarios for how art aids adaptation and so is increasingly favored in early populations. Charles Darwin suggested that the ability to
create feelings with music gave certain individuals
an edge in attracting mates. Interestingly, his fellow
discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, believed natural selection could not account
for artistic faculties and proposed a “spiritual
essence,” a kind of God-of-the-gaps view of
human development. Some arguments involve
ecological adaptation rather than the psychology
of emotion or sexual selection. Pfeiffer proposed
that art arose out of necessity to hold the group together, reduce conflict, and pass on a growing
body of wisdom. Looking back, art is an advance,
but Terrence Deacon believes it was really a desperate response to change, perhaps to a degrading
environment. Such models seem to take a pessimistic view of human freedom and creativity, yet
wracking one’s brains for a solution takes as much
creativity as dreaming on a sunny afternoon.
Ellen Dissanayake’s ethological approach involves finding core behaviors that natural selection
could work on. Most important is “making special,”
through which reality is elaborated, reformed, and
placed in a different realm, usually a magical or supernatural world, though often today a purely aesthetic realm. In contrast Helena Cronin suggests a
pre-adaptation route in which art arose as an unselected by-product of some other adaptation. This
may be true of many potentials of the human mind,
some of which, perhaps, have yet to be discovered.
John Barrow pushes the causal nexus with the
fascinating notion that the structure of the universe
itself helped shape human creativity and aesthetic
sense. Scale is important—if people were the size
of ants, they would lack the strength to break
chemical bonds as they do when chipping stones
or carving ivory. Human associations of colors with
emotions may relate to properties of light. Barrow
also attempts to trace some aesthetic preferences
to human adaptation to an ancestral savanna
homeland. While intriguing, however, there really
was no single “ancestral environment” upon which
—30—
A RT, O RIGINS OF
to base such an argument. Indeed, Rick Potts convincingly argues that the time of human evolution
was marked by intense environmental variability
and that the flexible cognition of human beings
was an adaptation to instability. Perhaps human
creativity and the aesthetic sense also developed in
response to environmental instability.
Or did the arts grow from the human need to
impose order on human intelligence and its capacity for self-revelation? Once human beings “left the
garden,” they needed art to cope with their new
knowledge, for natural selection could not keep
up. In thus recognizing art’s connection with the
deepest questioning of humans, sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson offers an almost theological argument, though his aim is consilience, the interlocking of causal explanations across disciplines.
Because of the human predicament Wilson
captures so well, the arts have been deeply connected with religion. Much of the world’s art is religious and so are many interpretations. Returning
to the caves, the most influential is the idea, championed by the Abbé Breuil, that the art was involved in hunting magic. Structuralism, via Annette
Laming-Emperaire and André Leroi-Gourhan, has
also been important. Whatever one thinks of structuralism, art is deeply symbolic, and its meaning
not easily perceived from another culture. David
Lewis-Williams notes that Leonardo da Vinci’s Last
Supper has little to do with men eating. And for
Clifford Geertz, the cultural significance of art is a
“local matter.” Jean Clottes and Lewis-Williams
argue for a connection with shamanism in which
the caves are spaces for ritual such as making images expressing the trance and hallucinatory experiences of shamanic activity.
Noting Jeremy Begbie’s defense of art as
knowledge, John Polkinghorne sees art as a vehicle for access to truth, a view not uncommon
among artists and writers such as Madeleine L’Engle, C. S. Lewis, Larry Woiwode, and John Keats,
who famously wrote in Ode on a Grecian Urn that
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Ursula Goodenough
also sees in art a source of nobility, grace, and
pleasure, and Thomas Dubay notes that even in
mathematics and science, beauty is evidence for
truth. Beauty and art are not coextensive but surely
related. Polkinghorne points out “That a temporal
succession of vibrations in the air can speak to us
of eternity is a fact that must be accommodated in
any adequate account of reality” (p. 45). Intimations of truth and contact with eternity are powerful motivations. In art and music, like religion,
there is a dimension of reality that transcends the
material world. Indeed, Alejandro García-Riviera
suggests that if God is truth, goodness, and beauty,
experience of these is an experience of God.
Interlocking causal explanations
An interlocking of explanations may be crucial for
understanding the origins of art. Theological perspectives are not necessarily at odds with other
ideas, and they may add an important dimension
to theories of art’s causation and motivation. Art as
a window onto truth not otherwise apprehended
makes sense of the deepest experience of art. It is
a motivation for “making special” and may also be
why the shaman creates art after one spiritual journey as an aid to the next. In some models, this
“truth” consists in the capture and communication
of an experience or feeling. This also makes sense,
for whatever their ultimate sources, revelations
and intimations come to an artist through experiences or feelings dependent on the human nervous and cognitive systems. And by whatever route,
people have natural selection to thank for this
wonderful facility for exploring truth. It is the universality of certain human experiences and certain
truths so conveyed that allows (some) art to communicate across generations. Lascaux, arguably the
most famous of the painted prehistoric caves in
France, still conveys real truth, very possibly some
of what the artists had in mind, if only in the back
of their minds, so many centuries ago.
See also A NTHROPOLOGY ; C ULTURE , O RIGINS OF ;
PALEOANTHROPOLOGY
Bibliography
Aiken, Nancy E. The Biological Origins of Art. Westport,
Conn.: Praeger, 1998.
Bahn, Paul, and Vertut, Jean. Images of the Ice Age. Leicester, UK: Winward, 1988.
Barrow, John. The Artful Universe: The Cosmic Source of
Human Creativity. Boston: Little, Brown, 1996.
Clottes, Jean, and Lewis-Williams, David. The Shamans of
Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves.
New York: Abrams, 1998.
—31—
A RTIFICIAL I NTELLIGENCE
Conkey, Margaret W.; Soffer, Olga; Stratmann, Deborah,
eds. Beyond Art: Pleistocene Image and Symbol. San
Francisco: California Academy of Sciences, 1997
Dissanayake, Ellen. What is Art For? Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1988.
Geertz, Clifford. “Art as a Cultural System.” In Local
Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, 2nd edition, ed. Clifford Geertz. New York: Basic
Books, 2000.
Hirn, Yrjö. The Origins of Art: A Psychological and Sociological Inquiry. London: Macmillan, 1900.
Layton, Robert. The Anthropology of Art, 3rd edition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Lewis-Williams, J. D. Discovering South African Rock Art.
Cape Town, South Africa: David Philip, 1990.
Mithin, Steven. The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive
Origins of Art, Religion, and Science. New York:
Thames and Hudson, 1996.
Pfieffer, John E. The Creative Explosion: An Inquiry into
the Origins of Art and Religion. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1982.
Polkinghorne, John. The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of
a Bottom-up Thinker. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Renfrew, Colin, and Scarre, Chris, eds. Cognition and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Symbolic Storage.
Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1998.
Tattersall, Ian. Becoming Human: Evolution and Human
Uniqueness. New York: Harcourt, 1998.
PAUL K. WASON
—32—
From: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/artifact
Artifact
An artifact may be defined as an object that has been intentionally made or produced for a certain
purpose. Often the word ‘artifact’ is used in a more restricted sense to refer to simple, hand-made
objects which represent a particular culture. According to Webster's Third New International
Dictionary, an artifact is “a usually simple object (as a tool or an ornament) showing human
workmanship and modification as distinguished from a natural object.” The Oxford English
Dictionary defines an artifact (artefact) as “anything made by human art and workmanship; an
artificial product.” This sense of the word can be seen from the word itself: it is derived from the
Latin words arte, ablative of ars (art), and factum, the past participle of facere (to make). In
experimental science, the expression ‘artifact’ is sometimes used to refer to experimental results
which are not manifestations of the natural phenomena under investigation, but are due to the
particular experimental arrangement, and hence indirectly to human agency.
1. On the Concept of Artifact
Aristotle divided existing things into those that “exist by nature” and those existing “from other
causes.” The former include “animals and their parts, … and the plants and the simple bodies (earth,
fire, air, water)”, the latter include “a bed and a coat and anything of that sort, qua receiving these
designations, i.e., in so far as they are products of art.” (Physica, Book II, 192 b 9–18). Aristotle
makes here a distinction between natural objects and artifacts (“artificial products”, ibid., 192 b 28),
and describes the latter as products of the art of making things. The art of making something
involves intentional agency; thus an artifact may be defined as an object that has been intentionally
made for some purpose.
An artifact has necessarily a maker or an author; thus artifact and author can be regarded as
correlative concepts (Hilpinen 1993, 156–157):
(A1) An object is an artifact if and only if it has an author.
The concept of authorship is here assumed to involve the same kind and degree of intentionality as
the concept of an artifact. It should be noted that (A1) allows the possibility that an artifact has
several authors who contribute to its production. Such objects may be termed “collectively produced
artifacts”.
Intentional agency is not limited to human beings. For example, in a recent experiment a New
Caledonian crow called Betty bent a piece of straight wire into a hook and used it to lift a bucket
containing food from a vertical pipe (Weir at al., 2002). The action required for the solution of
1
Betty's problem, bending a metal wire into the form of a hook, was quite “unnatural”, and
apparently an instance of intelligent, goal-directed action. Betty's hook may be regarded as a simple
artifact made for the purpose of gaining access to the food bucket. Tool manufacture has also been
observed among animals in the wild, for example, chimpanzees strip leaves off twigs detached from
branches of trees and use the twigs for reaching termites or ants. (Beck 1980, 117.)
The products of an artifact maker's actions can be divided into the objects intended by the author
and unintended products. When a tailor makes a coat for his customer, his intention is to make a
coat of a certain size and style, but he also produces scraps of cloth as by-products of his work. Such
by-products are products of an artifact maker's intentional actions, but they are not intended
products. Stereotypical examples of artifacts, e.g., tools, weapons, and ornaments, are usually
intended products, and the definition of an artifact as an object intentionally made for a certain
purpose applies to such objects. However, in the anthropological and archaeological literature the
word is sometimes used in a wider sense for all objects produced by human activities. According to
Kathy Schick and Nicholas Toth (1993, 49), (human) artifacts are “objects that have been modified
by humans, either intentionally or unintentionally.” The word ‘artifact’ is used in this wide sense for
all objects and phenomena that are of interest to archaeologists as sources of information about past
cultures. On the other hand, the scientific use of the expression of ‘artifact’ is often restricted to
“intentionally manufactured items”. (Dunnell 1977, 120–121; Oswalt 1976, 24.) There is a clear
conceptual distinction between an object made and used for some purpose and the residue or
“debitage” resulting from human (or animal) activities. (Cf. Andrefsky 2001, 2.) The former objects
may be regarded as artifacts in the strict or proper sense.
Objects taken from their natural environment and used as tools or for some other purpose form a
bridge between natural objects and artifacts. Such objects are called “naturefacts” (“made by
nature”; Oswalt 1973, 14–17; 1976, 17–23; Schnurrenberger and Bryan 1985, 134; Schick and Toth
1993, 92–93; Dickson 1996, 74). When a naturefact is modified to improve its usability for some
purpose, it becomes a genuine artifact.
Even animals to which we are not inclined to ascribe intentionality can be said to make objects, for
example, some wasps use mud to construct spherical vessels and fill them with paralyzed insects or
spiders which serve as nutrition for their offspring. It is natural to call such objects “animal
artifacts” even when the animal's behavior is wholly innate and not an instance of intelligent,
purposive action. James L. Gould (2007, 249) has defined an animal artifact as “any creation on the
part of an animal, using and/or modifying available materials, which is useful to it or its offspring.”
Here the requirement of intentionality is replaced by the condition that the product should be useful
for the animal in an appropriate biological sense. The distinction between the artifact and the residue
resulting from the productive activity can be made even for “animal artifacts” in Gould's sense: the
residue consists of products which are not useful for the animal.
2
2. Artifact, Work, and the Ontology of Artifacts
(A1) makes the concept of artifact (in the proper sense) equivalent to that of work (as a product as
opposed to activity); for example, according to (A1), all works of art, including musical and literary
works, should be called “artifacts” insofar as they have authors. In aesthetics, the expression
‘artifact’ has been used in this wide sense when it has been argued, as some philosophers have done,
that works of art are necessarily artifacts (Davies 1991, 120–141; Levinson 2007, 81–82).
Ontologically, an artifact can be a singular, concrete object such as the Eiffel Tower, a type (a type
object) which has or can have many instances (for example, a paper clip or Nikolai Gogol's Dead
Souls), an instance of a type (a particular paper clip), or an abstract object, for example, an artificial
language. A singular artifact can be a portable or (in principle) transportable object which can be
separated from its immediate surroundings without destroying it, or a non-separable feature of an
object which serves as its substrate or foundation. Objects of the former kind are called
ontologically independent objects; artifacts of the latter kind are dependent objects in the sense that
it is (ontologically) impossible for them to exist without their substrate. (See Simons 1987, 294–323;
Husserl 1913/2001, Investigation III, sections 2, 5.) A coat and a chair are independent objects, but
(for example) the Apennine Base rail tunnel constructed in the early 20th century is a dependent
object whose foundation is the Tuscan-Emilian part of the Apennine mountain range. It is not
possible to detach the tunnel from the mountain in the way a wheel of a bicycle can be detached
from the bicycle. The tunnel is an artifact in the strict sense of being an object intentionally made for
the purpose of facilitating railway traffic between Bologna and Florence.
An artifact kind identified by a common description or concept can include several subtypes or
species; for example, there are different paper clip types for which their authors (that is, their
inventors) obtained separate patents; these fall under the more general artifact kind ‘paper clip’.
Commonly used artifact kinds (pens, paper clips, computers, etc.) evolve over time as different
authors and designers try to improve earlier artifact types or adapt them to new conditions and
purposes. (See Petroski 1992a, 1992b.)
Artifacts are classified in different ways: on the basis of their form, the method of manufacture,
material properties, style, their intended use, or on other grounds. In philosophical discussions on
the nature of artifacts they are often described as having “intended proper functions” (Rudder Baker
2008, 3; see also Simon 1996, 3), and identified by their use; thus Hilary Kornblith (1980, 112)
observes: “At least for the most part, it seems that what makes two artifacts members of the same
kind is that they perform the same function.” This is the way an artifact is presumably regarded by
its user, but it is by no means the only basis of artifact classification. For example, the artifacts of
visual arts are divided on the basis of their production method into drawings, paintings, prints, and
photographs, and prints are divided into etchings, engravings, woodcuts, lithographs, and other
kinds. A drawing or a photograph can serve many different purposes; it may be an object of
aesthetic contemplation, or it may be used to help to identify some person or object. In
3
archaeological research artifacts are usually classified on morphological or stylistic grounds or on
the basis of other observable features which serve as evidence for hypotheses about their intended
function. (Adams and Adams 1991, 217–225; Read 2007.)
If we distinguish the concept of work from that of an artifact and say, for example, that an author
can create a work only by making some artifact (for example, to write a novel, an author has to
produce a manuscript), the expression ‘artifact’ may be said to be used in a narrow (or primary)
sense. The instances of a type artifact are artifacts in this narrow sense, that is, singular, particular
objects.
3. Making Objects: Productive Action
A singular object which is an artifact in a narrow sense is usually made from some pre-existing
object or objects by successive intentional modifications. The production of an artifact can take
different forms, and artifacts can be characterized on the basis of the kinds of actions by which they
are produced, that is, in terms of the general action types by which objects can be modified. (Cf.
Oswalt 1973, 169–172, 1976, 203–205; Beck 1980, 105.) Perhaps the most elementary action type
of this kind is separation, the separation of an object from another object so that one (or both) of the
resulting objects can be used for some purpose. Making a walking-stick by breaking a limb from a
tree and stripping it of leaves and bark consists of acts of separation. (Oswalt calls this action type
“reduction”; see 1976, 203.) Reshaping is another way to produce a new (kind of) object; this
consists in changing the shape or structure of an object (either a natural object or an artifact) without
separating any part from it or adding anything to it. (Beck 1980, 105.) Betty's hook is an artifact
made by reshaping a piece of metal wire, and a glass blower can make a hollow glass object by
reshaping a gob of hot glass by means of a blowpipe. To make complex artifacts, it is necessary to
join a number of objects together; Oswalt calls this action type or “production principle”
conjunction (1976, 203–204). For example, a knife made by attaching a wooden handle to a metal
blade is a conjunctive artifact. Simons and Dement (1996, 264) call these basic action types
“removal”, “forming”, and “assembly”. Complex artifacts are usually made by sequences of these
(and possibly other) basic action types. Given a number of productive action types A1 , …, Ai , …, An ,
an artifact can be defined quasi-inductively as an object intentionally produced from some natural or
artificial “parent” object or objects by means of the actions Ai (i = 1,…,n). In this case the
intentionality of production can be taken to mean that the author performs the actions
Aiintentionally; this need not require an intention to produce an object of any pre-determined type.
An agent may simply be playing or experimenting with the materials available to him. The resulting
object may show “human workmanship and modification”, even if it is not an instance of any
previously known artifact type.
When an artifact is a dependent object made by separation or reshaping, e.g., a tunnel or a knot,
productive actions modify its substrate, and a non-separable new feature of the substrate (the parent
4
object) becomes the artifact. In the case of separation, the part separated from the parent object (for
example, the rock and the earth removed from the mountain in the construction of a tunnel) is not
the artifact, but the residue of the productive activity.
Many artifacts are linked together in the sense that they are either designed to be parts of a complex
artifact, like the wheels and the frame of a bicycle, or are joined together when they are used in the
intended way, for example, a violin bow and a violin, or a locomotive and railway carriages. Oswalt
(1976, 204) describes the latter form of linkage as follows: “Linked forms always are joined
together in a technical manner in their primary usage.” Linked artifacts can be said to be designed
and made for each other, but they can often be used alone for “accidental” purposes not originally
intended.
Separation, reshaping, and conjunction (assembly) are general action descriptions which are
instantiated in different cases of artifact making by different techniques or (production) routines.
(For the concept of action routine, see Segerberg 1985.) Such procedures often require the use of
various artifacts as production tools.
4. Productive Intention
When a person intends to make an object of a certain kind, his productive intention has as its content
some description of the intended object, and the author's intention “ties” to an artifact a number of
predicates which determine the intended character of the object. The existence and some of the
properties of the artifact are dependent on its intended character. This is expressed by the following
Dependence Condition (Hilpinen 1992, 65):
(DEP) The existence and some of the properties of an artifact depend on an author's intention
to make an object of certain kind.
Because of this dependence of an author's intentions, artifacts can be said to be “creations of the
mind” (Thomasson 2007, 52). This condition holds both for artifacts in the proper sense and for the
residue resulting from productive actions.
The causal tie between an artifact and its intended character — or, strictly speaking, between an
artifact and its author's productive intention — is constituted by an author's actions, that is, by his
work on the object. The actual properties of an artifact constitute its actual character. The success
of an author's productive activity depends on the degree of fit or agreement between the intended
and the actual character of the object. The actual character of an artifact is of course always much
richer than the intended character: the artifact fits an author's intentions if and only if the former
includes the latter. At least one of the descriptions included in the intended character should
presumably be a sortal or “substantival” description which determines the identity of the object and
the criteria by which it can be distinguished from other objects (cf. Hilpinen 1992, 61). For example,
5
‘painting’ and ‘chair’ are sortal descriptions, but ‘red’ (or ‘red thing’) is not. It is possible to give a
definite answer to the question of how many chairs there are in a given room, but not to the question
of how many red things there are in the room: as Gottlob Frege (1884/1953, 66) pointed out, the
description ‘red thing’ does not identify objects in a determinate manner. Artifact kinds can be
identified by count nouns (such as ‘chair’) or by mass terms (e.g., ‘plywood’ or ‘whisky’).
An author's productive intention is often expressed by cognitive artifacts which show the character
of the intended artifact and the way it should be constructed, for example, a drawing, a diagram, or a
model of the artifact, together with a list of parts and materials and a set of instructions (a precept)
for the production process. Such representations are especially important in the case of collectively
produced complex artifacts. They are necessary for successful communication among the authors of
the artifact and for the coordination of their productive actions. (For different representations of
complex artifacts, see Simons and Dement 1996, 266–75.)
Artifact sortals can be essentially or nonessentially (accidentally) artifactual. For example, ‘motor
controller’ and ‘paper clip’ are essentially artifactual terms, but a path through a forest can be
intentionally made (an artificial path) or it can be an unintended product of people's habit of
following the same route when they walk through the forest. Languages and words can be natural
entities (without identifiable creators) or artifacts which have been intentionally designed for a
certain purpose. In fact, many “natural” languages, especially their written forms, can be regarded as
artifacts. For example, the creation of New Norwegian (Landsmål or Nynorsk) in the mid-19th
century was mainly due to the efforts of the Norwegian poet Ivar Aasen, who presented it as an
alternative to the official Norwegian language of the time (Riksmål, Dano-Norwegian). Aasen's
proposals were later modified and supplemented by many other authors who contributed to the
development of New Norwegian. (See Haugen 1966, 33–45.)
According to condition (DEP), a person is an author of an artifact only if the existence and the
character of the artifact depend on that person's productive intentions. Such dependence admits of
degrees; thus it is possible to distinguish degrees of authorship. The 13th century philosopher St.
Bonaventure distinguished four ways in which a person can make a book: A scribe (scriptor) simply
copies the works of others, without making any changes or additions. A compiler (compilator)
combines the texts of other authors without adding any new material to the text, whereas a
commentator “writes both others' work and his own, but with others' work in the principal place,
adding his own for purposes of explanation.” Finally, an author (auctor), in the strict sense, “writes
both his own work and others' but his own work in a principal place adding others' for the purposes
of confirmation.” (Eisenstein 1979, 121–22; Woodmansee 1992, 281.) A scribe who intentionally
copies a text produces a new artifact, a new copy of the text, and is without doubt an author of that
copy: the existence and the character of the copy depend on the scribe's intentions. The scribe
intends the copy to have a certain textual character, but that intention is determined by and
dependent on the productive intentions of the original author of the text. As regards the textual
character of the copy, the scribe represents a minimal (or zero) degree of authorship. The textual
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intentions of a compiler are also dependent on the intentions of the authors whose texts the compiler
is joining together, but the way in which the original works are combined is up to the compiler. A
compiler and a commentator represent intermediate degrees of authorship between a scribe and an
author in the proper or strict sense of the word.
5. On the Characterization and Evaluation of Artifacts
As was mentioned above, artificial things are often characterized in terms of functions and goals (cf.
Simon 1996, 5), and artifact kinds can be identified by sortal descriptions which refer to their
intended function (e.g., ‘hammer’). An object that has been made for a certain purpose F may be
termed ‘an F-object’. The properties of an F-object can be divided into two classes: (i) those
relevant to the functioning of the object as an F-object, and (ii) the properties irrelevant to the
purpose F. The former properties may be termed the significant properties of the object (or its
F-significant properties); they may also be called the “good-making properties” of the object. For
example, the weight of a hammer is one of its significant features, but its color is usually not. In
addition to an identifying (sortal) description F, the content of an author's productive intention
includes the properties that he regards as significant for the purpose F. The latter properties depend
on this purpose (or purposes); thus the intended character of an artifact is not simply a collection of
predicates, but has a hierarchical structure. In many cases an object is expected to serve many
different purposes; thus the description F may be quite complex. If an artifact is evaluated on the
basis of its suitability for a certain purpose, its goodness is a form of what may be called
instrumental goodness. (G. H. von Wright 1963, 19–22.)
An author's productive activity may be evaluated on the basis of the relationships among the
intended character of an artifact, its actual character, and a purpose F (Hilpinen 1995, 140):
(E1) The degree of fit or agreement between the intended character and the actual character of
an object,
(E2) The degree of fit between the intended character of an object and the purpose F, in other
words, the suitability of an object of the intended kind for the purpose F,
and
(E3) The degree of fit between the actual character of an object and the purpose F, that is, the
suitability of an artifact for F.
(E1) determines whether an artifact is a successful embodiment of the author's intentions, (E2)
determines whether the character that the author intends to give to an artifact is suitable for the
purpose F, and (E3) tells whether the author has succeeded in making an object that is in fact
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suitable for the purpose F. The study of artifacts (qua artifacts) is intrinsically evaluative, since
viewing an object as an artifact means viewing it in the light of intentions and purposes.
The purpose F on which the evaluation of an artifact and its design are based need not be the
purpose that the author had in mind; it can be any purpose for which the artifact might be used. The
direction of evaluation may be reversed so that the maker or owner of an artifact tries to find new
uses for it.
In addition, we should distinguish the actual character of an artifact from the author's conception of
it. If the author's conception of an object agrees with its intended character, the artifact is
subjectively satisfactory for the author, but it may fail to fit the author's productive intentions if he
has a mistaken conception of it.
If the author's productive activity is successful, the character of a completed artifact both depends on
and agrees with his productive intentions so that it can be regarded as an embodiment of these
intentions. If the actual character of an object does not agree with its intended character, it is
unsatisfactory from the author's point of view, and if the author's conception of an object does not
agree with its intended character, the artifact is subjectively unsatisfactory from the author's point of
view. In the latter case the author has a reason to try to improve the object until it satisfies his
productive intentions. A change in an object which improves the fit between its actual and intended
character is, from the standpoint of the author's intentions, a progressive change.
It seems plausible to regard an object as a proper artifact only if its maker's productive activity has
some degree of success, for example, satisfies some sortal predicate included in his productive
intention. This condition may be termed the Success Condition:
(SUC) An object is an artifact made by an author only if it satisfies some sortal description
included in the author's productive intention.
If an agent's activity fails in every respect, the agent does not accomplish anything, but produces
only “scrap”. (Cf. Hilpinen 1993, 160; Bloom 1996, 10; Thomasson 2003, 598–99.) Even if the
object does not fit the author's productive intention, but he accepts it as a satisfactory realization of
his intention, it may be regarded as a proper artifact. This is expressed by the following Acceptance
Condition:
(ACC) An object is an artifact made by an author only if the author accepts it as satisfying
some sortal description included in his productive intention.
The acceptance is based on the author's intentions and purposes, but as was pointed out above, the
artifact may later be evaluated by other persons or by the author himself with respect to other
possible uses and purposes. If an artifact has several authors, the Acceptance Condition should hold
for at least one of them. According to the Acceptance Condition, an object is an artifact only if its
8
maker regards it as such, that is, accepts it as a product of his intentional activity. The Success
Condition concerns the fit between the actual and the intended character of an object; the
Acceptance Condition the fit between the author's conception of an object and its intended character.
In this context it should be observed that the author's intention may change during his productive
activity. In the above conditions, ‘productive intention’ should be regarded as referring to the
content of the author's final intentions concerning the artifact.
In some cases the satisfaction of the Acceptance Condition is sufficient for the satisfaction of the
Success Condition in the sense that if an author has produced an object with an intention to make an
object of kind K and has accepted it as a K-object, it cannot fail to be a K-object. When a person
signs a document, his acceptance of an illegible scrawl as his signature is sufficient to make it his
signature. (However, on a later occasion he can of course make a mistake and fail to recognize the
signature as his own, or believe that a signature written earlier by a forger is genuine.)
If the concept of artifact is defined in terms of productive actions in the way suggested in Section 3,
the Success Condition should be taken to mean that the author or authors actually succeed in
performing the intended productive action, and the Acceptance Condition may be taken to mean that
the author (or one of the authors) believes that the action has been completed.
Randall Dipert's theory of artifacts includes the condition that an artifact (in the strict sense) should
be intended by its author to be recognized as having been intentionally modified for a certain
purpose (Dipert 1993, 29–31). This is a plausible condition, since an F-object can presumably be a
good F-object only if its potential users recognize it as such. However, this recognizability should
not be taken to mean general recognizability: a mechanical shark used in making an adventure film
is an artifact, but its authors do not wish the audience to recognize it as such, on the contrary; the
condition of recognizability presumably applies only to the persons who are using it in the making
of the film.
The conditions listed above provide a partial characterization of the concept of artifact. We might
say that different intentionally modified or constructed objects exhibit different degrees of
artifactuality, depending on how well they satisfy these conditions.
6. Artworks
As was mentioned above, artifactuality is often regarded as one of the defining characteristics of
works of art; for example, this is an essential condition in George Dickie's (1984, 63) analysis,
according to which a work of art is an “artifact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld
public”. The condition of artifactuality is plausible only if the concept of artifact is understood in a
wide sense in which intentionally created events and processes (e.g., performances) and works
which have instances (for example, musical and literary works) are regarded as artifacts. According
to condition (A1), the condition of artifactuality in this sense is equivalent to the requirement that a
9
work of art should have an author. Some philosophers have objected to the condition of
artifactuality, using instances of so-called “driftwood art” or “found objects” (found art) as
counterexamples. (Cf. Weitz 1956, 34; Dickie and Stecker 2009, 152–153.) An object found in
nature and presented in an art gallery without any physical modification is an artistic naturefact,
analogous to a natural object adopted for some use. To avoid the paradoxical consequence that some
artworks lack authors, the concepts of authorship and artifactuality must be interpreted in this
context in such a way that the choice of an object for “presentation to the artworld public” is
sufficient to make the presenter the author of the object qua work of art, that is, as an object of
aesthetic appreciation. According to this view, the presentation of a natural object as an object of
aesthetic appreciation counts as an “intentional modification” required for artifactuality (cf. Dickie
1984/1997, 45–46). However, usually the works of “found art” are assemblages of natural objects
and artifacts collected together by an artist. Such works are genuine artifacts, artifacts in the strict
sense; they are intentionally put together for aesthetic purposes by using natural objects and artifacts
as materials.
Artifacts in the wide sense form an ontologically heterogeneous collection of entities which extends
across the traditional philosophical boundaries between concreta and abstracta, and substantial
objects, events, and processes. (Cf. Thomasson 1999, xii, 117–120.)
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