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This page intentionally left blank
 Creations of the Mind
Theories of Artifacts and Their Representation

edited by
ERIC MARGOLIS
and
S T E PH E N L AU R E N C E

1
 1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford  
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide in
Oxford New York
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With offices in
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South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam
Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and in certain other countries
Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
 the several contributors 2007
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
First published 2007
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate
reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction
outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover
and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Data available
Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk

ISBN 978–0–19–925098–1
ISBN 978–0–19–925099–8 (Pbk.)

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
 Contents

List of Contributors vii

Introduction ix

PA RT I : M E TA PH Y S I C S
1. Social Ontology and the Philosophy of Society 3
John R. Searle
2. Artifacts: Parts and Principles 18
Richard E. Grandy
3. On the Place of Artifacts in Ontology 33
Crawford L. Elder
4. Artifacts and Human Concepts 52
Amie L. Thomasson
5. Artworks as Artifacts 74
Jerrold Levinson

PA RT I I : C O N C E P TS A N D C AT E G O R I E S
6. Artifact Categorization: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly 85
Barbara C. Malt and Steven A. Sloman
7. Seedless Grapes: Nature and Culture 124
Dan Sperber
8. How to Refer to Artifacts 138
Hilary Kornblith
9. Water as an Artifact Kind 150
Paul Bloom
10. The Organization and Representation of Conceptual Knowledge in
the Brain: Living Kinds and Artifacts 157
Bradford Z. Mahon and Alfonso Caramazza

PA RT I I I : C O G N I T I V E D EV E LO P M E N T
11. The Conceptual Foundations of Animals and Artifacts 191
Jean M. Mandler
vi Contents

12. The Essence of Artifacts: Developing the Design Stance 212

Deborah Kelemen and Susan Carey
13. A World Apart: How Concepts of the Constructed World Are
Different in Representation and in Development 231
Frank C. Keil, Marissa L. Greif, and Rebekkah S. Kerner

PA RT I V: EVO LU T I O N
14. Animal Artifacts 249
James L. Gould
15. The Evolutionary Ancestry of Our Knowledge of Tools: From
Percepts To Concepts 267
Marc D. Hauser and Laurie R. Santos
16. Creations of Pre-Modern Human Minds: Stone Tool Manufacture
and Use by Homo habilis, heidelbergensis, and neanderthalensis 289
Steven Mithen

References 312
Index 347
 List of Contributors
Paul Bloom, Department of Psychology, Yale University
Alfonso Caramazza, Department of Psychology, Harvard University
Susan Carey, Department of Psychology, Harvard University
Crawford L. Elder, Department of Philosophy, University of Connecticut
James L. Gould, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University
Richard E. Grandy, Department of Philosophy, Rice University
Marissa L. Greif, Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences, Duke University
Marc D. Hauser, Departments of Psychology, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology,
and Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University
Frank C. Keil, Department of Psychology, Yale University
Deborah Kelemen, Department of Psychology, Boston University
Rebekkah S. Kerner, Department of Psychology, Yale University
Hilary Kornblith, Department of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts
Jerrold Levinson, Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland, College Park
Bradford Z. Mahon, Department of Psychology, Harvard University
Barbara C. Malt, Department of Psychology, Lehigh University
Jean M. Mandler, Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego
Steven Mithen, Department of Archaeology, University of Reading
Laurie R. Santos, Department of Psychology, Yale University
John R. Searle, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley
Steven A. Sloman, Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, Brown University
Dan Sperber, Institut Jean Nicod (CNRS, EHESS, and ENS), Paris
Amie L. Thomasson, Department of Philosophy, University of Miami
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 Introduction

One of the most striking facts about human beings is that we live in a world that
is, to an unprecedented extent, populated by our own creations. 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.
Given their prevalence, it is only natural that we should take these things for
granted. But a moment’s reflection reveals the significance of human artifacts for
our daily lives. All you have to do is look around you. As Henry Petroski has
remarked (1992, p. ix):
Other than the sky and some trees, everything I can see from where I now sit is artificial.
The desk, books, and computer before me; the chair, rug, and door behind me; the
lamp, ceiling, and roof above me; the roads, cars, and buildings outside my window. If
truth be told, even the sky has been colored by pollution, and the stand of the trees has
been oddly shaped to conform to the space allotted by development. Virtually all urban
sensual experience has been touched by human hands, and thus the vast majority of us
experience the physical world, at least, as filtered through the process of design.

Moreover, urban areas aren’t the only ones that are populated by human artifacts.
Just about everywhere on the planet where humans live, you will find both an
abundance of artifacts and a landscape that has been substantially altered to meet
human needs—from the roads and fences that cross-cut farmlands to the docks
that protrude from small fishing villages.
Many artifacts have clear functional uses. They cook our food, they keep us
warm and dry, they take us where we want to go. But human artifacts aren’t
purely utilitarian objects. They also have enormous cultural value. There is a
big difference between driving a Volkswagen Beetle and a Hummer, or between
wearing the latest Armani suit and an old pair of ripped, baggy jeans. The artifacts
we surround ourselves with speak volumes about what is important to us, what
groups we identify with, and who we are as individuals.
Artifacts are also important because of their potential to reveal distinctive
features of the human mind. The image of ‘man the tool-user’ has been
complicated by recent discoveries about the ecology of non-human animals (see
Gould, this volume), but it is still quite reasonable to point to theoretically
significant facts about human artifacts that may distinguish us as a species. Even
if non-human animals might be said to produce artifacts of their own—as when
chimpanzees employ small branches to collect hard-to-reach termites—it bears
explaining why we humans are so much more prolific in the types of artifacts we
create and why we are so much more flexible and creative in how we use them.
x Introduction

Humans clearly outstrip all other animals in our technological accomplishments.

Why is that? Is it because we have a more powerful general intelligence? Is it
owing to our possession of natural language? Is it because we have specialized
cognitive systems or a special sort of psychological organization?
These are just a few of the questions that this book aims to address. Our goal
has been to bring together theorists from a wide variety of disciplines that have
a shared interest in the nature of artifacts and their implications for the human
mind. The book is divided into four parts, although we should say at the outset
that the divisions are somewhat artificial and that many of the chapters bear
heavily on the issues that are featured in other parts of the book. We view this
interplay of thought across subject areas and disciplines as a gratifying outcome
and as a clear sign that researchers coming from rather different backgrounds and
perspectives have a lot to say to one another.
Part I is primarily concerned with the metaphysics of artifacts. In one way
or another, all of these chapters are concerned with the existence and nature
of artifacts, for example, the question of whether artifacts are mind-dependent
entities and whether being mind-dependent would make them any less real than
other sorts of entities, especially natural kinds. Not all of the authors maintain
that artifacts are mind-dependent, but among those who do, there is a further
question about how artifacts depend on our thoughts about them. For something
to be an artifact of a certain type (e.g. a chair) does it have to be the case that
its creator had a specific intention in creating that object? And is there a way to
distinguish the intention that may be necessary for an ordinary artifact from the
intention that may be necessary to render something a work of art? Finally, one
further question that is addressed in this section is whether it even makes sense
to distinguish artifacts from natural kinds. On views according to which artifacts
aren’t mind-dependent, the distinction may seem artificial. But there are also
numerous examples that challenge the distinction on intuitive grounds.
Part II is primarily concerned with concepts of artifacts and the categories
they represent. Just as artifacts are ubiquitous in human life, so thoughts about
artifacts are also ubiquitous—much of our daily thought is concerned with
artifacts, making artifact concepts central to the study of concepts in general.
Also, irrespective of the metaphysical dispute about the mind-dependence of
artifacts, there remains the purely psychological question of how we do in fact
think about them. For example, under what conditions would people think or
say that something is a boat? Would it affect things to learn that the object lacked
the function that is ordinarily associated with standard boats? How about the
appearance? Is it possible that our judgments about artifactual identity are highly
sensitive to the contextual features of a cognitive task? And what can we learn
about artifact concepts by looking at case studies in neuropsychology and in the
rapidly developing area of neuroimaging? Finally, Part II takes up the question
of whether words for artifacts, and the concepts they express, pick out their
referents without embodying a description of what they refer to. This approach
 Introduction xi

to semantics is popular for natural kind terms and concepts but previously has
received less support in discussion of artifacts.
Part III is primarily concerned with cognitive development. To what extent are
infants able to categorize their experience in terms of artifact-related concepts,
as opposed to simple low-level perceptual properties? At what point in cognitive
development does an understanding of artifacts emerge? Are there important
stages that children go through in developing artifact concepts? This part of
the book also explores whether there are innate domain-specific systems for
representing artifacts or whether the adult competence is based on a confluence
of more general systems.
Part IV is primarily concerned with the evolution of artifacts and the use of
artifacts by non-human animals. One facet of this issue is the widespread use
of tools or tool-like entities among non-human animals, from chimpanzees to
birds to insects. Another is the dispute about whether the underlying cognitive
mechanisms are different for these animals than for humans. Yet another is the
fascinating question of what can be said about our hominid ancestors and the
role that artifacts play in helping us to determine when and how the modern
mind first appeared.

This book has been in the works for a long time. We want to express our deepest
gratitude to the authors and thank them for their patience. Thanks also to Peter
Momtchiloff of Oxford University Press for his support of this project.
Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence
This page intentionally left blank
 PART I
M E TA PH Y S I C S
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