10

Being For: A Philosophical Hypothesis About the Structure of

Functional Knowledge

Much philosophical refl ection about artifacts, natural entities, and the comparison between
these items, focuses on ontological questions. Most theorists who have been and are still
interested in these topics aim at characterizing identity criteria to distinguish artifacts from
natural entities.
Ontologists have considered the dependency of artifacts on the mind and their function-
ality as basic features distinguishing them from natural entities. These features have not,
however, been clearly explained or adequately delineated. To shed some new light on the
notion of “functionality” as well as on the notion of “mind dependency,” I draw on some
studies from cognitive psychology. During the past decade these studies have in fact
focused on the categorization and conceptualization of artifacts. From a different perspec-
tive to the ontological one, they have thoroughly analyzed the cognitive mechanisms that
make humans understand artifacts. The results of cognitive investigations might provide
novel conceptual grounds for ontological questions about the artifactual-natural dichot-
omy, which would also be empirically justifi ed.
However, psychological accounts do not completely explain the distinctive features
characterizing artifacts either: an appeal to the vague concept of “Design Stance” is meant
to explain the human attitude toward artifacts. According to the explanation proposed
in the Design Stance, humans recognize artifacts thanks to a metaintentional capacity;
the capacity to engage in intentional attitudes of second order, that is, intentional attitudes
about other intentional attitudes.^1 By means of this capacity, human beings would
allegedly be able to conceptualize the supposed function that an author intended to be
performed by way of the artifacts that they have designed. I criticize this view because it
presupposes that the recognition of a function is dependent upon it having been conceived
by a designer. I also argue in favor of a different, perhaps complementary view that
requires a basic scheme employed by the human cognitive apparatus to deal with func-
tional knowledge, that is, the knowledge that a certain object is for something. I maintain
that such knowledge is independent of intentional attributions and can be applied to arti-
facts as well as to natural entities, even though it is an important cognitive element for
the recognition of artifacts.

Giacomo Romano