170 Giacomo Romano
that make the phenomena to which these patterns apply more intelligible. These patterns
themselves are considered to be only partially real regardless of their ontological status,
which is not a crucial matter: they are useful from a predictive point of view, and therefore
their existence is justifi ed.^5 There is no need to ascertain the counterpart of the Stance of
Design in some aspects of the world because it is a practical heuristic strategy and as such
it makes sense. Thus the Design Stance in principle, being only methodological heuristics,
does not need any real and empirical counterpart (cf. Dennett 1999).
10.1.3
Despite the strongly instrumental signifi cance that Dennett assigns to the Stance of
Design, cognitive psychologists (cf. German and Defeyter 2000; German and Johnson
2002; Defeyter and German 2003; Kelemen and Carey 2007) have interpreted it in a more
realistic sense.^6 These scholars, contrary to Dennett, do not take the Design Stance as a
mere predictive device. They assume it is an actual cognitive device present in the human
mind, explaining and justifying it as part of the human cognitive system on the basis of
several empirical studies. According to them, the Design Stance is an effective form of
reasoning that is employed by people, both adults and children after a certain age (though
there are signifi cant differences), to understand artifacts. These authors have also provided
some hypotheses about the psychological genesis, the cognitive structure, and the work-
ings of the Stance of Design. For example, German and Johnson (2002: 279–280) maintain
that the Design Stance is probably a mental attitude or frame “... in which an entity’s
properties, behavior, and existence is explained in terms of its having been designed to
serve a particular purpose.” According to Kelemen and Carey’s version of the Stance of
Design (2007: 214), “an artifact is intentionally created by a designer to fulfi ll some
function.”
Generally speaking, these psychologists agree about the main points in the interpretation
of the Design Stance. Each hypothesis about the Stance of Design endorses the fact that
this is a cognitive framework that is applied by any human subject in order to recognize
(a) that artifacts are produced intentionally by human beings (they are usually taken to be
human-made), (b) they are defi ned according to their functional features, (c) their catego-
rization endorses categorization extension to superordinate items (e.g., the capacity to
categorize an object as a “goblet” enables one to categorize it also as a “glass”); and (d)
the creators of these items also have baptism rights in relation to their creations (in psy-
chological jargon that means that creators are the ones who coined the name, and deter-
mined the nature and identity of what they created, e.g., whether what they made was a
paper boat or a paper hat).
The Design Stance, so characterized, seems to be a kind of cognitive ability that is
suitable for dealing with the knowledge of specifi c kinds of objects, namely artifacts.
Furthermore, since the concepts of “production” (“creation”) and “intentionality” are