Being For 179
a psychological scheme that helps us to understand them at a glance as a unifi ed procedure.
Such a procedure has to be rapidly and automatically recognized, possibly through the
application of an unaware mechanism—hence the functional scheme.
Some phenomena that are described in cognitive literature can be considered as weak
evidence in favor of the Functional Stance that we take when we apply the functional
scheme. These phenomena are the capacity to detect the for-ness that appears early in
childhood and is extended to any possible kind (both natural objects and artifacts), as
partially reported by Kelemen and Carey 2007, as well as the universality of this capacity,
observed in different cultures (Walker 1999; German and Barrett 2005). These variables
seem to endorse the fact that the recognition of for-ness results from the work of a special-
ized cognitive mechanism that is deputed to implement functional knowledge. They seem
to prove also that functional categorization is fast, unconscious, and performed by young
children. However, functional categorization does not necessarily correspond to artifact
categorization, as some authors seem to hold (Bloom 1998: 91). Functionality, rather than
artifactuality, is recognized as a characterizing feature, but functionality is different from
artifactuality. Functionality is a feature that is in fact not identifi ed as being distinctive
only of artifacts, even though very often they can be associated with artifactuality. Such
an association would indeed be established by a further cognitive step that is performed
by the Design Stance, a more complex cognitive device that might depend on the Func-
tional Stance. This further step could be useful in determining the intentional origins of
artifacts, not their functional properties, which, as I have pointed out, can be independently
detected.
Functional knowledge, so characterized, may appear to be a cognitive trick because it
covers our ignorance about the real workings of the phenomena that we recognize as being
for something. It might be objected that we can reach a real understanding of them only
if we are able to grasp their hidden causal mechanisms. Thus for-ness recognition would
provide us with a grasp of superfi cial mechanisms that arguably does not reveal the real
nature of the phenomena with which we are in touch. The functional stance at least
endorses an understanding of phenomena from a practical point of view that is essential
for the conducting of our daily lives, a fortiori in a technologically advanced culture.
Functional knowledge is, of course, to be considered a pragmatic heuristic of common
sense; it would be a part of the broad cognitive area covered by folk competences (such
as naïve psychology, naïve physics, naïve biology, naïve mathematics, etc.). Such knowl-
edge, although not scientifi cally reliable, is effective for the practical goings on of every-
day life.
Indeed engineers, architects, and designers in general have to deal with a lay dimension
for the realization of several products. These products have to be conceived of in terms
of the intuitions, which underlie common sense for two basic reasons. First, the terms,
concepts, and methodology of strict sciences do not fi t the demands of the practical man-
agement of life. Strict science often deals with idealized situations and does not take into