180 Giacomo Romano
account the contingencies of everyday life. Moreover, a matter of grain size is at stake:
the sciences normally approach selected, fi ne-grained phenomena that are described with
specialized jargon. Practical life, on the contrary, deals with coarse-grained phenomena
that are usually characterized according to the jargon of common sense. The second reason
why designers have to take into consideration the dynamics of common sense is that, even
though they may plan their projects making use of a vast amount of technical knowledge,
they often have to think of the products that realize those projects as being intended for
laypeople. Indeed they have to design their products in such a way as to make them
understandable to laypeople. Thus they also have to take into account functional knowl-
edge that is reasonably to be considered constitutive of common sense. Donald Norman
(both an engineer and a cognitive scientist), for example, applied the principles of ecologi-
cal psychology to design methodology in order to deal with the practical dimension of
common sense.^16 He also systematically took into consideration several psychological
studies of folk competences. On the analogy of Norman’s research, functional knowledge
could be seriously scrutinized as well.
The assumption of a functional scheme also seems rationally justifi ed: in the account
of the human capacity to manage practical life, such a cognitive tool is an easy explanatory
principle. Indeed functional knowledge would account for the human cognitive skill to
understand complex mechanisms, a skill that is pivotal in the development of technology.
In fact technology cannot be properly explained only in terms of causal cognition simply
by claiming that it “was originally the result largely of imaginative trial and error” (Wolpert
2003). The ability to arrange human experience and cognitive skills into a structured form
of knowledge that can be accessed easily, such as with technology, requires fairly advanced
and effective competencies, one of which could be that deputed to functional
knowledge.
The hypothesis that our cognitive system, by means of the application of the functional
scheme, makes us perceive objects as being for something appears reasonable. Thus it
appears reasonable that we are endowed with a spontaneous classifi catory bias that is
engendered by our cognitive mechanism for the recognition of for-ness. We are also erro-
neously prompted by our habits, which are used in artifact-saturated environments to
identify the things that we perceive as being for something and as being made by someone.
Such an incorrect inference has induced us to think of the entities that we recognize as
being for something as being entangled with agency and intentionality, while such match-
ing is not necessary. In fact interpreting any functional feature as a feature that is inten-
tionally loaded is unnecessary and misleading, so we are convinced that we need to extend
the characterizing trait of artifacts, their being made for something, to all the things that
we perceive only as being for something. Among these we include several natural items
that in fact do not reveal any clue of an agency relative to their origins.
According to this hypothesis an important practical heuristic devised and put to use by
our cognitive system, in combination with our experience of an artifact-saturated world,