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tends to confound our dichotomic categorization of artifacts and natural entities. Simple
categorical disarray, however, seems to be a reasonable price for quick and frugal heuris-
tics, such as with the functional stance. This facilitates and quickens our understanding of
the workings of several natural and artifactual things, and it contributes to our application
of the Stance of Design in an effort to understand the intentional origins of artifacts, and
so improves our general technical capacities.
10.4 Conclusion
To clarify notions such as “mind-dependency” and “functionality,” which ontologists take
to be distinctive of artifacts, I refer to some cognitive studies on artifact categorization
and conceptualization. Cognitive investigations appeal, however, to an indeterminate idea,
that of “Design Stance,” which needs to be more thoroughly explained. In fact the Stance
of Design is characterized as the human approach toward artifacts in terms of inferential
processes that draw on assumptions about the relationship between the function of an
artifact and the intention of its designers. I argue that we need to know more in detail
about the constitutive elements and how they work. I hypothesize that in order to under-
stand the functionality, or for-ness, of artifacts, a more basic stance has to be assumed.
This is the stance that we take by applying a cognitive scheme that makes us perceive
functional things as vehicles, catalysts of transformational processes. Humans apply this
scheme by default, automatically and unconsciously, mostly by means of the activation of
a specialized cognitive mechanism. This explains why the human capacity to grasp for-
ness is prompt and selective; and it also explains why it is not exclusively applied to arti-
facts but also to several natural items. This basic capacity does not therefore discriminate
between artifacts and natural entities. Our distinction of artifacts from natural entities is
based rather on the inferential reasoning (usually performed with the Design Stance) that
makes us recognize their intentional origins. It is such reasoning that presupposes the
functional stance, rather than being presupposed by it. According to my proposal, there-
fore, functional knowledge could be a specialized and basic constitutive component of the
more general attitude of the human mind to categorize the objects of this world into arti-
facts and natural entities.
More thorough investigation is needed, investigation that develops further discussion
on the issues considered here and arguably on other issues such as the cognitive nature of
the for-ness detection mechanism (whether it is an innate modular mechanism or an
acquired general capacity, how it could develop in the human mind, etc.) or the adequate
logical formalization of the for-ness relation. Other empirical confi rmation would be
required as well. I hope that after the development of this investigation there will be suit-
able conditions to decide whether my proposal can be formulated into a sound hypothesis.
This could help to explain better how the human mind identifi es the features that are taken