182 Giacomo Romano
to be distinctive of artifacts with respect to natural items, and it could also make these
features more certain from an ontological point of view.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Melissa (“Missy”) Ciaravino, philosophy student at the State University
of New York at Buffalo, for editing the English of a previous version of my chapter.
Notes
- An intentional attitude of second order could be, e.g., my belief that I remember that I met Elvis, and Jill’s
belief that Mary thinks that Elvis is still alive. Perhaps “metaintentionality” is a special case of “metacognition”
as defi ned by Moses and Baird, that is, “any knowledge or cognitive process that refers, motors, or controls any
aspect of cognition” (1999: 533–535). - Simons theorizes about artifacts in other important texts also, such as in Simons (1989) and Simons and
Dement (1996), but in these texts he focuses on artifacts from a strictly ontological, and more precisely mereo-
logical point of view, without providing a general explicit defi nition of artifact such as the one that I have quoted.
However, I report Simons’s defi nition because it is suffi ciently broad to comprehend all of the other ontological
defi nitions and characterizations of artifact. - This, in Dennett’s philosophy, is interchangeably used with “Design Stance.”
- Recently there has been quite a debate about the relations between the Dennettian Stances and the philosophi-
cal relevance of the Stance of Design (cf. Baker 1987; Millikan 2000; Ratcliffe 2001). - In fact Dennett’s ontological commitment relative to the mental is to be considered as a form of instrumental-
ism or mild realism. - In terms of real intentional states and attitudes.
- Deborah Kelemen has explicitly argued in favor of this idea (Kelemen 1999a, b, c, d; 2003; 2004).
- This remark is derived from personal communication with Professor Deborah Kelemen.
- Kelemen, together with most of the other psychologists who have theorized about the Stance of Design, uses
purpose without distinguishing it much from function. - That is, the reasoning that enables humans to recognize sequences of events as being causally related.
- For an overview of the cognitive studies of causal cognition, see Cheng (1999).
- Here I am referring to causality and causation as loosely understood terms in the common sense; I am not
appealing to any philosophical and/or scientifi c theory. However, I take the original Humean account of “causal-
ity” (Hume 1987 [1739]) in terms of temporal priority, contiguity, and the constant conjunction of cause C to
its effect E, as being rather close to the conception of “common sense”; even though the Humean account was
further developed in modern regularity approaches that seem intuitively less clear to the causal reasoning of
common sense. - Here again I am referring to “causality” and “causation” as loosely understood in common terms, not in a
scientifi c or philosophical theory. - The path toward a logic of change has been broken by von Wright (1969); a relationship between the proper
formulation of a logic of change and its employment in studying the cognition of functional features could be a
fi rst step toward a thorough investigation of functional knowledge. - One could think of a somewhat Gestalt-like principle of unifi cation of the individual causal links to the
functional picture; this is, however, pure speculation. - Norman specifi cally appealed to the work of Gibson. Of course I do not make a secret of myself being
inspired by the work of Gibson (1979) in this hypothesis. However, there are some considerable differences
(only sketched here in the interests of brevity) between the concept of “for-ness” and the key concept of