194 Marzia Soavi
specify the right types. It seems obvious that O in (c) and (d) has to be intended as a
physical-structural type, but this interpretation excludes the following possibility: let us
suppose that few items of a new type (physical-structural) of chair are produced but that
none of them is ever used, as they are immediately put in a museum.
Fortunately the most intuitive way to understand (c) and (d) seems to be to imply that
they have conditional forms of the following types:
c′. If tokens of O are used at all, then they are most often used for F.
d′. If tokens of O are used at all by competent users, they are most often used for F.
Thus according to (c′) and (d′) we can truly attribute the function F to types O, even when
tokens of O are never used. But here we have two problems. First, it is not clear what
exactly (c′) and (d′) mean with respect to a type whose tokens have never been used. How
can we tell that (c′) or (d′) is true with respect to such a type? The second problem is that
even if we could fi nd the way to determine this (e.g., by establishing which is the most
likely way an object with a certain structure could be used), we would have the undesir-
able result that all the nonused types of artifacts may have many more functions in common
than our way of classifying them allows. That is, F in (c′) and (d′) ranges over all the
functions that are compatible with the structure. It is clear that in these cases, however,
we want to be able to say, for example, that the objects in question are chairs and that they
have the same function that chairs typically have. The conditional interpretation thus fails
to accommodate the fact that different types of unused artifacts may have different func-
tions and may be classifi ed accordingly as artifacts of different functional kinds.
If we interpret (c) and (d) according to a nonconditional form, (c) and (d) will fail to
accommodate the fact that artifacts of a certain type may remain unused and nonetheless
be artifacts of a certain functional kind.
11.5 Third Option
The third criterion is the attribution of function according to the intention of production,
that is:
- o is an object of artifact kind K iff o has been produced for F.
What does “an object has been produced for a certain function” mean?
According to the notion of “production” adopted here, production includes two phases:
the execution or physical realization phase, implying some manipulation, and the design-
ing phase. If an object is intentionally produced for F, the phase of the physical realization
follows instructions posited during the design phase. The phase of designing is the phase
of study, experimentation, and trial aimed at fi nding out which structural constraints an
object must meet to exhibit certain physical dispositions. I do not want to enter the debate