46 Beth Preston
3.4 Use and Reproduction
Perhaps because of such disanalogies, Paul Griffi ths (1993: 419–420) says that fi tness in
material culture is a vaguer notion than in biology, and suggests that an artifact’s “... ability
to fulfi ll its intended use gives it a propensity to be reproduced” (1993: 420). This is more
promising. Artifacts are made for specifi c uses, and whether or not they are reproduced
and at what rate plausibly depends on their actually fulfi lling these uses. So rather than
trying to fi nd cultural analogues of biological phenomena like the four components of
fi tness discussed earlier, we can perhaps settle on just one factor as constituting the fi tness
of an artifact—its performing as intended by its makers and/or users. We may then pick
out proper functions in accordance with this revised formula:
A current token of an artifact type has the proper function of producing an effect of a
given type just in case producing this effect contributed to the intended use of past
tokens of this type of artifact, and thereby contributed to the reproduction of
such artifacts.
This formula has the added virtue of implicitly recognizing the role of the larval stage in
the reproductive cycle of material culture by referring proper function in part to the inten-
tions and activities of human agents via the notion of intended use.
But now we face two further diffi culties. The fi rst has to do with the qualifi cation of
use as intended. The problem is that there are established uses we want to call “proper
functions” because they clearly affect reproduction, but that are not necessarily intended
by designers, makers, or users. Many examples of such unintended proper functions
concern social, economic, or political uses of material culture. Both nineteenth-century
corsets and tiny shoes for bound feet were ostensibly intended to enhance female sexuality
and attractiveness. But as Marianne Thesander (1997) points out, wearing these artifacts
made it impossible for women to do even ordinary housework. Consequently these arti-
facts were also used to display the wealth and social status of a family by providing evi-
dence that its wives and daughters had no need to work and could afford to be routinely
incapacitated. But it is doubtful that designers, makers, or users of these artifacts explicitly
recognized or consciously intended this use. This phenomenon is widely recognized in the
social sciences, and the terms manifest function and latent function are often used to mark
intended and unintended functions, respectively. Fortunately this diffi culty may be reme-
died by simply striking the word intended from our formula. Use can be assessed from
the outside without appeal to intention by observing actual patterns of behavior involving
material culture, including verbal reports. This wider net will catch both intended and
unintended uses, and will therefore enable us to pick out both manifest and latent proper
functions.
The second diffi culty concerns a common phenomenon I have called “phantom func-
tion”—cases where use and consequent reproduction look perfectly normal, and the attri-