48 Beth Preston
motivations for using artifacts in regular ways that are not contingent on their believing
these artifacts to be performing successfully. For example, deference to authority, respect
for tradition, or sheer habit motivate many people to participate in the ritual of the Eucha-
rist even though they do not believe the doctrine of transubstantiation, or do not really
understand it. And religious leaders may enjoin such rituals even when they have no belief
in the effi cacy of the artifacts involved in order to enhance their own status or their control
of their followers’ behavior. Similarly the captains of industry may—and often do—repro-
duce and market commodities they know perfectly well cannot do what they are implicitly
or explicitly advertised to do; and many completely skeptical users may acquire and use
these commodities, thus ensuring their ongoing reproduction, out of a desire to be fashion-
able, because it is required by some authority, out of desperation because there are no
other options, and so on.
So we are stuck. Fitness in biology ties reproduction to capacities the individual organ-
ism actually exercises, and to which the successful performances of its various organs and
traits actually contribute. But in material culture reproduction is only sometimes contin-
gent on capacities the individual artifact actually exercises. It may also be contingent, in
whole or in part, on what human beings do with that artifact, regardless of its actual
capacities, and even regardless of what those human beings believe about its capacities.
In other words, human agents may—and not infrequently do—use an artifact as if it had
certain capacities, even though it does not have them, and sometimes even though they
do not believe it does. We are forced to conclude that there is no good analogue of fi tness
for material culture. In particular, successful performance is not closely tied to reproduc-
tive success in material culture as it is in biology. So contribution to successful perfor-
mance does not pick out the proper functions of artifacts or their components, although it
may well pick out the proper functions of biological traits.
So what does pick out proper functions in material culture? On the basis of our investi-
gations so far, it seems that proper functions in material culture can be identifi ed only by
looking at patterns of actual use and how they affect reproduction. So in conclusion we
may revise our formula once again to refl ect this direction of investigation, if not the
precise details that will be available only once the investigation has actually been carried
out. Provisionally, then,
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 contributes to the explanation of historically
attested, dominant patterns of use to which past tokens of this type of artifact have been
put, and which thereby contributed to the reproduction of such artifacts.
One fi nal note: alert readers have probably noticed that this way of picking out the proper
functions of artifacts does not provide any account of the functions of novel prototypes,
which have no history of use and reproduction. Novel prototypes, in short, have no proper
functions on this view. They may well have another sort of function—known variously as