62 Françoise Longy
different from the peelers she knows, will probably change her thought from “John is using
a new sort of peeler” to “John has cleverly turned a rubber collector into a peeler” if she
receives the information that at present this sort of device is usually bought by people
working in rubber plantations to extract the last coat of rubber and that it is in fact what
the fi rm producing such devices sells them for.
If the peeler’s function really has changed from being an intended function to being a
cultural one, how did this happen? Does an event have the capacity to turn an intended
function into a cultural one? Does competition, for instance, produce such a transforma-
tion? Let us suppose that at some point a new fi rm launched new peelers on the market,
for example, cheaper peelers, peelers with colored handles, or peelers with a better con-
nection between the blade and the handle. Let us furthermore suppose that the competition
between the two fi rms resulted in the closing down of one of them. What we get then is
a typical case of selection in which one of two variants wins. So SEL can apply.^13 From
this time onward, then, the peeling function of the peelers should be analyzed as a cultur-
ally established function. However, the idea of an event switching the nature of the func-
tion is problematic for the same reason that we have already seen: far away history does
not seem to matter. Whether or not such episodes have really occurred has no effect on
the fact that, nowadays anyhow, such devices have the culturally established function of
being peelers. The only thing that seems to matter is the existence now and in the very
recent past of a diffused and stable association between this type of object and a typical
use.
Since there seems to be no particular historical event with the role of marking the fron-
tier between intended functions and culturally established ones, the transition from the
former to the latter (supposing there is one) should be gradual. In between the end marked
“intended” and the end marked “culturally established,” there should be a gray zone, pos-
sibly a large gray zone, where the intended mixes with or fades into the culturally estab-
lished. Independent of whether this idea of a gray zone makes sense or not, it goes against
the very idea of a clear-cut distinction between these two sorts of functions, and hence
against the idea of separating functions into two distinct categories along these lines.^14 Our
investigation into the historical development of a function has thus led us to the following
negative conclusion: if indeed artifacts had fi rst an intended function when they leave the
hands of their designers and then later on a culturally established one, it would not be
possible to distinguish one from another.
4.5 The Invention Period
There is at least one situation, that of invention, where it seems possible to escape the
problem of mixed functions. A function attributed to something that is still in the making
cannot, it would seem, refer to something other than a mental content, that is, to the imag-