The “nature” of an artifact is often equated with its function. Clearly, an artifactual
function must be an extrinsic property. This feature of functions has important implications
on the semantics of artifactual kind terms: it enables us to vindicate that
artifactual kind terms have an externalist semantics. Any alleged externalist theory,
indeed, must show that the referents of the considered terms share a common nature
(i.e., an extrinsic property), whether we know or could possibly ever know…
Read moreThe “nature” of an artifact is often equated with its function. Clearly, an artifactual
function must be an extrinsic property. This feature of functions has important implications
on the semantics of artifactual kind terms: it enables us to vindicate that
artifactual kind terms have an externalist semantics. Any alleged externalist theory,
indeed, must show that the referents of the considered terms share a common nature
(i.e., an extrinsic property), whether we know or could possibly ever know what that
nature is. However, the state of the art shows that function is not enough to represent
such “nature”: function does not exhaustively account for important phenomena that
characterize artifacts and artifactual kinds, nor does it thoroughly define what they
are. Thus, extending the scope of externalism to artifactual kind terms seems doomed
to fail. Pace opposite views, it could even be argued that artifacts are a sub-class of
social kinds. If so, not only social but also artifactual kind terms cannot refer externalistically,
since their referents constitutively depend on human intentions and norms.
Either way, externalism fails to apply to those kinds of terms.