ARTIFACTS AS DOMESTICATED KINDS OF PRACTICES
Sergio F. Martínez Muñoz
Abstract of "Artifacts as Domesticated Kinds of Practices".
After briefly reviewing arguments pointing to the impossibility of distinguishing in principle between natural and artifact kinds I suggest that contrary to usual accounts artifact kinds should be characterized independently of natural kinds. Artifacts (or at least a sizable diversity of them) can be characterized in terms of construction behaviors that constitute kinds through processes of domestication of materials and social relations (organized in practices), processes that in turn enter into the constitution of more sophisticated artifacts and social relations.Understanding domestication as niche construction allows for a generalization of the concept of domestication to encompass most (if not all) construction behaviors, and thus, modeling the evolution of construction behaviors is then a way of modeling the most distinctive kinds of artifacts widely accepted as characterizing human (biological and cultural) evolution.
You do not have to classify and label things in order to perceive what they afford.[i]
J. J. Gibson
1.Introduction. The thesis that the kindings that matter to natural science can be characterized as “natural kinds” is widely accepted in philosophy. Several well known characterizations of the issue focus on the metaphysical problem of characterizing natural kinds with the aim of using such metaphysical characterization as a basis for scientific epistemology. (refs) Characterizations of “human” or “social kinds” are usually presented in contrast to natural kinds (refs). In the philosophy of science nowadays, however, several discussions stem from the idea that we have to first characterize natural kinds epistemologically, through the study of actual scientific classifications, and then use the succesful characterization as constraints in our metaphysics. (refs) But if, as can be argued, it is not possible to epistemologically distinguish in principle between natural and artifact kinds, then we should start by characterizing artifactuality as a first step towards a epistemology of kinding.
In section 2 I review arguments pointing to the impossibility of distinguishing in principle between natural and artifact kinds. Thus, the usual philosophical account of artifacts based on this distinction fail. In section 3 I present accounts of artifacts relating them closely with behaviors (and routines). This way of characterizing artifacts in order to be productive has to reject the traditional methodological assumption that cognition and action can be decoupled. In section 4 I point out how this assumption is behind claims that the way in which artifactuality is characterized in different disciplines can be oblivious to the way it is characterized in others. In section 5 I show relevant connections between anthropological theories of material culture and accounts of artifactuality. In section 6, Niche Construction Theory is introduced and advantages of understanding domestication within this framework are pointed out. I suggest that such an account of domestication can be generalized if we give credit to the idea that domestication involves the cultivation of affordances. In particular, traditional accounts of tool use and tool making can be understood as construction behaviors that are domesticated in the processes of conforming to practices through which such behaviors reproduce and diversify. This provides a general characterization of artifactuality that can be used to overcome the duality between cognition and action and should allow for productive comparisons of artifactuality in different disciplines.
2. Artifacts and natural kinds. Artifacts have not caught philosophers’ attention as much as natural kinds have. They have, of course, been a topic in metaphysics, where usually the discussion of artifacts is parasitic on views about natural kinds. A recent collection of essays on artifacts is Creations of the Mind[ii] ; a book which aims to showcase the different ways in which philosophers and scientists deal with the topic of artifacts. For most philosophers, the question of artifacts arises because artifacts are made[iii], and the process of making them involves intentions, thus artifacts are mind dependent, setting them up them in contrast to natural kinds.[iv] The contributions of psychologists and anthropologists in the same book question this duality from different perspectives. Two psychologists (Barbara Malt and Steven Sloman) start their contribution to the anthology with the following sentence: “A sizeable subfield of cognitive psychology is devoted to how humans categorize entities in their world, yet there has been little explicit consideration of what it means to categorize”.[v] The perspective held at an intuitive level by most lay people —they tell us— is that when people see an object, such as a table, they look for the metaphysically real category of objects this particular object belongs to. But if pressed, most psychologists would probably claim to be agnostic about whether or not there are objectively defined metaphysically real groupings of artifacts. Rather, psychologists would be inclined to think that what they mean by ‘artifact kinds’ are psychological kinds. For Malt and Sloman, the central question about artifacts in psychology is the question of judging “which psychologically real, if not metaphysically real, grouping an object belongs to”.[vi]
Malt and Sloman have been involved in a heated debate in cognitive psychology about the nature of categorization. Most often, how an artifact is categorized in psychology means choosing a task and with respect to this task, finding out how a judgment is made about which grouping it belongs to. But not any grouping will do. As Malt and Sloman put it: “An almost universal assumption is that the psychologically real groupings are stable groupings that map directly onto mental representations constituting ‘concepts’...”[vii] They think rather that the relevant groupings depend crucially on the situation at hand. More importantly, they claim that since grouping artifacts can be associated with different activities, it is very important to select the methodologies that are appropriate to the different types of categorization. Categorization, they claim, is not a coherent field of inquiry since it is not possible to draw a sharp line between categorization and pragmatics.Gibson would agree (as the epigraph suggests).
In the same book, Dan Sperber questions from a very different perspective the assumption that one can in principle distinguish between kinds of artifacts and natural kinds[viii]. Sperber provides a series of examples of objects that point to a continuum of artifacts that are made and others that we can say occur naturally. The boundary between what is made and what occurs naturally cannot be located in the nature of things. Sperber gives the example of seedless grapes and bananas as examples supporting the general thesis that domesticated plants and animals have simultaneously biological, cultural, and artifactual functions. In trying to understand how these different functions are related, Sperber argues that the common sense distinction between two different classes of things with respect to the question “What is it for?” should not be the basis for our ontology.
Sperber, Malt and Sloman question the widespread assumption in metaphysics that intentions (by themselves) are crucially relevant to the classification of artifacts by arguing against the idea that classifications in general are independent of the situation or the task. There are other ways of questioning the central role attributed to intentions in the classifications of artifacts. Whose intentions and which productive activities are supposed to determine kind membership? The idea can be thought as unproblematic if one focuses in artisan products, like the chair made by a carpenter. But it is far from obvious what are the intentions in question, and how these intentions relate to the artifact in cases like a car or an airplane. Different intentions enter into the production of different parts, and the different parts can be used in different artifacts. Further more, one can argue that whatever the intentions are, they are not geared to the production of one single exemplar of a car (the car I own, for example), but rather, to the production of kinds of things (cars, trucks, motorcycles) that can travel roads and bridges and so on. In other words, the intention of constructing a car cannot be decoupled from the intention of constructing roads and bridges, nor it can be decoupled from the expectation of travelling these roads.[ix] As Houkes and Vermaas put it, the idea that intentions determine the kind membership of an artifact hardly fits the complex production processes and organized collective efforts of even the most common artifacts nowadays in production.[x] Houkes and Vermaas are promoters of what is called the Dual Nature program for an ontology of artifacts. A technical artifact has a physical nature and a functional nature. A good design provides a good fit between the two natures. Thus, an important task consists of formulating criteria that any satisfactory account of the ontology of artifacts has to satisfy. Such criteria should make clear the different contributions of the two natures in the classification of an artifact.
Promoters of this approach have formulated these criteria in different ways [xi] and there is no doubt that they have advanced our understanding of artifacts in a way that is particularly helpful in engineering.[xii] A crucial advance of such an approach with respect to metaphysical theories of artifacts is the recognition that the issue of classification and kinding are paramount. But to the extent that the dual nature approach relies on “natural kinds” in order to characterize artifact kinds this approach ignores accounts of artifactuality that cannot be characterized as decomposable in terms of “natures”. Decomposing in terms of natures is not always feasible or desirable (as the work of Malt and Sloman and Sperber exemplifies and as we see from a different perspective below).
3. What is an artifact (beyond metaphysics)? The first issue of the journal Artifact appeared in 2007. It included articles by authors invited to answer the question “what is an artifact?” from different disciplinary perspectives. Owen F. Smith says in his contribution that, through the lens of his background as anthropologist, art historian and new media professor, he can see that the term artifact is understood in different ways, but he suggests that the most general way of understanding artifacts requires characterizing them as “change agents”. He quotes Carroll[xiii] who talks of artifacts as “support for a task that can radically redefine the task” for which the artifact was originally developed.
Ken Friedman in his contribution to the same issue emphasizes the behavioral dimension of artifacts (implicit in Owen´s characterization of artifact).[xiv] Physical artifacts —he says— have a behavioral dimension characterized in terms of affordances and interfaces that are effectuated in practices. Practices for Friedman can be either of two related things: i) ways in which we organize our working habits and living patterns around the artifacts we use,[xv] and ii) behavioral artifacts identifiable as the result of expertise (in the sense that “an expert physician practices medicine or a lawyer argues law”.)[xvi] From this perspective paths between buildings, organizational structures, organizational memory, the behaviors of actors that constitute the reality of a performance, but also the craft of an artisan or a scientist are behavioral artifacts constrained and articulated by practices.
This behavioral dimension of artifacts was also important in early evolutionary economy and institutional economics. Artifacts were thought to play a a crucial role in the classification of routines. Routines were introduced and discussed in Nelson and Winter as fixed patterns of behaviors or actions, but the relation to artifacts, even if recognized, was not assimilated into the theoretical (evolutionary) model of change. This led to a dismissal of the role of artifacts and its role in the characterization of routines. More recently it has been increasingly recognized that the notion of artifact cannot be dismissed. There have been several attemps to bring artifacts back into the discussion about routines. D’Adderio, for example, suggests that artifacts and “artifactual representations” have to be brought to the forefront of the routines debate.[xvii] As Cohen points out, one important presupposition that has to be removed in order for the notion of routine to be more productive in explanations is the assumption that cognition and action can be decoupled, and thus, that routines cannot be modeled as simply automatic or non-intelligent patterns of behavior. Cohen suggests that in order to overcome the immense theoretical inertia of the concept of routine we should do better to focus on the Deweyan notion of habit.[xviii]
I fully agree with this suggestion, but instead of using the notion of habit we can use a concept of practice (as Friedman does) that allows us not only to talk of habits (in Dewey’s sense) as part and parcel of collective enterprises, but that also allows us to talk of the complex web of (behavioral) artifacts that constitute scientific enterprises (laboratories, mathematical theories, and so on). What is crucial is avoiding the split between cognition and action, a distinctive feature of the traditional concept of routine. [xix]
Focusing on practices as the articulation of (behavioral) artifacts also allows us to incorporate artifacts into an evolutionary model of change. This is not a topic I can enter here; I just want to point out that (behavioral) artifacts can be seen as products of the evolution of the human lineage as well as culturally evolving in historical time. As Sterelny puts it (but with my terminology), there is a coevolution of the cognitive capacities involved in the classification of behavioral artifacts and their environments.[xx][xxi]
As we shall see, this close relationship between practices, artifacts and behaviors is also a key component of non-dualistic approaches to our understanding of artifactuality in psychology and the social sciences.
4. Back to metaphysics: on the duality of natural kinds and artifacts. There is no doubt that western scientific thinking, since the scientific revolution at least, has used as a point of departure for framing methodological questions an opposition between two kinds of things, passive, material or physical things that constitute and external world (subject to natural laws) on the one hand, and agents having the capacity to shape the material things following plans. Such opposition has played an important role in the organization of scientific inquiry. For example, the belief in a passive material world allowed the drawing of a sharp line between the way in which anthropology studies artifacts and the way in which psychology studies them. Psychologists study phenomena at a level of abstraction that allows such phenomena to be detached from the (cultural) context in which they take place. Such an assumption leads to a division of labor in which anthropology describes the content of human experience while psychology aim to characterize the processes that interpret such experience.[xxii] Many critics have pointed out such methodological divide. Even in 1981 Coleworried about this divide and pointed out the important role that the divide had played in the framing of questions and development of both disciplines.[xxiii] Of course there are many different characterizations of such methodological divide.; but there is no doubt that as Jean Lave puts it in 1988 the source of the divide is a a positivistic epistemology.[xxiv]
The important point is that, once this separation between passive matter and active (human) agents is accepted, the opposition between natural kinds and artifacts as mind-dependent follows. The separation also justifies thinking of artifacts in psychology in a way that does not need to be contrasted or compared to the way artifacts are modeled (theorized about) in anthropology (or in other social sciences). The pre-supposition is generalizable for claims supporting the view that how we think of artifactuality in each scientific discipline has to be decided by each discipline (implicitly) through the choice of methods appropriate to the discipline. The assumption also leads us to think of artifacts as classifiable in terms of parts and functions, and abstract from the context or kind of expertise that is associated with them.
5. Artifactuality as material culture. Taking on board the opposition between passive artifacts and natural kinds leads to views in Anthropology like that of Gordon Childe. Childe thought that anthropologists should not attempt to reconstruct past cultures from the evidence of remains of those cultures. They should rather look for objective knowledge of the past, and thus all efforts should be directed to constructing bridges that lead from such passive artifacts to a theory of the past. Such bridges should include at crucial junctures universal laws that would allow to draw conclusions or to test out the theories in question.[xxv] Towards the third part of the twentieth century there were several important lines of inquiry trying to overcome such a methodological framework through reevaluations of materiality designed to question (in different ways) the idea that materiality is just a passive recipient of human agency. Overcoming the dichotomy, however, is not easy.
Tim Ingold has claimed that most of these approaches aiming to overcome the dichotomy between passive matter and agency fail since they continue to think in terms of incorporeal minds entering into contact with a material world. In a special issue of the journal Archaeological Dialogues, Ingold[xxvi] summarizes his critique of current studies on material culture. The very notion of material culture —says Ingold— takes things to be the embodiment of mental representations, static solidified objects taken out from the “generative flux of the medium” that gave birth to them. For Ingold, material cultural studies tend to assume that all that is material resides in physical things. In this issue of Archaeological Dialogs several anthropologists respond to Ingold’s challenge.
In his response to Ingold, Tilley[xxvii]suggests thatIngold does not distinguish between “brute” materials and their properties on the one hand, and the concept of materiality that embraces subject-object relations on the other.. Anthropologists, as opposed to geologists —says Tilley—, are concerned with what stones mean. All materials have their properties but only some of these materials and their properties are significant to people. Tilley complains that Ingold does not consider the manner in which materials affect people’s lives and suggests that Ingold is falling in the old trap of a simplistic empiricism that considers artifacts in and for, and only in terms of, themselves.