Against artifactual epistemic privilege.
| Autor | Verdejo, Víctor M. |
| Cargo | Artículo en Inglés |
According to a standard, baseline definition (e.g. Baker 2004; Dipert 1995; Hilpinen 2008; Thomasson 2007), artifacts are objects intentionally made or produced for a certain purpose. If artifacts are so intentionally made, it is only to be expected that artifact creators, whether they are creators of a new artifact or reproducers of an extant kind of artifact, must possess the requisite intentions. Indeed, it is certainly plausible that the very existence of genuine artifacts requires that there are (or there were) authors of them with the appropriate intentions. Standard intuitions therefore provide support to the following requirement for genuine artifactuality. For any object O, and author A, Authorship (A):
(A)
If O is a genuine artifact, then there is an A who has (or has had) the intention to create something of the O-sort.
The converse of (A) is patently not true. That there is an A who has (or has had) the intention to create something of the O-sort is not a sufficient condition for O to be a genuine artifact. At a minimum, the process by which A realizes his or her intention to create O must be satisfactorily accomplished. Nonetheless, it is hard to undermine the idea that (A) expresses a necessary requirement for artifactuality. Here I wish to join the philosophical consensus in taking (A) to constitute such a necessary condition. (12) However, I will be defending that a natural epistemological interpretation of this requirement is patently mistaken.
(A) demands creative intentions regarding O for A, if O is a genuine artifact. But that is only possible if A fulfils whatever conditions are required for a subject to have the required intentions. Among such conditions one finds, no doubt, the conditions for having the concept of an O-sort of thing. Obviously, one has no intentions about things one cannot think about. And thinking about O requires that one possesses or has the target O-concept. The notion of concept possession at hand is of a theoretically neutral sort and just refers to the capacity to think of Os or of whatever falls under the concept of O (cf. Fodor 1998, 2004; Davis 2005). It follows from this that (A) entails Possession (P) for any author A and object O:
(P)
If O is a genuine artifact, then there is an A who has (or has had) the concept of O.
As it happens, the aforementioned natural interpretation of (A), the one targeted in this paper, goes clearly beyond (P). It is natural to suppose, as some philosophical circles have actually supposed, that (A) leads to a further requirement on the part of the corresponding authors. In particular, these authors, when they are authors of genuine artifacts, must (not only possess the relevant concepts but furthermore) have some sort of epistemic privilege about the artifacts they create. The intuitive idea is that the makers of an X must know in a privileged and authoritative way what Xs are. After all, it really does seem plausible that authors of Xs must have a special knowledge about what they are doing when making an X. Otherwise, who would? In a more philosophically precise vein, the idea is that concepts that authors exhibit in their creative intentions must be largely correct concepts of the relevant artifacts. (3) In fact, this is a usual tenet in the philosophical reflection on artifacts. It is closely related to the thesis that creative intentions determine artifact individuation (e.g. Hilpinen 1992; Bloom 1996). But it is Amie Thomasson (2003, 2007) who has provided the most explicit statements of the view. For ease of exposition, I will focus on Thomasson's developments. In her 2003 paper, Thomasson distinguishes strict artifactual kinds and loose artifactual kinds, depending on whether artifacts are allowed or not to undergo great changes over a period of historical development. Even for loose artifactual kinds, Thomasson contends that "if a[n artifact of kind] K exists, there cannot be universal ignorance of K-relevant features; someone (at least the maker) must have a substantive concept of Ks, and that thing must largely fulfill that concept" (Thomasson 2003, p. 602). The concept that figures in the maker's intention to produce an artifact of kind K must therefore be a "substantive (and substantively correct) concept of what a K is" (Thomasson 2007, p. 59). As a consequence of this tight relation between artifacts and substantively correct concepts of them, certain forms of epistemic privilege and immunity follow.
Thus the sense in which these artifacts and artifactual kinds are human creations does have important consequences for their metaphysics, and for our epistemic relation to them--consequences that mark them as importantly different from the objects and kinds of the natural sciences. In the former but not the latter case, the mere existence of objects of that kind entails that there is substantive knowledge of the kind's nature: their existence is not independent of human knowledge of them. And makers of artifacts are (as such) guaranteed certain forms of immunity from massive error about the objects of their creation, whereas scientists are not guaranteed a similar freedom from error about their objects of study. (Thomasson 2007, pp. 63-64)
As we will see in short, Thomasson might have been clearer than she actually has been about what it means to have a "substantive" or "substantively correct" concept (4) of (and hence epistemic privilege about) an artifact or artifactual kind. As in many other cases of philosophical scrutiny, there is an ambiguity here between a strong and a weak reading. However, at the end of the path that I propose to follow the difference between a weak and a strong reading of Thomasson's position will not really matter. In particular, I will be arguing that, in spite of its intuitive plausibility, not even the weak reading of Thomasson's view can be sustained. At least not if one gives any credence to an anti-individualistic view about concept possession, one that is the common philosophical ground at least since Burge's (1979) seminal contribution. More precisely, I will be defending that, if one accepts that what concepts subjects have is, at least in part, a matter of the relations that these subjects bear to their (physical or social) environment, then the thesis that authors of artifacts have a privileged knowledge about the objects they create is either false, or, as one says, an explanatorily idle label. This is so even if, as (A) conveys, authors of artifacts must have the concept of the objects they create. Let us now make fully explicit what kind of epistemic privilege will be assessed in this paper.
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Artifactual Epistemic Privilege
I have said that Thomasson's considerations may be interpreted as involving either a strong claim or a weak claim about the substantive (or substantively correct) character of the concepts of makers of artifacts. In particular, the substantive character of the concepts in question may amount to the subject's possessing knowledge that either:
1) is definitive of the specific features relevant to being an artifact (of a certain kind),
or
2) is definitive of the general sorts of features relevant to being an artifact (of a certain kind).
The expression "being definitive of' is Thomasson's own (cf. Thomasson 2007). I will be assuming that "being definitive of" can be substituted by "being determinative of' and hence, simply by "determining". Following this interpretation, to say that a substantive concept (that a subject has) is definitive of the specific features or sorts of features of the target artifactual objects is simply to say that it involves knowledge that (fully) determines such specific features or sorts of features of artifactual objects. Now, Thomasson is clearly ambiguous between 1) and 2). Sometimes she seems to be concerned with a defense of epistemic privilege along the lines of 1), according to which, the "[...] makers' concepts must be definitive of the specific features relevant to membership in artifact kinds' (Thomasson 2007, p. 60). At some other points, she seems to hold the weaker claim 2) and hence the thesis that the author of an artifact "must have a substantive idea of what sort of a thing it is she intends to create (say a K)" (Thomasson 2007, p. 60). This may raise some exegetical problems but we can put them aside for present purposes. I will focus the discussion to follow on 2). I shall argue that, if anti-individualism is correct, the kind of knowledge required for artifactuality does not accord with 2). Since I will be assuming that a substantial version of anti-individualism is true, the advanced line of reasoning runs to the conclusion that we should give up on the thesis of the epistemic privilege of artifact makers. And since 2) is clearly weaker than 1), the presumption shall be that the thesis of epistemic privilege must be abandoned on either reading.
For present purposes, I will be assuming the truth of anti-individualism as a thesis about concept or thought possession without providing or articulating the general theory that underlies or undergirds such a thesis.5 We may state the target thesis as follows, for any subject S:
(AI)
What concepts S has is (at least in part) a matter of what relations S bears to the (social or physical) environment.
(AI) is, it must fairly be noted, not free of controversy. However, one version or other of (AI) is the received view in much of the current philosophical developments about the mental. These include accounts of self-knowledge (Burge 1988; Brown 2000, 2004), perception and representation (Burge 2010; Silins 2012), collective or cooperative cognition (Heal 2013), testimony (Goldberg 2007, 2009) or computationalism (Rescorla 2013), among others. This is why the analysis of (AI) and the consequences it has in relation to the alleged epistemic privilege of authors is important and interesting in its own right, whether or not we ultimately come up with a theory...
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