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  1. Two Conceptions of Technical Malfunction.Bjørn Jespersen & Massimiliano Carrara - 2011 - Theoria 77 (2):117-138.
    The topic of this paper is the notion of technical (as opposed to biological) malfunction. It is shown how to form the property being a malfunctioning F from the property F and the property modifier malfunctioning (a mapping taking a property to a property). We present two interpretations of malfunctioning. Both interpretations agree that a malfunctioning F lacks the dispositional property of functioning as an F. However, its subsective interpretation entails that malfunctioning Fs are Fs, whereas its privative interpretation entails (...)
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  • Money, recognition, and the outer limits of obliviousness.Aaron James - 2023 - Synthese 202 (2):1-24.
    Does the very existence of money depend in any sense on our “recognition” of it? According to certain functionalist views, no such attitudes are necessary. This paper argues to the contrary for recognition dependence, of a minimal sort. What’s needed in a population is (1) the functional know-how of money use, (2) an ideational structure founded upon people’s thinking about what others are thinking, and (3) wide enough acceptance of a payment or settlement obligation (as expressed, e.g., when someone asks (...)
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  • The case for eliminativism about words.Nick Tasker - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-23.
    Words are ubiquitous and familiar, and the concept of a word features both in common-sense ways of understanding the world, and in more theoretical discourse. Nonetheless, it has been repeatedly argued that there is no such thing as words. In this paper, I will set out a range of arguments for eliminativism about words, and indicate the most promising responses. I begin by considering an eliminativist argument based on the alleged mind-dependency of words, before turning to two challenges arising from (...)
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  • Social Construction and Achieving Reference.Ron Mallon - 2017 - Noûs 51 (1):113-131.
    One influential view is that at least some putatively natural human kinds are actually social constructions, understood as some real kind of thing that is produced or sustained by our social and conceptual practices. Category constructionists share two commitments: they hold that human category terms like “race” and “sex” and “homosexuality” and “perversion” actually refer to constructed categories, and they hold that these categories are widely but mistakenly taken to be natural kinds. But it is far from clear that these (...)
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  • Ontology, Reference, and the Qua Problem: Amie Thomasson on Existence.Andrea Sauchelli - 2013 - Axiomathes 23 (3):543-550.
    I argue that Amie Thomasson’s recent theory of the methodology to be applied to find the truth-conditions for claims of existence faces serious objections. Her account is based on Devitt and Sterelny’s solution to the qua problem for theories of reference fixing; however, such a solution cannot be also applied to analyze existential claims.
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  • The Constitution of Virtual Objects.Guillaume Bucchioni & Alexandre Declos - forthcoming - Dialogue:1-21.
    Résumé David Chalmers maintient que la réalité virtuelle est une véritable réalité. Une version de ce « réalisme virtuel » affirme que les entités virtuelles dépendent ontologiquement d'entités numériques réelles. Nous explorons ici cette suggestion, en proposant un nouveau modèle pour décrire la dépendance du virtuel à l’égard du numérique. En nous appuyant sur la théorie de la constitution de Lynne Rudder Baker, nous défendons que les objets virtuels sont constitués par des objets numériques, lorsque ceux-ci se trouvent dans certaines (...)
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  • The Mess We Make: On the Metaphysics of Artifact Kinds.Nurbay Irmak - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-17.
    According to natural kind essentialism, there are certain properties essential to natural kinds. A similar view, artifact kind essentialism, is commonly held for artifactual kinds. According to artifact kind essentialism, artifactual kinds have essential properties that determine their conditions of membership. In this paper, I explore and defend the possibility of a nonessentialist alternative for artifactual kind membership.
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  • What makes law law: categorial trends in analytic legal metaphysics.Triantafyllos Gkouvas - 2023 - Jurisprudence 14 (4):480-509.
    Appeals to metaphysics have lately come to ascendancy in analytic legal philosophy. Over the last 20 years or so, a new discourse framework has emerged in analytic legal metaphysics that focusses on the explanatory question of how law is made. By any measure the most influential refinement of this question is to be found in Mark Greenberg's seminal 2004 article How Facts Make Law. This essay tries to exert some pressure on this familiar question by posing the categorial question of (...)
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  • Nunc pro tunc. The Problem of Retroactive Enactments.Giuliano Torrengo - 2018 - Philosophia 46 (1):241-250.
    In this paper, I present a problem for the realist with respect to the institutional sphere, and suggest a solution. Roughly, the problem lies in a contradiction that arises as soon as institutional contexts are allowed to influence the institutional profile of objects and events not only in the present, but also in the past. If such “retroactive enactments” are effective, in order to avoid contradiction the realist seems to have to accept the unpleasant conclusion that institutions can create a (...)
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  • Towards an Institutional Account of the Objectivity, Necessity, and Atemporality of Mathematics.Julian C. Cole - 2013 - Philosophia Mathematica 21 (1):9-36.
    I contend that mathematical domains are freestanding institutional entities that, at least typically, are introduced to serve representational functions. In this paper, I outline an account of institutional reality and a supporting metaontological perspective that clarify the content of this thesis. I also argue that a philosophy of mathematics that has this thesis as its central tenet can account for the objectivity, necessity, and atemporality of mathematics.
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  • A verisimilitudinarian analysis of the Linda paradox.Gustavo Cevolani, Vincenzo Crupi & Roberto Festa - 2012 - VII Conference of the Spanish Society for Logic, Methodology and Philosphy of Science.
    The Linda paradox is a key topic in current debates on the rationality of human reasoning and its limitations. We present a novel analysis of this paradox, based on the notion of verisimilitude as studied in the philosophy of science. The comparison with an alternative analysis based on probabilistic confirmation suggests how to overcome some problems of our account by introducing an adequately defined notion of verisimilitudinarian confirmation.
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  • Undercutting the Idea of Carving Reality.Crawford L. Elder - 2005 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 43 (1):41-59.
    It is widely supposed that, in Hilary Putnam’s phrase, there are no “ready-made objects” (Putnam 1982; cf. Putnam 1981, Ch. 3). Instead the objects we consider real are partly of our own making: we carve them out of the world (or out of experience). The usual reason for supposing this lies in the claim that there are available to us alternative ways of “dividing reality” into objects (to quote the title of Hirsch 1993), ways which would afford us every bit (...)
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  • Are there essential forms in the social domain?Ludger Jansen - 2023 - Ratio 36 (4):306-318.
    Traditionally, nature has often been thought to be structured by essential forms providing the generic features of natural things and thus the foundations for scientific explanations. In contrast, human history and the social domain have been thought to be the realm of ever-changing appearances, where contingency prevails. The paper argues that the existence of essential forms is compatible with the contingent, mind-dependent and historical character of the social world, and that essential forms can also be found in the social domain. (...)
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  • Making Things Collectively.Chaeyoung Paek - forthcoming - Metaphysics 6 (1):1-12.
    In this paper, I examine two different kinds of production processes, mass production and collaborative production. While both production processes intuitively seem like collective actions, the established views about collective action fail to treat them as collective action due to the common issue: the lack of shared intention. As an alternative, I propose the artifactual view of action, according to which collective action is possible even when there is no shared intention among agents. Motivated by Evnine’s (2016) view about action, (...)
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  • Against Social Kind Anti-Realism.Rebecca Mason - forthcoming - Metaphysics 3 (1):55-67.
    The view that social kinds (e.g., money, migrant, marriage) are mind-dependent is a prominent one in the social ontology literature. However, in addition to the claim that social kinds are mind-dependent, it is often asserted that social kinds are not real because they are mind-dependent. Call this view social kind anti-realism. To defend their view, social kind anti-realists must accomplish two tasks. First, they must identify a dependence relation that obtains between social kinds and our mental states. Call this the (...)
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  • Précis of Understanding Institutions.Francesco Guala - 2018 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 48 (6):539-549.
    Understanding Institutions offers a theory that is able to unify the two dominant approaches in the scientific and philosophical literature on institutions. Moreover, using the ‘rules-in-equilibrium’ theory, it tackles several ancient puzzles in the philosophy of social science.
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  • Necessary and Universal Truths about Law?Brian Z. Tamanaha - 2017 - Ratio Juris 30 (1):3-24.
    Prominent analytical jurisprudents assert that a theory of law consists of necessary, universal truths about the nature of law. This often-repeated claim, which has not been systematically established, is critically examined in this essay. I begin with the distinction between natural kinds and social artifacts, drawing on the philosophy of society to show that necessity claims about law require a fundamental reworking of basic understandings of ontology and epistemology, which legal philosophers have not undertaken. I show law is a poor (...)
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  • Law’s Artifactual Nature: How Legal Institutions Generate Normativity.Kenneth M. Ehrenberg - 2015 - In George Pavlakos & Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco (eds.), Reasons and Intentions in Law and Practical Agency. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 247-266.
    I argue that law is best understood as an institutionalized abstract artifact. Using the ideas of John Searle on institutions and Amie Thomasson on artifacts, I show how the law is capable of generating new reasons for action, arguing against recent work by David Enoch who holds that legal reason-giving is ultimately a form of triggering conditional reasons.
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  • Otra vuelta de tuerca sobre Dennett y la hermenéutica artefactual: tensiones y aporías.Diego Lawler & Diego Parente - 2013 - Estudios de Filosofía (Universidad de Antioquia) 47:83-106.
    Este trabajo versa sobre la aplicación a los artefactos técnicos del enfoque filosófico propuesto por Daniel Dennett para elucidar el ámbito de las cosas artificiales. En particular, sugiere dos cosas. Por una parte, que esta aplicación no nos permite entender acabadamente la dimensión normativa que cubre la esfera práctica de nuestra producción y uso de artefactos técnicos. Por otra, que ella promueve un criterio sumamente liberal de la atribución de funciones a los artefactos técnicos que desfigura la idea misma de (...)
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  • A Marriage is an Artefact and not a Walk that We Take Together: An Experimental Study on the Categorization of Artefacts.Corrado Roversi, Anna M. Borghi & Luca Tummolini - 2013 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4 (3):527-542.
    Artefacts are usually understood in contrast with natural kinds and conceived as a unitary kind. Here we propose that there is in fact a variety of artefacts: from the more concrete to the more abstract ones. Moreover, not every artefact is able to fulfil its function thanks to its physical properties: Some artefacts, particularly what we call “institutional” artefacts, are symbolic in nature and require a system of rules to exist and to fulfil their function. Adopting a standard method to (...)
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  • Replies to Critics.Francesco Guala - 2018 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 48 (6):630-645.
    I answer the questions raised by commentators, and clarify what Understanding Institutions tried to achieve.
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  • Institutional Externalism.Giuliano Torrengo - 2017 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 47 (1):67-85.
    Many philosophers regard collective behavior and attitudes as the ground of the whole of social reality. According to this popular view, society is composed basically of collective intentions and cooperative behaviors; this is so both for informal contexts involving small groups and for complex institutional structures. In this article, I challenge this view, and propose an alternative approach, which I term institutional externalism. I argue that institutions are characterized by the tendency to defer to elements that are external to the (...)
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  • Constructivist Set-Theoretic Analysis: An Alternative to Essentialist Social Science.James Mahoney - 2023 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 53 (4):327-366.
    Psychological essentialism is a cognitive bias through which human beings conceive the entities around them as having inner essences and basic natures. Social scientists routinely generate flawed inferences because their methods require the truth of psychological essentialism. This article develops set-theoretic analysis as a scientific-constructivist approach that overcomes the bias of psychological essentialism. With this approach, the “sets” of set-theoretic analysis are mental phenomena that establish boundaries and identify similarities and differences among entities whose natural kind composition is not known. (...)
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  • The Anti-Realist Boogeyman (And How To Avoid Him).Dana Goswick - 2022 - Philosophia 51 (1):189-204.
    I distinguish Local Constructivism (humans play a constitutive role in constructing some of the objects we have epistemic access to) from Global Constructivism (humans play a constitutive role in constructing all of the objects we have epistemic access to). I explicate and clarify Local Constructivism and show how the metaphysical concerns which motivate endorsing Local Constructivism about some objects (e.g. social objects, modal objects) differ from the epistemic and semantic concerns which motive endorsing Global Constructivism. I, then, examine the criticisms (...)
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  • How Does a Theoretical Term Refer?Ataollah Hashemi - 2022 - Axiomathes 32 (6):957-968.
    This paper deals with the question of what the most appropriate semantic theory for theoretical terms would be. Traditionally, in the contemporary literature of philosophy of language, there have been two widely held semantic theories: the descriptivist theory and the causal theory. Comparing theoretical terms with natural kind terms, I attempt to show that the causal theory of reference applies to natural kinds owing to certain ontological and epistemological assumptions of natural kinds realism. I argue that there is no reason (...)
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  • Taking Stock of Engineering Epistemology: Multidisciplinary Perspectives.Vivek Kant & Eric Kerr - 2019 - Philosophy and Technology 32 (4):685-726.
    How engineers know, and act on that knowledge, has a profound impact on society. Consequently, the analysis of engineering knowledge is one of the central challenges for the philosophy of engineering. In this article, we present a thematic multidisciplinary conceptual survey of engineering epistemology and identify key areas of research that are still to be comprehensively investigated. Themes are organized based on a survey of engineering epistemology including research from history, sociology, philosophy, design theory, and engineering itself. Five major interrelated (...)
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  • Can There Be an Artifact Theory of Law?Luka Burazin - 2016 - Ratio Juris 29 (3):385-401.
    The idea that particular legal institutions are artifacts is not new. However, the idea that the “law” or “legal system” is itself an artifact has seldom been directly put forward, due perhaps to the ambiguities surrounding philosophical inquiries into law. Nevertheless, such an idea has recently been invoked more often, though not always developed in detail in terms of what the characterization of the “law” or “legal system” as an artifact entails ontologically, and what consequences, if any, this has for (...)
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  • On collectively assigning features to artifacts.Rodrigo A. Dos S. Gouvea - forthcoming - Filosofia Unisinos:1-12.
    The common notion of artifacts characterizes them as the products of successful activities of their makers, guided by intentions that such objects would instantiate certain features, such as their specific functions. Many counterexamples, however, reveal the unsuitability of the common notion. In the face of this acknowledgment, the paper explores the possibility that features of artifacts, and more specifically, the possession of their functions, may arise, at least partially, from collective assignments. In order to achieve the mentioned goal, the paper (...)
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  • Antistructure and the roots of religious experience.Connor Wood - 2020 - Zygon 55 (1):125-156.
    The cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion offer a standard model of religious representations, but no equivalent paradigm for investigating religiously interpreted altered states of consciousness (religious ASCs). Here, I describe a neo‐Durkheimian framework for studying religious ASCs that centralizes social predictive cognition. Within a processual model of ritual, ritual behaviors toggle between reinforcing normative social structures and downplaying them. Specifically, antistructural ritual shifts cognitive focus away from conventional affordances, collective intentionality, and social prediction, and toward physical affordances and behavioral (...)
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  • Abstract and Concrete Products: A Response to Cray.David Friedell - 2017 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 75 (3):292-296.
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  • Pravilo priznanja i nastanak pravnog sustava.Luka Burazin - 2015 - Revus 27:99-114.
    The paper claims that the rule of recognition, given the way it is presented by Hart, cannot be a constitutive rule of any legal system as a whole, but rather a constitutive rule of legal rules as elements of a legal system. Since I take the legal system to be an institutional artifact kind, I claim that, in order to account for a legal system as a whole, at least two further constitutive rules, in addition to the rule of recognition (...)
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  • Artifact Categorization. Trends and Problems.Massimiliano Carrara & Daria Mingardo - 2013 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4 (3):351-373.
    The general question (G) How do we categorize artifacts? can be subject to three different readings: an ontological, an epistemic and a semantic one. According to the ontological reading, asking (G) is equivalent to asking in virtue of what properties, if any, a certain artifact is an instance of some artifact kind: (O) What is it for an artifact a to belong to kind K? According to the epistemic reading, when we ask (G) we are investigating what properties of the (...)
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  • Artifacts, Intentions, and Contraceptives: The Problem with Having a Plan B for Plan B.Philip A. Reed - 2013 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 38 (6):jht051.
    Next SectionIt is commonly proposed that artifacts cannot be understood without reference to human intentions. This fact, I contend, has relevance to the use of artifacts in intentional action. I argue that because artifacts have intentions embedded into them antecedently, when we use artifacts we are sometimes compelled to intend descriptions of our actions that we might, for various reasons, be inclined to believe that we do not intend. I focus this argument to a specific set of artifacts, namely, medical (...)
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