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  1. The ontology of art and knowledge in aesthetics.Amie L. Thomasson - 2005 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63 (3):221–229.
    Amie L. Thomasson; The Ontology of Art and Knowledge in Aesthetics: Thomasson The Ontology of Art and Knowledge in Aesthetics, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art.
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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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  • 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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  • The stability of social categories.Abraham Sesshu Roth - 2021 - European Journal of Philosophy 31 (1):297-309.
    One important thesis Ásta defends in Categories We Live By is that social properties and categories are somehow dependent on our thoughts, attitudes, or practices—that they are inventions of the mind, projected onto the world. Another important aspect of her view is that the social properties are related to certain base properties; an individual is placed in a category when the relevant base properties are thought to hold of them. I see the relationship between the social and the base as (...)
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  • Social Kinds, Social Objects, and Vague Boundaries.Francesco Franda - 2021 - Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Ontology of Social, Legal and Economic Entities (SoLEE).
    In this paper, I argue against what I call “natural realism” about social kinds, the view according to which social categories have natural boundaries, independent of our thought. First, I draw a distinction between two different types of entity realism, one being about the existence of the entity, “ontological realism”, and the other one being about the direct mind-independence of the entity, “natural realism”. After endorsing ontological realism, I present the natural realist argument according to which there would be certain (...)
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  • The Threat of Thinking Things Into Existence.Kathrin Koslicki - 2021 - In Luis R. G. Oliveira and Kevin J. Corcoran (ed.), Commonsense Metaphysics: Essays in Honor of Lynne Rudder Baker. pp. 113-136.
    According to Lynne Rudder Baker, our everyday world is populated, among other things, by what she calls “intention-dependent objects” (“ID objects”), i.e., objects which “could not exist in a world lacking beings with beliefs, desires, and intentions” (Baker (2007), p. 11). Baker’s claim that what exists, at least in part, depends on human activity opens her up to the concern, or so her critics have argued, that new objects and new kinds of objects can apparently be “conjured” into existence, given (...)
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  • Social Objects, Response-Dependence, and Realism.Asya Passinsky - 2020 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 6 (4):431-443.
    There is a widespread sentiment that social objects such as nation-states, borders, and pieces of money are just figments of our collective imagination and not really ‘out there’ in the world. Call this the ‘antirealist intuition’. Eliminativist, reductive materialist, and immaterialist views of social objects can all make sense of the antirealist intuition, in one way or another. But these views face serious difficulties. A promising alternative view is nonreductive materialism. Yet it is unclear whether and how nonreductive materialists can (...)
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  • Some Building Blocks for a Theory of the Firm as a Real Entity.David Gindis - 2007 - In Yuri Biondi, Arnaldo Canziani & Thierry Kirat (eds.), The Firm as an Entity: Implications for Economics, Accounting and the Law. Taylor & Francis. pp. 266-291.
    The firm is a real entity and not an imaginary, fictitious or linguistic entity. This implies that the firm as a whole exhibits a sufficient degree of unity or cohesiveness and is durable and persistent through time. The firm is essentially composed of a particular combination of constituents that are bound together by something that acts as an ontological glue, and is therefore non-reducible to other more basic entities, i.e., to its parts or its members. From our perspective, the firm (...)
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  • Understanding Institutions without Collective Acceptance?Pekka Mäkelä, Raul Hakli & S. M. Amadae - 2018 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 48 (6):608-629.
    Francesco Guala has written an important book proposing a new account of social institutions and criticizing existing ones. We focus on Guala’s critique of collective acceptance theories of institutions, widely discussed in the literature of collective intentionality. Guala argues that at least some of the collective acceptance theories commit their proponents to antinaturalist methodology of social science. What is at stake here is what kind of philosophizing is relevant for the social sciences. We argue that a Searlean version of collective (...)
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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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  • 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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  • 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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  • The Conceptual Elusiveness of Engineering Functions. [REVIEW]Pieter E. Vermaas, Dingmar Eck & Peter Kroes - 2013 - Philosophy and Technology 26 (2):159-185.
    In this paper, we describe the conceptual elusiveness of the notion of function as used in engineering practice. We argue that it should be accepted as an ambiguous notion, and then review philosophical argumentations in which engineering functions occur in order to identify the consequences of this ambiguity. Function is a key notion in engineering, yet is used by engineers systematically in a variety of meanings. First, we demonstrate that this ambiguous use is rational for engineers by considering the role (...)
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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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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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  • Engineering differences between natural, social, and artificial kinds.Eric T. Kerr - 2013 - In Maarten Franssen, Peter Kroes, Pieter Vermaas & Thomas A. C. Reydon (eds.), Artefact Kinds: Ontology and the Human-made World. Cham: Synthese Library.
    My starting point is that discussions in philosophy about the ontology of technical artifacts ought to be informed by classificatory practices in engineering. Hence, the heuristic value of the natural-artificial distinction in engineering counts against arguments which favour abandoning the distinction in metaphysics. In this chapter, I present the philosophical equipment needed to analyse classificatory practices and then present a case study of engineering practice using these theoretical tools. More in particular, I make use of the Collectivist Account of Technical (...)
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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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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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  • Social construction: big-G grounding, small-g realization.Aaron M. Griffith - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (1):241-260.
    The goal of this paper is to make headway on a metaphysics of social construction. In recent work, I’ve argued that social construction should be understood in terms of metaphysical grounding. However, I agree with grounding skeptics like Wilson that bare claims about what grounds what are insufficient for capturing, with fine enough grain, metaphysical dependence structures. To that end, I develop a view on which the social construction of human social kinds is a kind of realization relation. Social kinds, (...)
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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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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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  • Kind Properties and the Metaphysics of Perception: Towards Impure Relationalism.Dan Cavedon-Taylor - 2015 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 96 (4):487-509.
    A central debate in contemporary philosophy of perception is between those who hold that perception is a detection relation of sensory awareness and those who hold that it is representational state akin to belief. Another key debate is between those who claim that we can perceive natural or artifactual kind properties, e.g. ‘being a tomato’, ‘being a doorknob’, etc. and those who hold we cannot. The current consensus is that these debates are entirely unrelated. I argue that this consensus is (...)
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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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  • 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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