Abstract

The past several decades have seen a frenzy of philosophical focus on artifacts, spawning numerous theories of artifacts. Most proposals understand being an artefact as being a member of a particular artifact kind; to be an artifact is to be a chair or a pencil or a crank shaft or flatbed truck or whatever. Despite the many theories of artifacts, no one has asked what makes a kind an artifact kind, specifically. While the artifact literature has yet to address this issue, the philosophy of art has already been addressing a parallel question about art by asking what kinds are the art kinds, if being an artwork requires belonging to an artkind. Michel Xhignesse has proposed that the artkinds are those kinds governed by the social norms of the art world which constitute an artistic practice. In this paper, I argue that Xhignesse’s answer can be extended to artifacts generally. I argue that artifact kinds like cabinet, cellphone or sedan chair are constituted by the social norms which govern the associated artifact practice. These social norms determine what features are constitutive of the kind, how the kind should be used, treated, and regarded and by whom and in what context. Crucially, these social norms are often arbitrary and always contingent—there’s nothing necessary about the artifact kinds that happen to be at the center of our current artifact practices. I call this the social practice view of artifact kinds. To illustrate the social practice view, I consider two cases. First, the historical case of chopines—elevated shoes associated with Venetian prostitutes during the Renaissance—illustrates how a distinct social practice arose in a particular historical context, simultaneously giving rise to a new kind of shoe constituted by its attendant norms which differentiated the chopine from the similar clog and high heel, and which eventually fell out of fashion. There was nothing necessary about the chopine being a distinct kind of footwear from clogs or high heels. Rather, the kind arose and developed as a result of distinct social practices and in response to various competing social values. Similar considerations hold for all other artifact kinds—e.g. chairs and stools, pens and pencils, laptops and tablets. Second, is the case of Jaffa cakes, a British confection where there’s debate about whether they’re cakes or biscuits because if they’re the latter they will be subject to an additional tax. Here there’s disagreement about the artifact kind a given artifact belongs to because there is heavy overlap between the social norms and concomitant social practices. Where our practices are indeterminate, we are deciding that Jaffa cakes are or are not biscuits, that is, we are stipulating what social practice Jaffa cakes should be subject to. In many cases, an informal answer is sufficient since people will treat them however they want, but sometimes what kind an artifact belongs to requires more formal.