Portraits as displays

Cynthia Freeland’s investigation of four kinds of ‘fidelity’ in portraiture is cut across by more general philosophical concerns. One is about what might be called the expression of persons--the persons or ‘inner selves’ of portrait subjects and of portrait artist: whether either is possible across each of the four kinds of fidelity, and whether these two kinds of expression are in tension. More fundamental is the problem of telling how self-expression is at all possible in any of these forms. Finally, she wonders how photography affects all these questions. This comment addresses portraiture not so much in terms of the four fidelities, but with another quartet of concepts: four ordinary types of ‘display’, in terms of which we see how artists’ self-expression is possible in all these forms, also including photography. Its key idea is that portraits are displays simply by being pictures or sculptures, which are kinds of artifacts, hence things that we perceive as having intentional affordance: that is, as being intentionally made ‘for’ something.

Functions and Health at the Interface of Biology and Technology

Synthetic biology promises to eliminate the distinction between biology and engineering by delivering a philosophically interesting new kind of entity: a biological organism that is wholly designed and constructed by humans. The possibility of such organisms raises interesting questions in three domains: the analysis of (1) biological functions, (2) engineering functions, and (3) health and disease. This paper identifies and systematically answers these questions. This does not only establish how we should think about functions and health and disease in synthetic biological organisms, but it also reveals insights that are of broader relevance: (1) aetiological accounts of biological function need to omit or reinterpret reference to natural selection. This results in complete continuity between aetiological analyses of function in engineering and philosophy; (2) considering synthetic biology prompts interesting further questions about heritability, ancestry, and biological individuals; and (3) accounts of disease as biological dysfunction do not straightforwardly map onto our intuitive health and disease judgments regarding non-human animals. In response to the latter point I examine three possible avenues, and tentatively defend one on behalf of the ‘disease as dysfunction’ theorist.     

Was it designed to do that? Children's focus on intended function in their conceptualization of artifacts

Do young children who seek the conceptual kind of an artifact weigh the plausibility that a current function constitutes the function intended by the object designer? Three- and four-year-olds were encouraged to question adults about novel artifacts. After inquiring about what an object was, some children were shown a function that plausibly accounted for the structural features of the object; others were shown a possible, but implausible function. Children given implausible functions were less satisfied with these responses than those given plausible functions, as shown by their more persistent attempts to ask follow-up questions about function. Accordingly, preschoolers appear to take into account matters of intentional design when assigning artifacts to conceptual kinds.     

Time to get a new mountain? The role of function in children's conceptions of natural kinds

Prior research indicates that young children are promiscuously teleological, attributing purpose not only to artifacts, but also to living and non-living natural entities. This study further examines the role of function in children's reasoning about different object kinds by indirectly probing children's intuitions about what types of entities can be rendered functionless. Specifically, children were asked to decide whether entities that could no longer perform certain activities should be fixed/replaced (e.g. "Do you need to get a new one?"). Results reveal that young children broadly view both artificial and natural kinds that can no longer perform certain activities as needing to be fixed or replaced. These findings suggest that the teleo-functional bias not only influences children's explanatory preferences but also their category judgments.     

The intuitive concept of art

A great deal of work in analytic philosophy of art is related to defining what counts as art. So far, cognitive approaches to art have almost entirely ignored this literature. In this paper, I discuss the role of intuition in analytic philosophy of art to show how an empirical research program on art could take advantage of existing work in analytic philosophy. I suggest that the first step of this research program should be to understand how people intuitively categorize something as art. Drawing on results from cognitive science and analytic philosophy, I show that the intuitive categorization of an artifact as art rests on the intentions attributed (frequently implicitly) to the creator of the artifact based both on its appearance and on background knowledge. I discuss how the issue of categorization is related to other empirical issues concerning our relationship to works of art, such as perception, appreciation, interpretation, and evaluation.     

Historical Semantic Chaining and Efficient Communication: The Case of Container Names

Semantic categories in the world's languages often reflect a historical process of chaining: A name for one referent is extended to a conceptually related referent, and from there on to other referents, producing a chain of exemplars that all bear the same name. The beginning and end points of such a chain might in principle be rather dissimilar. There is also evidence supporting a contrasting picture: Languages tend to support efficient, informative communication, often through semantic categories in which all exemplars are similar. Here, we explore this tension through computational analyses of existing cross‐language naming and sorting data from the domain of household containers. We find (a) formal evidence for historical semantic chaining, and (b) evidence that systems of categories in this domain nonetheless support near‐optimally efficient communication. Our results demonstrate that semantic chaining is compatible with efficient communication, and they suggest that chaining may be constrained by the functional need for efficient communication.     

The role of functional information for infant categorization

This report examines whether knowledge about function influences the formation of artifact categories in 11-12- month old infants. Using an object-examination task, a set of artificial stimuli was presented that could either be grouped according to overall similarity or according to similarity in one functionally relevant part. Experiment 1 revealed that infants categorized the objects according to overall similarity but not part similarity under control conditions. Experiment 2 showed that after having seen the experimenter demonstrating the functional use of the critical part, infants later categorized the stimuli according to part similarity. When the same actions were performed without producing any effect, infants failed to categorize according to the critical part. This set of findings suggests that 11-12-month old infants use functional information as a cue to categorization.     

Category essence or essentially pragmatic? Creator's intention in naming and what's really what

Daily experience is filled with objects that have been created by humans to serve specific purposes. For such objects, the very act of creation may be a key element of how people understand them. But exactly how does creator's intention matter? We evaluated its contribution to two forms of categorization: the name selected for an artifact, and intuitions about what an artifact "really" is. To contrast the possibility that intention serves as an essence (Bloom, P. (1996). Intention, history, and artifact concepts. Cognition, 60, 1-29; Bloom, P. (1998). Theories of artifact categorization. Cognition, 66, 87-93.) determining an artifact's name with the possibility that it matters through its relevance to discourse goals, participants in three experiments read scenarios about people interacting with an artifact and then judged the suitability of different names for it. The intention of the creator was of differing degrees of relevance to the communication, and the relevance of other aspects of the entity varied in a complementary fashion. We found that name selection was altered by the communicative goals of a situation, and name choice was most consistent with creator's intention when the situation made intention relevant to achieving those goals. In a fourth experiment, we used the same scenarios to test the possibility that intention serves as an essence determining intuitions about what an object "really" is. The impact of creator's intention was modulated by the discourse context. These findings suggest that creator's intention influences both name choice and intuitions about what something "really" is by virtue of its impact on how communicative goals are best realized.     

Domain effects in lexical development: learning words for foods and toys

We investigated 3-year-olds’ and adults’ use of domain cues in learning words for solid and nonsolid material entities. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants heard a novel neutral noun (e.g., “my X”) for a standard solid or nonsolid entity described as either a toy or a food. They then were asked to extend the word to one of two other entities. Both options matched the standard in solidity; but one differed from it in an object-relevant property (shape) and the other in a substance-relevant property (color, texture, or smell). Both children and adults were more likely to select the same-shaped entity if the standard was (1) solid than if it was nonsolid, and (2) described as a toy than if it was described as a food. Their interpretations of novel words for material entities were thus affected not only by perceptual information (about solidity) but also by conceptual information (about domain). In Experiment 3, the novel noun was presented in a syntactic context that suggested the solid entity should be interpreted as an object (e.g., “an X”) and that the nonsolid entity should be interpreted as a substance (e.g., “some X”). For adults, these changes largely eliminated the effect of the entity’s domain (toy, food) on interpretation. We interpret these findings in terms of the proposal that domain cues, like solidity cues, furnish information about whether an entity’s structure should be thought of as arbitrary or nonarbitrary and, hence, about whether a word should be interpreted as naming an object or a substance construal.