Abstract
A very important practical concern of modern information systems is to make explicit, for the purpose of mutual understanding and interoperability, people’s assumptions about everyday reality. This is one of the reasons behind the emergence of applied ontology as an interdisciplinary area of research, which builds on the powerful tools of formal ontology and the insights of philosophical investigation to provide useful, cognitively transparent and computationally manageable formal models, also known as (computational) ontologies. The importance of such ontologies is increasingly recognised nowadays, as a complement to standard technical documentation, especially in the (collaborative) design, production, maintenance and deployment of complex technical artefacts. Under this perspective, I will focus on an ontological puzzle that is still lively debated. When engineers or technicians speak of technical things and discuss about construction or maintenance problems, they tend to ascribe a genuine ontological status to their ‘creatures’, even if they do not have a physical presence. This seems to be a systematic phenomenon in the case of system components that are temporarily missing or undergo replacement. A technician would, for instance, talk about a cable that connects to a lamp in a smashed headlamp of a car, thus referring to the lamp even if it is not there anymore. This chapter will offer a practitioner-oriented ontological account of such situations, concerning objects playing the role of functional components in larger artefactual systems. I will argue that the way people refer to such objects presupposes a non-standard ontological behaviour, allowing for complete replacement and virtual presence.
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Notes
- 1.
Interestingly, only the pebble I have in my hand can be replaced.
- 2.
By the way, I prefer to call the sortals above artefactual sortals just to convey the information that their instances are somehow assimilated to artefacts, although improperly. So I would rewrite Hilpinen’s statement as follows: ‘Artefactual sortals can be essentially or non-essentially (accidentally) artificial’.
- 3.
Note that what I am denying here is a de re dependence: it is obvious that de dicto, whether or not something is an artefact depends on the existence of a previous authorship event, but such event is not necessary for the de re existence of the thing itself.
- 4.
Not vice versa, since I admit that some physical objects may be constituted by other physical objects that share the same location. Think for example of those children’s toys that can be configured as a starship or a monster or a gun: when the starship disappears, being transformed in a monster, still the toy is there.
- 5.
I arrive therefore at a conclusion similar to Carrara and Vermaas (2009), in the sense that I admit a fine-grained ontology of artefactual types. However, the reason of such fine-grainedness is not due to the fact that objects with the same physical operational principles might have different functions, but simply to the existence of multiple design specifications for the same generic function.
- 6.
As a methodological note, I believe we should acknowledge a primacy of intrinsic properties (as compared to extrinsic ones) to determine ontological categories.
- 7.
At least, this is the typical case. Should a particular paperweight species be predesigned in advance, carefully choosing the desired weight and size, then each stone complying with such design specification would constitute a paperweight.
- 8.
Those who take intentional selection as an essential property of artefacts cannot exploit this minimal view of physical objects to simplify their theory, since intentional selection is clearly contingent for all physical objects, hence the contradiction, which motivates the choice to assume artefacts as constituted by physical objects.
- 9.
Note that the extension of such artefactual roles intersects with the extension of the corresponding kind: the things being actually used as a chair certainly include some artefactual chairs, but not all of them: think of chairs that are never sold and used, and scrapped afterwards.
- 10.
My intuition is that, when something is replaced, something else, namely, a kind of imaginary place, is assumed to exist in addition to the object being replaced in that role. In this sense, conventional system components can be seen as special places, dependent on their host, where something relevant may happen.
- 11.
Of course, the abbreviated expression only works as long as we focus on artefactual systems only. If we consider larger systems that include non-designed components (for instance, an airplane including its passengers), such components may behave differently from the system components we are discussing here. See Franssen and Jespersen (2009) for an account of such situations.
- 12.
If the host artefactual object uses standard components, their specifications might be separate.
- 13.
I am adopting DOLCE’s account of qualities (Borgo and Masolo 2009).
- 14.
I adopt a very opportunistic approach concerning the Ship of Theseus problem: the rules for deciding whether an artefactual object survives certain parts replacement depend on the specific artefactual species and are ultimately a matter of social conventions.
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Acknowledgments
This work has been performed in the framework of the European Marie Curie International Research Staff Exchange project EUJOINT. I would like to thank Stefano Borgo, Emanuele Bottazzi, Maarten Franssen, Yoshinobu Kitamura, Peter Kroes, Riichiro Mizoguchi, Pieter Vermaas and Laure Vieu for their thoughtful comments, their suggestions and the lively discussions. I would like to thank also my partner Rosalba for her patience, understanding and support.
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Guarino, N. (2014). Artefactual Systems, Missing Components and Replaceability. In: Franssen, M., Kroes, P., Reydon, T.A.C., Vermaas, P.E. (eds) Artefact Kinds. Synthese Library, vol 365. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00801-1_11
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