Response and Essay
RESPONSE#01
I agree with the writer of this post that things which are deniable cannot be considered as genuine substance. This post gives a comparison between artifact and genuine substance arguments made by Wiggins and Baker. Wiggins claims that artifacts and genuine substances are two different things, whereas Baker argues that they are the same things. One example mentioned in this post is of Wiggins, where he said that artifacts are man-made and genuine substances are natural things, Baker in response, said that humans are natural so what they made are, in a sense, natural too. The writer of the post agrees with Wiggins by giving the example of a plastic that, although it is made by humans, there is a no internal activity of plastic, and it is defined by humans. Further, it should not be repudiated for a thing to be natural, but plastic is as it causes severe climate changes.
RESPONSE # 4
The writer of this post is strongly in favor of David Wiggins, and so am I; the argument that is given by Baker is that human beings are natural, so things made by them are natural too; this statement of Baker makes no sense to me, it is also mentioned in the post that there are many things which are present in the world and would not exist if human beings did not make them. We cannot characterize all those things as natural substances; for example, if we talk about computers, we cannot characterize computers as a natural substance as it has no to zero internal activity. They need human beings for inputs, and then they can process. This contradicts the argument given by Baker. I strongly agree with the writer’s statement that for things to be natural, they should not need some other activity to exist.
ESSAY:
This essay is based on a discussion about Lynne Rudder Baker’s paper “The Ontology of Artifacts.” Artifacts are things made for a certain purpose like a clock etc. (Baker, 2004). Artifacts are opposite to natural things like trees etc., and are generally considered ontologically deficient by philosophers, but Baker claims that “without artifacts, there would be no recognizable human life.” In this paper, Baker opposed certain theories on the ontological status of artifacts; she proposed a theory of artifact, she defended the ontological status and claimed that “constitution” is not the identity of artifacts. She pointed out that every object has its primary kind or essence, and the constitution is the relation between different primary kinds, and she proposed the relationship of unity. Baker discussed five distinguishing points between natural substances and artifacts which come from the work of David Wiggins. (Baker, 2004) She counteracts all the points from Wiggins’s work; for every point, she had strong opposing points but for the fifth point, her argument did not make sense and raised many questions about her approach. Baker also rejected the “mind dependent and mind independent theory.” According to Baker, on a constitutional level, artifacts and natural objects have ontological status.
The artifacts are not deficient, but the aggregates that form artifacts are deficient. Baker then also said that aggregates like artifacts have primary properties, yet they are not ontologically significant, which is problematic. Baker gave requirements that it takes to be adequate for an artifact to be a thing. A necessary condition for x is a condition that a thing must fulfil to be an x; meeting the condition may not be enough to be x. There could be loads of conditions needed. A sufficient condition for being x is a condition which ensures that a thing is x; there could be other circumstances that a thing may also have in order to be an x, so just concentrating on a sufficient condition may leave out any essential condition to be an x.
An example could be of a medicine; the purpose of making a medicine is the treatment of a specific disease; the things necessary for medicine production are the excipients. Still, they alone are not enough for the production; the sufficient production conditions include machines and experts. To enable the production. Both conditions are essential to be known to know all the things that must be present for a thing to exist. (Baker, 2004)
REFERENCES
Lynne Rudder Baker (2004) The ontology of artifacts, Philosophical Explorations, 7:2, 99-111, DOI: 10.1080/13869790410001694462