Artifacts and Their Functions

Eaton, Anthony

doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199341764.013.26

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Others argue that the function is determined by what the artifact is optimally suited for (Dennett 1990). Yet others think that it is determined by what the artifact type has been selected for (Eaton 2020). Regardless of the interpretation, artifact hermeneuticians stress analyzing artifacts' appearances for clues to their general purpose (say, to hold liquids or solids, to be used for cutting or stabbing, as a garment, as a blanket, and so on).…”

Section: Universal Style and Instrumental Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Visual style hermeneutics: from style to context

Stejskal

2021

World Art

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This essay re-examines the once promising idea that style analysis can provide an independent source of insight into an artifact's non-stylistic context. The essay makes explicit the consequences of treating collective style as such a source in archaeology and anthropology of art, and further develops a new framing for the idea that avoids the criticisms largely responsible for the decline in theoretical interest in the epistemic import of visual style analysis since World War II. This re-framing proposes that inference from style to context is permissible on those occasions when a collective style signals by its morphology its suitability to serve a certain function. And it does so because it prescribes publicly certain modes of behavior or spectatorship. Furthermore, the public nature of the signaling may be such that it allows even uninitiated spectators to get a sense of it and thus to gain access to some of the motivations and norms informing the collective's form of life.

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Section: Universal Style and Instrumental Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Visual style hermeneutics: from style to context

Stejskal

2021

World Art

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“…Re-use transparency may not have been originally set up as for surveillance, but it functions as surveillance.31 The harm here comes from the fact that some distant, uncharitable observer is watching you and 30 I take this definition from Kevin Macanish's survey of surveillance ethics(Macanish, 2020). I am not distinguishing, as some have, between surveillance as attention from powerful entities above, versus sousveillance as attention from the people below(Thomsen, 2019).31 For a very useful discussion of how the function of an artifact can differ from its creators' intent, seeEaton (2020).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Transparency is Surveillance

Nguyen

2021

Philos Phenomenol Research

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In her BBC Reith Lectures on Trust, Onora O'Neill offers a short, but biting, criticism of transparency. People think that trust and transparency go together but in reality, says O'Neill, they are deeply opposed. Transparency forces people to conceal their actual reasons for action and invent different ones for public consumption. Transparency forces deception. I work out the details of her argument and worsen her conclusion. I focus on public transparency -that is, transparency to the public over expert domains. I offer two versions of the criticism. First, the epistemic intrusion argument: The drive to transparency forces experts to explain their reasoning to non-experts. But expert reasons are, by their nature, often inaccessible to nonexperts. So the demand for transparency can pressure experts to act only in those ways for which they can offer public justification. Second, the intimate reasons argument: In many cases of practical deliberation, the relevant reasons are intimate to a community and not easily explicable to those who lack a particular shared background. The demand for transparency, then, pressures community members to abandon the special understanding and sensitivity that arises from their particular experiences. Transparency, it turns out, is a form of surveillance. By forcing reasoning into the explicit and public sphere, transparency roots out corruption -but it also inhibits the full application of expert skill, sensitivity, and subtle shared understandings. The difficulty here arises from the basic fact that human knowledge vastly outstrips any individual's capacities. We all depend on experts, which makes us vulnerable to their biases and corruption. But if we try to wholly secure our trust -if we leash groups of experts to pursuing only the goals and taking only the actions that can be justified to the non-expert public -then we will undermine their expertise. We need both trust and transparency, but they are in essential tension. This is a deep practical dilemma; it admits of no neat resolution, but only painful compromise.In her 2002 BBC Reith Lectures on Trust, Onora O'Neill offers a biting criticism of one of the ethical presumptions of modern life. People think that trust and transparency go together, says O'Neill. And they think that transparency is wholly good. But actually, she says, trust and transparency are deeply opposed.

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“…Unfortunately, addressing these issues in detail would pull us away from our main argument in this paper. But see note 20 for further discussion of "classist things".11 Our claim that a propensity toward particular uses and outcomes is built into these objects should not be read as an assertion about the intentions of a designer, nor should it be understood as a claim about how the object is conventionally used; we take it that claims about the function of an object should be understood as claims about what it has been selected for within a particular cognitive niche (compareDennett, 1990;Eaton, 2020).…”

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confidence: 99%

Oppressive Things*

Liao

Huebner

2020

Philos Phenomenol Research

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This paper is the product of a dynamic system that was initiated with a series of discussions about Shirley cards and other material artifacts of visual culture technologies; Shen-yi Liao was responsible for the initial writing of this paper and many of the specific ways of articulating the ideas that emerged from the initial discussions; Bryce Huebner was involved in multiple stages of planning and multiple rounds of discussion and revision. In addition, the development of ideas in this paper owes much to inputs from anonymous referees

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Artifacts and Their Functions

Cited by 7 publications

References 5 publications

Visual style hermeneutics: from style to context

Visual style hermeneutics: from style to context

Transparency is Surveillance

Oppressive Things*

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