Research

Publications

“On the Social Nature of Artifacts,” Theoria vol. 89 no. 6 (2023): 910-932.

“Artifactualization without Physical Modification,” Res Philosophica, vol. 98 no. 4 (2021): 545-572.

“Artifacts and Mind-Dependence,” Synthese, vol. 199 no. 3-4 (2021): 9313-9336.

“Function Essentialism about Artifacts,” Philosophical Studies, vol. 178 no. 9 (2021): 2943-2964.

“Good ‘Cat’, Bad ‘Act’,” Philosophia, vol. 49 no. 3 (2021): 1007-1019.

“Relativity and the Causal Efficacy of Abstract Objects,” American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 3 (2020): 269-282.

“Abstract Objects, Causal Efficacy, and Causal Exclusion,” Erkenntnis, vol. 83, no. 4 (2018): 805-827.

Public Philosophy, Reviews, etc.

“Review of Dietrich et al, Great Philosophical Objections to Artificial Intelligence: The History and Legacy of the AI Wars” Teaching Philosophy, vol. 46 no. 4 (2023): 579-583.

“AI Exemplifies the Free Rider Problem – Here’s Why That Points to Regulation” The Conversation, May 5, 2023.

“Review of Joshua Mozersky, Time, Language, and Ontology: The World from the B-theoretic Perspective” Dialogue, vol. 55 no. 3 (September, 2016): 574-576. 

Works in Progress/Under Review (*)

Drafts available upon request.

A paper on the reference of artifact kind terms
I defend a hybrid causal-descriptivist version of the reference for artifact kind terms. Reference for artifact kind terms functions analogously to natural kind terms like ‘water’. I defend the standard Kripke-Putnam account by showing that we just need an account of artifact essences, which in turn secures the indexicality and rigidity of artifact kind terms like ‘chair’. I reject arguments from Irene Olivero and Diego Marconi that no such essences can be found. I then rebut hybrid descriptivist challenges in the form of the qua-problem from Amie Thomasson, and argue that while some descriptive content is needed to fix the reference of our kind terms, whether natural or artifactual, it doesn’t involve any analytic entailments between the description associated with the term and its referent.

A paper on the realism/antirealism debate about artifact kinds
I explore the realism/antirealism debate about artifact kinds and the various realist proposals for the essential natures of artifacts and artifact kinds given by Elder, Lowe, Soavi, and Franssen and Kroes, among others. I argue that realist approaches to artifacts are misguided and privilege metaphysical principles over our actual artifact practices resulting in unacceptably revisionary accounts of artifacts and artifact kinds. I argue that the fundamental realist assumptions, in particular about mind-dependence, should be rejected as mind-dependence isn’t metaphysically problematic. Accounts of natural kinds are being inappropriately foisted wholesale onto artifacts, yielding these revisionary and unintuitive accounts. Instead, I propose a different methodological approach that takes our artifact practices as a starting point, including their mind-dependence, and argue that an account of artifacts should be developed from there.

A paper which explores whether there is a principled distinction between artifacts and natural kinds
I defend the idea that natural kinds such as wombats are determined by a fully mind-independent essence, while artifact kinds like coffee pots are essentially the result of human intentional creative activity. Many kinds, such as uranium-235, domesticated animals, and dredged lakes, seem to blur this common distinction, leading many philosophers to doubt the philosophical importance of the kind artifact or to adopt pluralism about artifactuality. I argue that we can maintain a principled distinction between artifacts and natural kinds by making fine-grained modal distinctions between varieties of mind-dependence. I distinguish between accidentally and essentially artifactual kinds: the former may have members which are all artifacts but this isn’t necessary, while the latter necessarily only has artifacts as its members. The cases raised are of accidental artifact kinds – their tokens are often causally dependent on human intentions, but they can occur naturally. We can maintain a principled distinction between natural kinds and artifacts if we restrict the latter to essentially artifactual kinds, yielding a univocal sense of ‘artifact’. As a result, both natural kinds and artifacts have essential natures, but the kind of mind-dependence involved is fundamentally different.

A paper on the nature of artifact kinds
This project gives an account of what distinguishes artifact kinds from each other and what kind any given artifact belongs to. I develop an account of artifact kinds where they are determined by the social norms constituting the associated social practice. In order to illustrate this social practice view, I consider the historical case of chopines – elevated shoes worn by Venetian sex workers during the Renaissance. A social practice, constituted by distinct norms of use, treatment, and regard, arose around chopines and determined what features constituted the kind, who the shoe was for and what its context of use was. Similarly, social practices governing artifact kinds determine what kind any given artifact belongs to. In most cases the intentions of the maker will conform to a norm, but in some cases this may not be clear. This has occurred with jaffa cakes, a British confection consisting of a sponge with orange jam covered in chocolate. There’s no agreement about whether they’re cakes or cookies. Whether jaffa cakes are cakes or cookies is determined by how we treat them, i.e. which social practice they’re subsumed under. Where this isn’t clear we may require formal codifications of our practices, i.e. legislation. If jaffa cakes are cookies, then they’ll be subject to an additional tax on chocolate covered cookies, so what artifact kind they belong to may have important practical consequences. The social practice view thereby has both important theoretical and practical consequences.

Dissertation

A Metaphysics of Artifacts: Essence and Mind-Dependence (UMass Amherst, 2022)

My dissertation explores the nature of artifacts – things like chairs, tables, and pinball machines – and addresses the question of whether there is anything essential to being an artifact and a member of a particular artifact kind. My dissertation offers new arguments against both the anti-essentialist and current essentialist proposals. Roughly put, the view is that artifacts are successful products of an intention to make something with certain features constitutive of an artifact kind. The constitutive features are often functional features, but may include structural, material, aesthetic, historical, or other features. I further explore the ways in which artifacts are mind-dependent and I argue that this dependence is disjunctive. Not only do they depend on the singular intentions of their makers, but they often also depend on social groups or public norms. Thus, there is an important social dimension to being an artifact. I also explore the question of what makes a kind an artifact kind, in what ways artifacts are normative, and how artifact kind terms refer.