Publications
“Why Be Realists About Artifact Kinds?” Acta Analytica (2025): DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-025-00659-x.
“What Makes a Kind an Artifact Kind?” Synthese vol. 205 no. 66 (2025): DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-025-04914-x.
“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 social powers of artifacts
Much discussion about social power has occurred in the social ontology literature and it is usually attributed to agents or larger structural systems in which they act. Increasingly metaphysicians are recognizing the social nature of artifacts and technology. We develop a definition of social power that’s flexible enough to include not just agents, but also artifacts. We offer an array of examples of how artifacts have social power and then aim to explain the metaphysical bases of the exercise of artifact social power by developing a tripartite taxonomy of the sources of that power: intended artifactual dispositions, unintended affordances, and social norms. This shows the distinct ways that artifacts can affect social outcomes, behaviours, and power relations, how they sustain larger sociotechnical systems, and how this can bear on attributions of responsibility and questions of justice.
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 role of maintenance and repair practices and their import for the metaphysics of artifacts and technology
Recent work in the philosophy of technology is uncovering the importance of our maintenance and repair practices for how we conceive of, value, and create artifacts, technology, and sociotechnical systems. I aim to show how maintenance and repair practices offer crucial insight for the metaphysics of artifacts and artifact kinds by exploring recent views of artifacts that understand them as distinctly social kinds, governed by social norms and constituted by their associated social practices. These practices involve norms of maintenance and repair that affect how we conceive of artifact kinds, but changes in other norms governing those kinds in turn affect our norms of maintenance and repair. Thus, norms of maintenance and repair and other artifact norms are involved in feedback loops that determine the nature of the artifact kind. I then show how this has bearing on traditional metaphysical puzzles, including the Ship of Theseus, cases of intermittent existence, and the statue and the clay.
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.
Tim Juvshik 