Jesús Vega (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)

Vendredi 19 mai de 11h30 à 13h

Institut Nicod, Pavillon Jardin, ENS, 29, rue d'Ulm 75005 Paris

Jesús Vega
(Dept. Lingüística General, Lógica y Filosofía de la Ciencia, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)

Titre : "Private Artifacts? On the Grammar of the Artifactual Realm"

Résumé :
Theorists about the nature of artifacts often discuss Robinson Crusoe’s case or refined versions of it, pointing to the possibility that an isolated individual create his own artefactual culture. Some of them even suggest that it does make sense to talk about private tools and also perhaps artefacts. My aim in this paper is to characterize what it could be a private artifact and to formulate what I will dub the privacy challenge for a theory of artifacts. The nature of artifacts is dependent on a set of rules or norms: norms of use and norms of production and reproduction. Artifacts share with linguistic expressions a normative dimension that prevents them to be private. I will argue that characteristically artifacts work as props for sharing intentionality and this very fact grounds the normative features of artifacts. Recognizing this role of artifacts helps us to address along wittgensteinian lines some issues about their categorization, about their relational and holistic nature, about their normativity and about their sociality.