Against intentionalism: a reappraisal of artefactual metaphysics, with an eye to weaponry

Abstract

It is commonplace to talk of weapons being ‘misused’ in certain contexts. We might say that whenever a policeman uses a Taser on a struggling suspect to force compliance that he has ‘misused’ his weapon. This might be justified by reference to the intention of a designer, who wished the Taser to be a purely defensive weapon. What is of note is that such a claim is predicated on the acceptance on a prior metaphysical outlook: that in order to determine the nature of a weapon, or any artefact whatsoever, we must turn to the intentions of the designer. This is emblematic of intentionalism, the metaphysical outlook that artefact kinds are determined by reference to the intention of the designer. Intentionalism represents the default view within contemporary analytic philosophers of technology. I intend to provide an account that undermines this view, supplanting it with what I term the optimality account. Under this account we ought to define artefacts by reference to their capacity to function well as tokens of a particular artefact type. This thesis has two main goals. The first is to provide a persuasive account of why we should reject the claim that artefacts are defined by their designer’s intentions. In so doing, weaponry will be utilised as both a focus and a case study of why such an account is grossly inadequate to the data before us. Second, the account given here will provide a positive account of artefact metaphysics that will link the nature of weapons to their capacity to be optimal as means of harming others.