Questions & Notes on Reading (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/artifact/#1) :
An artifact is classified by : form, material properties, method of manufacture, and use, among other variables.
We must distinguish the concept of work from artifact. The line between both depends on the various action types of which it is composed of. Examples of these:
separation ( a walking stick as a whole vs the knobbed handle at the top)
reshaping ( a literal reformation, for example a paper clip becomes a hook, or glassblowing)
conjunction ( artifacts are linked, example: an assembly line composes an object out of many separate parts)
Question: are these separated parts artifacts? I might argue yes.
Considering Intent:
One may be an author of an artifact only if the existence and character of the artifact depends on that persons’s productive intentions.
Examples:
A scribe has 0 authorship ( he just copies a previously written work) BUT impregnates the final work with his individual flairs, perhaps even changing the context of the work by priming the reader in another way.
What I wonder is: is a translator the author of an artifact as well? He has not composed the work but does control diction, iteration, and these variables in turn prime the reader in a different way than the original author may have intended.
Along this thread- the editor, the illustrator? They must indeed take partial authorship of the artifact because they so alter the final product.
And of the teacher, the mentor, the advisor? Without him or her the course and context of the artifact is deeply changed.
Lastly the concept of an F object seems very redundant. An object is functional most likely in one way or another. A psychological term I relate to this is divergent thinking- being able to think of multiple uses or solutions for an object. For example, a rock becomes a hammer. A bucket becomes a cage. etc.
