Clases artificiales

Abstract

This article discusses recent attempts to apply our vocabulary of kinds to the realm of artifacts. Does it have sense to talk about artifacts kinds? Are artifactual kinds real kinds? This article takes a skeptical position to these issues, and suggests that in the realm of the artificial is better to apply the Wittgensteinian notion of «family resemblance», rather than insisting of applying the notion of kind. The structure of this paper is as follows. In the first part, the notion of natural kind is introduced in an elementary way, noting specially its metaphysical and epistemological aspects. In the second part, the possibility of extending this concept to the realm of artifacts is critically examined. Different essentialist conceptions on artifacts are discussed, and epistemic aspects involved in implementing the notion of kind to the artifactual realm are analyzed. In the third part, it is considered the position that suggests that the vocabulary of kinds could be applied to the field of artifacts provided that they could be considered as nominal kinds. Finally, this article concludes that while it would be more satisfactory to pick up the concept of family resemblances, rather that the concept of kind, to analyze the artifactual realm, this does not mean that one is forced to abandon any philosophically interesting realistic commitments.