Resumen de Artifact concepts as cultural coordinates
It is commonly accepted that our categories to classify our world of artifacts cannot be grounded in the identification of the objects according to a material or formal essence. In the light of this fact, two kinds of theories have been proposed to understand artifact categorization: those that identify artifacts on the basis of their functions and those that do so on the basis of the intentions of their maker. In this paper, I will argue that neither of them is sufficient to elucidate the way in which human subjects are able to categorize and conceptualize artifacts. My proposal is that classifying an artifact depends on the coordinates that it occupies in a cultural space. That leads us to a dynamic and relational approach to the practices of categorization of artifacts. Finally, I would like to remark that this idea allows us to set a parallelism between concepts and affordances of artifacts. Firstly, because both notions share a dynamical and relational character. Secondly, because we can understand the concepts of artifact as linguistic correlates of such affordances that help us to fix and constrain the meaning of an artifact.
