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Wybo Houkes, may lead to doubt whether these features are sufficiently distinc-
tive, but this should not prevent — and has not prevented — philosophers and
other researchers from analyzing them. Outside philosophy, the tacit dimension
of technology and engineering design has attracted substantial attention. Paul
Nightingale reviews the results of this attention and their relevance for a bet-
ter understanding of engineering. Inside philosophy, such a better understanding
may be created by analyzing the role of practical reasoning in engineering. In his
chapter, Jesse Hughes explores ways in which this role may be conceptualized.
Research on artifact epistemology does not, at the moment, show the vitality of
research on artifact ontology, neither in philosophy nor in engineering. However,
the contributions make clear that there is room for substantial growth.
All papers make clear that philosophers and engineers have only begun to de-
velop an appropriate ontology and epistemology for the realm of artifacts. All
papers make specific suggestions for further research, from developing an account
of artifact functions that is fully adequate to the complicated phenomenology of
use and design to analyzing the role of specificationism in the reasoning of engi-
neers. Indirectly, they shed light on issues that have to remain unexplored in this
part, such as the relation between structural part-whole relations and functional
decomposition, and the difference between natural and artificial objects. In com-
bination, they also show the need for a richer account of what counts as a real
object and of our standards for knowledge and its relation to action – questions
that lie at the roots of the disciplines of ontology and epistemology.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
[Mitcham, 1978] C. Mitcham. Types of technology, Research in Philosophy and Technology 1,
229-274, 1978.