Resumen de Two kinds of knowledge of artifacts
In this paper I apply a distinction proposed by Stuart Hampshire about two kinds of knowledge of the future to our knowledge of artifacts. I respectively call them: practical knowledge and inductive knowledge of artifacts. I will argue that maker’s knowledge of artifacts could be understood in principle as a kind of practical knowledge that could also make sense of some of the features that we associate with the sort of epistemic privilege we have regarding artifacts and artifactual kinds. Nevertheless, I will criticize some ways of understanding this suggestion and I will offer an epistemological model of our knowledge of artifacts that claims the following: the conception that guides the production of the artifact is sufficient to produce the artifact through a reliable mechanism that is under the control of the subject. And this is only possible if the subject is able to identify a set of success conditions learned within a dynamics of exchanges with an environment rich in functions and purposes.
