Maarten Franssen

Modelling infrastructures as socio-technical systems

The conceptualisation of the notion of a system in systems engineering, as exemplified in, for instance, the engineering standard IEEE Std 1220–1998 (1999), is problematic when applied to the design of socio-technical systems. This is argued using Intelligent Transportation Systems as an example. A preliminary conceptualisation of socio-technical systems is introduced which includes technical and social elements and actors, as well as four kinds of relations. Current systems engineering practice incorporates technical elements and actors in the system but sees social elements exclusively as contextual. When designing socio-technical systems, however, social elements and the corresponding relations must also be considered as belonging to the system.

Technical artifacts: An integrated perspective

Humans are always interested in distinguishing natural and artificial entities although there is no sharp demarcation between the two categories. Surprisingly, things do not improve when the second type of entities is restricted to the arguably more constrained realm of physical technical artifacts. This paper helps to clarify the relationship between natural entities and technical artifacts by developing a conceptual landscape within which to analyze these notions. The framework is developed by studying three definitions of technical artifact which arise from different perspectives. All these perspectives share two intuitions: that technical artifacts are physical objects that exist by human intervention; and that technical artifacts are entities to be contrasted to natural entities. Yet the perspectives are different in the way they spell out these intuitions: the relevant human intervention may range from intentional selection to intentional production; and the contrast between technical artifacts and natural entities may be introduced by a constitution relation or by defining properties that set technical artifacts apart. The three perspectives are compared and their similarities and dissimilarities are explored with the help of ontological analysis.

Modeling engineering systems as socio-technical systems

The IEEE standard for the systems engineering process is problematic when applied to the design of (socio-technical) systems. This is argued using examples of automated vehicle systems. A conceptualization of socio-technical systems is introduced. This distinguishes technical and social elements and agents, as well as four kinds of relations. Next to physical and functional relations, intentional and normative relations play an important role. The IEEE standard defines social elements as contextual and focuses on total design control. Because of the involvement of agents and social elements in socio-technical systems both these viewpoints are problematic.

An impossibility theorem for verisimilitude

In this paper, we show that Arrow’s well-known impossibility theorem is instrumental in bringing the ongoing discussion about verisimilitude to a more general level of abstraction. After some preparatory technical steps, we show that Arrow’s requirements for voting procedures in social choice are also natural desiderata for a general verisimilitude definition that places content and likeness considerations on the same footing. Our main result states that no qualitative unifying procedure of a functional form can simultaneously satisfy the requirements of Unanimity, Independence of irrelevant alternatives and Non-dictatorship at the level of sentence variables. By giving a formal account of the incompatibility of the considerations of content and likeness, our impossibility result makes it possible to systematize the discussion about verisimilitude, and to understand it in more general terms.

Design, Use, and the Physical and Intentional Aspects of Technical Artifacts

It has been argued that technical artifacts are a special category of objects that require a combination of the physical and intentional ‘descriptions of the world’. In this chapter, I question this point of view. Any object can figure in the intentional actions of some person, for example as being used for a purpose. A more interesting question is whether there is a unique most adequate way of intentionally describing a technical artifact as what it is for, or, in other words, to what extent the character of an object as a particular sort of technical artifact is fixed. In this contribution I argue against the view that it is fixed. What an artifact is for generally depends both on what it was designed for and on what it is being used for. A consequence of this view is that the metaphysical status of technical artifacts, in the form of a precise answer to the question what sort of artifact it is, or whether it is or is not an artifact of some particular kind, is vague or indeterminate in cases where its use does not match its design. This, however, is precisely the sort of metaphysical vagueness that pervades the intentional conceptualization, as can be illustrated by arguments from the writings of Parfit and Davidson.

Modelling Systems in Technology as Instrumental Systems

Modelling is an extremely important aspect of the work of engineers. Ever since technology changed from a craft-based to a science-based practice, engineers have been engaged in modelling the artefacts they design, build and test. The modelling techniques they rely on, however, originate from the physical sciences. They work well for the technical devices, modelled as physical systems, that are the traditional products of the engineering disciplines. It is increasingly recognized, however, that modern technology consists in the implementation and operation of systems rather than single devices. The traditional conceptual framework of engineering, derived from the natural sciences, is ill-fit to model the hybridity and mereological complexity that are the key features of systems in technology. In this paper I present an approach to the modelling of systems in technology which is based on an incorporation of these two aspects from the start, represented in the notion of an instrumental system. I first show how the hybridity—the interaction between intentional action and causal processes—is taken care of in the basic structure of any instrumental system. Next I show how the representation of mereological complexity is taken care of through recursion. Finally relevance and potential applications of the approach are discussed.

The Goodness and Kindhood of Artefacts

One of the peculiar features of our discourse with respect to technical artefacts is its richly evaluative and normative character. We speak routinely of good alarm clocks and poor corkscrews and of functioning mobile phones and malfunctioning TV sets. Elsewhere, I have argued that the normative character of this discourse is linked to the fact that artefacts figure in a context of human action, more in particular a context of use (Franssen 2006, 2009a). Technical artefacts owe their existence to the goal directness of much of human life; they have been designed to be used, in order for their users to achieve certain goals or achieve certain purposes. Given that we have certain goals or purposes, the qualities of artefacts give us reasons to use them or not to use them in order to achieve these goals and purposes. It is because the qualities of artefacts are reason-giving that evaluative statements are normative; they express to what extent the specific qualities of a particular artefact give someone a reason to use it, given this person’s reasonable goals. Of course, artefacts are not the only things whose properties can give us reasons to use them or reasons to act in a particular way with respect to them (treat them with care, avoid them, and what have you). We can use a nutcracker to crack open a nut or we can use a rock that happens to be at hand. We may consider both to be good for the job of cracking this nut. However, this fact makes the nutcracker a good nutcracker but not the rock a good rock. The nutcracker is good qua nutcracker: it was designed for being used to crack nuts. The goodness of the rock in this context is not its goodness qua rock, but neither is it its goodness qua nutcracker, since the rock is not a nutcracker. At most we can say that the rock is a good rock for cracking nuts with. Using it for cracking nuts does not ipso facto make the rock into a nutcracker.

Editorial Introduction: Putting the Empirical Turn into Perspective

About 15 years ago, Peter Kroes and Anthonie Meijers published as editors a collection of papers under the title The empirical turn in the philosophy of technology (Kroes and Meijers 2000). Next to containing several examples of the kind of studies the editors had in mind, the book made an ardent plea for a reorientation of the community of philosophers of technology toward the practice of technology and, more specifically, the practice of engineering, and sketched the likely benefits for the field of pursuing the major questions that characterize it in an empirically informed way.

Philosophy of Technology as a Serious Branch of Philosophy: The Empirical Turn as a Starting Point

This article takes stock of where philosophy of technology is at, and where it has been since the so-called ‘empirical turn’ announced around the millennial turn. The article both discusses recent advances and suggests concrete ways of making progress in specific topics, especially regarding the philosophical study of technical artefacts. The article proposes to pursue philosophy of technology under three headings: the nature of artefacts, the concept of design, and the notion of use. The paper illustrates two specific ways in which philosophical discussion of such notions can and will make progress: one, by bringing a much greater degree of systematicity to answers that philosophers give to individual questions thrown up by these three notions, and two, by drawing in to a greater degree philosophical expertise acquired and developed in current foundational analytic philosophy, above all metaphysics and the philosophy of language. The paper’s two goals are connected: only by enlisting ‘foundational’ philosophy can we bring a degree of systematicity to contemporary analytic philosophy of technology, and its future.

Artefact Kinds, Ontological Criteria and Forms of Mind-Dependence

In this chapter we discuss criteria for ontologically crediting or discrediting certain kinds of things we refer to in everyday life and artefact kinds in particular. Generally used criteria for settling whether things ‘really exist’ are mind-independence and determinateness, and on these criteria artefacts are said to flounder. We show that another criterion, which we term the phase-substance criterion, is also of relevance for delineating what are the real kinds of things in the world and what are the merely nominal kinds. We use these criteria to argue that artefact kinds can be defended as real in the form of intentional-historical subkinds of structural kinds. We show that the relation between these structural kinds and their intentional-historical subkinds is mirrored by a similar relation for natural kinds in biology and that similar forms of a division of explanatory labour are at work in both cases.