Suppose I find on the ground a thin layer of sand. Painstakingly, I remove piece of sand after piece of sand, until what is left is a very fragile picture of a cat made out of grains of sand none of which were moved by me. If artifacts exist, this picture is an artifact and exists. But note that in the story I have not causally affected any of the grains of sand that remain in the picture. And, plausibly:
- If an object is composed of some parts, it is not possible to cause the object to exist without causally affecting any of the parts.
I conclude that the picture here doesn’t exist. And neither do artifacts in general.
1 comment:
This reminds me of a Jewish interpretation of the Sabbath rules according to which that you can't write on the Sabbath--that's creating something--but you can erase on the Sabbath. And in particular I think I saw the claim that it would be OK to write by erasing, because you aren't creating anything (i.e., on Friday, you shade a sheet of paper with a pencil, and then on Saturday you erase). I have no idea how mainstream this interpretation is.
Anyway, this interpretation makes me think that a friend of artifacts *could* bite the bullet and say that whether an artifact exists depends on whether "it" is made by adding or by subtracting. On such a view, there are clay statues but not marble ones.
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