Abstract

This study is a first step into an ambitious project: formalizing and conceptually classifying the properties of artifacts. In particular the focus is on the notion of Disposition. By Disposition we mean a property which has a potentiality component (Fara 1998). The article starts up with the actual literature on the concept of Disposition, describing the most important proposals and the most accepted conclusions. Afterwards it goes through a specific problem: the intrinsicness of Dispositions. All this, taking advantage of tools coming from cognitive science such as the Affordances. Affordance is a concept introduced by Gibson (Gibson 1977), and that will be here used in the way Scarantino did (Scarantino 2003).