# How Real Are Artefacts and Artefact Kinds? E.J. Lowe **Keywords:** Machines, Natural laws, Ontological categories, Sortal persistence conditions, Utensils **Abstract:** It is often difficult to specify, in a principled way, determinate existence and identity conditions for individual artefacts of many familiar kinds, and this fact threatens to undermine realism with regard to artefact kinds and their members. However, it may be argued that at least some kinds of artefacts, especially those that may be categorized as kinds of machine, are not vulnerable to these problems. The underlying reason for this is that, in the case of such artefacts, we can identify specific mind-independent laws governing their characteristic modes of activity, which thereby determine their persistence conditions in a nonarbitrary fashion. **Authors:** [[E.J. Lowe]]