Copies, Replicas and Counterfeits of artworks and artifacts

The paper offers an analysis of the notion of counterfeits, copies, and replicas of artworks and artifacts. Specifically, we analyze three important proposals (posited by G. Ryle, N. Goodman, and M. Wreen) of what a counterfeit is, and we argue that all of them are flawed. Exploiting the notion of historical property, we propose that being a counterfeit is dependent on the intention of the producer. Our proposal (D4) is that: x is a counterfeit if and only if x has been intentionally produced to convince someone else that x has a historical property that it actually does not posses. We argue also for the thesis that notwithstanding the similarities between the notion of counterfeit and the notion of copy, they are two independent notions. Since (D4) seems to be inadequate to capture a notion of counterfeit used for artifacts and artworks like film, music CDs, commercially branded objects, etc., in order to capture this different use we introduce a notion of replica related to a different conception of counterfeits.