Artifactuality

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The condition of being an artificial effect, such as a distortion or false feature introduced by a process or instrument
2. The state of having been produced or altered by human intervention rather than arising naturally in the observed thing
3. Quality of appearing as a false feature or distortion caused by the method of observation, measurement, or processing

Etymology: "Artifactuality" is a plain formation: the adjective "artifactual" with the noun-forming suffix "-ity" added to the end. "Artifactual" itself is built from "artifact", a word with a long pedigree. It comes from the Latin "artefactum", combining "arte", the ablative of "ars" meaning "skill", with "factum", "something made", the past participle of "facere", "to make". The compound therefore describes something produced by human workmanship, which is why the adjective came to mean that a feature of an observation or result is an effect of the method or tool used rather than of the thing being studied. The suffix "-ity" works as it does in words such as "reality" or "normality", turning the quality described by an adjective into a noun for that quality. So "artifactuality" names the condition of being an artifact in that sense: a distortion or false effect that an experiment, image, or measurement has produced on its own, rather than a real feature of what it was meant to capture.