In this paper, I want to start to untangle some of the philosophical issues associated with our practices of ascribing authorship for collaborative work, with an eye to formulating better guidelines for authorship. I will focus on the following questions: 1. What epistemic, social, and ethical functions are played by our practices of ascribing authorship for academic papers? 2. What ways of ascribing authorship would best address these functions? Can any one way of ascribing authorship address all of the functions? I hope to make three contributions. First, I hope to build on established debates about authorship to offer a general framework for assessing practices of assigning authorship. Secondly, to argue that the different functions of authorship are incoherent, making different predictions about who should be an author. Thirdly, I will argue that this incoherence points in the direction of replacing the role of an author with a number of different roles which address the different functions. In the final section I will set out a proposal that does just this, which I will call the no author account of authorship.

中文翻译：

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作者的意义何在？

在本文中，我想开始解开与我们将作者身份归于协作工作的做法相关的一些哲学问题，着眼于制定更好的作者身份准则。我将重点关注以下问题： 1. 我们为学术论文赋予作者身份的做法在认知、社会和伦理方面发挥了哪些作用？2. 什么样的署名方式最能解决这些功能？任何一种归属作者身份的方式都可以解决所有功能吗？我希望做出三个贡献。首先，我希望在关于作者身份的既定辩论的基础上，为评估分配作者身份的做法提供一个总体框架。其次，论证作者身份的不同功能是不连贯的，对谁应该成为作者做出不同的预测。第三，我将争辩说，这种不连贯性指向了将作者的角色替换为解决不同功能的许多不同角色的方向。在最后一节中，我将提出一个可以做到这一点的提案，我将其称为作者身份的无作者帐户。