Re: Tools

Alfred Lang (lang who-is-at psy.unibe.ch)
Mon, 9 Oct 1995 13:48:46 +0000

Michael Glassmann's challenge to review the concept of tools encourages me
to remind the fact that most current ideas of mediational tools have not
only some process in mind but also some substantive character, refer in a
dominating sense to mediating objects. This is true of the most prominent
language tools, words, sentences, and of current sign concepts in general.
Even gestures and other less codified communicative events take on a kind
of substantive character as soon as we try to operationalize them.

Now this appears to be somewhat misleading because it suggests, that the
tool's mediating function, as a pre-existing entity, is also between
pre-existing entitites to be mediated between, subjects and objects or
whatever, and the mediation is somehow added to the items to be mediated in
the form of the tool. This makes it difficult to conceive of the change of
the entities involved when they enter a relation or result form a relation
and have developed a different potential than what they had before. The
supposed substantive character of mediators confers the relation a somehow
static character and leads to some separation of the generative potential
of the relation.

Alfred

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