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Re: [xmca] Tom Toolery



Benjamin Franklin is credited with first defining the human being as a "tool-making animal," c. 1750. Quite a remarkable stake-out of the quintessential American philosophy so long ago, 100 years before Darwin and at the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution! Herder was more interested in symbols than tools, staking out a characteristically German position I guess. Hegel, c. 1802, had a hierarchy of artefacts in his system: land/crops, animals, tools, words, and then raising children and building institutions. It seems that Marx and Engels used "labour" and therefore "tools" in a way that left room for interpretation, but for a long time after them I think "tools" and "labour" tended to be interpreted narrowly. There was a political purpose here I think. In my view, "artefact" gives us the kind of categorical distinctions which are needed for the basic ontology and epistemology of CHAT, and in the digital age there is no dividing line between tools and symbols. Finer distinctions are needed to solve specific problems, of course. On the history, someone must have written a book on all this. Please forgive any mistakes n the above.

On "collaborative projects", Rod, in the way I use that concept, yes, almost everything is a collaborative project, it is just a matter of identifying who is collaborating for what and how. I take this concept not as a category of relations, but as a lens through which all relations may be viewed.

Andy

Rod Parker-Rees wrote:
While I agree that 'tools' is useful as a superordinate category, the distinction between 'tools-for work', 'tools-for-convenience' (utensils, utvar) and 'tools-for-play' (Coleridge's 'play-withs' is a bit awkward but less limited than 'toys') is also important in some contexts. I'm sure the distinctions could proliferate further and that the distinctions would have their uses in particular circumstances.

Could a chat over coffee be described as a collaborative project? In which case utensils might be more appropriate than tools to describe the stuff with which the coffee is prepared and the stuff on which people sit while drinking it (and which may significantly afford opportunities for such interactions) COULD be called tools but might better be described as furniture.

I suspect that the use of 'tools' to describe all mediating artefacts has roots in a particular form of modernism but I am well out of my depth here!

All the best,

Rod

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Carol Macdonald
Sent: 19 October 2010 13:39
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] Tom Toolery

To David

I am very concerned about the need to make a decision to require/invent a
new term, specifically "utensils". What's wrong with using the notion of
tools and then putting them in the context in which they are used?
Proliferating terms means they start to grow arms and legs and maybe violate
the axioms of one's theory. "Tools" has an impeccable ancestry.

In a collaborative project, what virtue would there be using "utensils"
rather than "tools"?

Larry, sorry for interrupting your conversation.  I just left too much time
to reply to David.

Carol

On 19 October 2010 14:22, Robert Lake <boblake@georgiasouthern.edu> wrote:

I have to admit, you folks are stirring up my inner Sapir-Whorf
.....fascinating!

On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 10:20 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com
wrote:
Nothing, Andy. That's why I want to oppose the ideal to the real, and not
to the material.

             ARTEFACT:
Tool-artefact       Utensil-artefact
(mass production)  (personal consumption)

                SIGN
Signal-sign         Symbol-sign
(thing-thing)        (meaning-meaning)]

        MATERIALITY
Reality               Ideality
(percepts)          (concepts)

David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education

--- On Mon, 10/18/10, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:


From: Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Tom Toolery
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Monday, October 18, 2010, 7:02 PM


What would be an example of something which is ideal but not also
material,
David?
andy
David Kellogg wrote: ...
It seems to me that if we follow Steve and Ilyenkov, and we see problem
after problem as a matter of establishing the interaction of "ideal" and
"material", we will need some kind of super-category for the indivisible
whole which both ideal and material make up. Otherwise we really do fall
into the worst kind of Cartesian dualism. ...
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--
*Robert Lake  Ed.D.
*Assistant Professor
Social Foundations of Education
Dept. of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading
Georgia Southern University
P. O. Box 8144
Phone: (912) 478-5125
Fax: (912) 478-5382
Statesboro, GA  30460

 *Democracy must be born anew in every generation, and education is its
midwife.*
*-*John Dewey.
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--
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*Andy Blunden*
Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
Videos: http://vimeo.com/user3478333/videos
Book: http://www.brill.nl/scss


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