minds and artifacts

Mike Cole (mcole who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Sat, 5 Jul 1997 14:34:56 -0700 (PDT)

Hi Gordon--

My response to Judy came up as a local response her comment
that artifacts don't have minds of their own, and presupposed the
discussion in Chapter 5 of Cultural Psychology. In that chapter, I
try to develop the idea of artifacts as simultaneously ideal and
material, and of mediation of activity through artifacts as the
necessary condition for the development of human thoought. From the
discussion so far, this aspect of what I was trying to accomplish
by the way in which I put "culture in the middle" has not captured
any readers' fancies.
Sure, I believe that humans have minds (putting aside the
"have" issue). But according to the view developed in CP, our minds
are not entirely our own. Their content and/or their functioning is
distributed in a bunch of ways that have been discussed here a lot
over the past few years.
And, sure (contra Latour?) I think it is important to distinguish
between the way in which mind is attributed to humans and the way in which
it might be attributed to artifacts." Among other things, the material
features of humans and artifacts differ (and that of artifacts differ
wildly among themselves).
I am not sure how best to/whether to expand on this topic here.
I am not sure who is reading through the book and who is not and how to
follow Gricean maxims simultaneously for both groups!
mike