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Re: [xmca] Tom Toolery



Well, I think you have spotted the difficulty, Carol.

It doesn't do really to say that artefacts mediate with other artefacts. Of course they do. Artefacts form a kind of universe in which you can't really draw a line between one artefact and another, between a key and a lock, for example. But artefacts don't *act*, do they? And the point is that artefacts (including the human body) act. So the question remains who or what is acting (i.e., engaging in actions or activity).

Andy

Carol Macdonald wrote:
Andy
In a small and trembling voice, 'cos we don't want to get into dualisms
here--surely artefacts mediate with other artefacts--the pencil mediates
writing? I don't feel I am in the right league to answer this questions, but
I think we are pushed back to this position.
Carol

On 16 October 2010 08:33, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

Understood, and an interesting example it was too. I was just trying to get
back to Paula's interesting question which started the thread.
Jenna got a thread going on the blind person's cane, where that part of the
mind which is in artefacts become completely subsumed into the body, from a
psychological point of view. Paula then pointed out that from a
psychological point of view we can take parts of our body to be tools.
So the question is raised: psychologically speaking, where is the border
line between body and things?
Lucas added the idea of "distributed cognition" so that the activity of
other people is seen also to be a part of mind.
But, and I think this is an challenging one: if the human body is an
artefact, what is it mediating between?

Andy


Carol Macdonald wrote:

Actually Andy
I thought I was giving an historically interesting example.  Maybe it's
because we have 350 000+ people a year dying from AIDS that health is so
high in our national consciousness. So excuse the example: you are lucky
you
didn't get an historical account of HIV/AIDS!!

Raising children is also interesting across the cultures in our country.
But
I have work to do so must stop here.

Carol

On 16 October 2010 02:44, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:



We shouldn't take this "the body is an artefact" down an entirely
negative
line of course, Carol.
Every parent will tell you the efforts that went into raising their own
darling children.

Andy

Carol Macdonald wrote:



TB is very interesting historically in the way we have responded to it.
Firstly, you got ill from it and died from it, like the poet Keats.
 Then
people were isolated in sanatoria and given drugs and then they
recovered.
And now, you are infectious until you start taking your medication, and
then
if you faithfully take it, then you get better. And most recently, you
are
likely to get TB as an opportunistic infection when you are HIV+, and
it's
harder to shake off because your immune system is compromised.

Recently my niece had a group of friends round for supper and then was
diagnosed with TB the following day.  She had to inform everybody, and
they
had to be checked, but within 48 hours, when she was on medicine, she
didn't
have to tell/warn anybody. Astonishing for someone who regularly swims
5km
before breakfast!! If she had been Keats, her symptoms would have been
more
than a slight cough at night.

carol

On 15 October 2010 14:42, Leif Strandberg <leifstrandberg.ab@telia.com


wrote:



and TB

Is Karin Johanisson (Prof in Medical History, Univ of Uppsala, Sweden)
translated...

her books are really interesting

Leif
15 okt 2010 kl. 14.26 skrev Martin Packer:

 Lactose intolerance - just one example of cultural continuation of




biological evolution...

Martin

.
<Wade 2010 Human Culture, an Evolutionary Force.pdf>


On Oct 15, 2010, at 5:22 AM, Andy Blunden wrote:

 I am intrigued Rod. You conclude from this interesting story that the




body is not ("may not be") an artefact, but "virtual maps" within the
brain
are? I presume because these neural structures are "constructed,"
whereas
other parts of the body are not?
What do you mean?

Andy

Rod Parker-Rees wrote:





In 'The body has a mind of its own' by Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew
Blakeslee (2007 Random House), there is a chapter which begins with
an
account of research by Dr Atsushi Iriki and colleagues in Japan.
This
research involved training monkeys to use rakes as tools to retrieve
food
and then using arrays of microelectrodes implanted in their skulls
to
study
the visual receptive fields of visual-tactile cells in the posterior
parietal cortex of the monkeys. What Iriki found was that these
visual-tactile cells, which usually responded to information only in
a
region within the monkeys' arms length, began to respond to more
distant
information (within arm+rake's length) but ONLY when the monky was
using the
rake as a tool - when the mankey was passively holding the tool the
response
drew back to its normal range. The chapter goes on to describe
studies
in
virtual reality in which participants learn to control avatars which
have
strikingly different physiology - e.g. a lobster - controlled by a
complex
code of combined body movements which is never shared with
participants,
they learn to control the movement of their avatar just by trial and
error
but they soon become able to 'automate' the process - focusing on
what
they
want to do rather on what they have to do to do it.

Our bodies may not be artefacts but our cerebellar virtual maps of
how
our bodies work and what we can do with them surely are.

I have just started wearing varifocal glasses and am in the process
of
retraining my body's ways of seeing (learning to move my head and
neck
rather than just move my eyes) already I am finding that things
'stay
in
focus' more as my head and neck get my eyes into position without me
having
to tell them where to go!

For me this links with the discussion about bodies and tools and
possibly extends (rake-like) beyond it - how much of the tool is
defined by
its form and how much by the cultural history of how, by whom, when,
where
and for what it has been and could be used?

All the best,

Rod

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:
xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
]
On Behalf Of Andy Blunden
Sent: 15 October 2010 06:02
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] Tom Toolery

My claim is, David, not just that (for example) my fingers are
functionally artefacts because I use them to play the piano, but
also
they
are genetically artefacts because they are the products of art.
"Labour
created man himself" as old Fred said. If we are going to claim that
thinking is artefact-mediated activity, then we must accept our
bodies
as
artefacts, or abandon other important definitions of artefact, as
mediator
of activity, material product of human labour and the substance of
culture.
We fashion our bodies for the purpose of constructing a culture just
as
surely as we fashion our buildings, our domestic animals, our food
and
clothing and everything else.

You can define a word how you like, but the importance of realising
that
our bodies are products of human labour which we use as both
instruments and
symbols, just like our white canes and spectacles,  is demonstrated
by
intersubjectivists who simply overlook the role of artefacts as
mediators
altogether. In part this is possible because they subsume the human
body
into the notion of 'subject', something which also allows them to
scoot over
all sorts of tricky philosophical problems entailed in recognizing
the
active participation of subjectivity in what would otherwise be
simply
a
complex series of material interactions. The result, contradictorily
is a
far worse Cartesian dualism than the one they tried to avoid.

No, I thought long and hard about this, and the conclusion is
inescapable: the human body is an artefact.

Andy
/ //// /

David Kellogg wrote:

 Sometimes I would really like to be a mosquito in the room when
Martin




is giving his course on developmental psychology. But I would
probably want
to bite the student who asked if the replacement of social
relations
in
language (e.g. discourse) by psychological ones (e.g. grammar) is a
"fact"
or just one of Martin's ideas; the question strikes me as rather
more
bumbling and humbling.
Fortunately, I have my own Thursday night session, which this
semester
is all about systemic functional linguistics and conversation
analysis. Last
night we were discussing the difference between them, and I pointed
out that
the systemic view is quite consistent with the idea of language as
an
artefact and the conversation analysis view is much less so.
Take, for example, the problem of repair. A teacher walks into a
classroom.
T: Good morning, everybody.
Ss: Good morning, everybody!
T: !!!!
The conversation is broken. But in order to repair it, the teacher
does
not pull over and stop. The teacher has to keep going. The teacher
has to
find out what exactly the kids mean, if anything (are they simply
repeating
what they heard, as seems likely, or are they including their
classmates in
their reply to the teacher?)
This means that even quite simple conversations (the sort we have
with
third graders) are quite gnarly and knobbled; they have
convolutions
and
introvolutions, knots and whorls and burls of negotiation.
 Conversations
exhibit very few of the genetic or structural of mechanical tools,
and in
fact only resemble "tools" only if we take a quite narrowly
functionalist
squint and presuppose a coinciding will that wields them. It even
seems to
me that they are misconstrued when we say that they are artefacts.
I think the Romantics, especially Herder, would agree with this
view:
I
think they would have been rather horrified at Andy's idea that a
body is an
artefact in the same sense as a tool is an artefact.  They would
point out
that it is not genetically so; the body is a natural product and
not
man
made. It is also not structurally so: unlike other artefacts, much
of
its
structure reflects self-replication and not other-fabrication.  Of
course,
we may say that a body is FUNCTIONALLY like an artefact, because we
use it
as a tool in various ways. But if we privilege this particular
interpretation of the body over the genetic, or the structural,
account, it
seems to me we get a pretty functionalist view of things. A body
involved in
a conversation is not an artefact; it's more like a work of art,
and
the
gratuitous and organic complexity of conversation is an indelible
sign of
this.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
--- On Thu, 10/14/10, Paula M Towsey <paulat@johnwtowsey.co.za>
wrote:


From: Paula M Towsey <paulat@johnwtowsey.co.za>
Subject: RE: [xmca] Tom Toolery
To: ablunden@mira.net, "'eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity'" <
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Thursday, October 14, 2010, 5:40 AM


Hello Andy-of-the-5-o'clock-shadow

Yet it's a different kind of gnashing of teeth (and wailing and
weeping)
when the baboons at Third Bridge get stuck into the tinned
supplies...

Paula



_________________________________
Paula M Towsey
PhD Candidate: Universiteit Leiden
Faculty of Social Sciences



-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:
xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu]
On
Behalf Of Andy Blunden
Sent: 14 October 2010 13:19
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] Tom Toolery

My answer, Paula: yes.
My body, with its various parts, is an artefact; according to
context,
symbol or tool.
My face and my 5 o'clock shadow is a symbol just as much as the
shirt
I
wear. My teeth a tool just as much as a can opener.

Andy

Paula M Towsey wrote:

 For some inexplicable reason while watching Mike's blind man with
a




stick video, I remembered smsing Carol with a quirky question: if
a
researcher without a knife is trying to open an airline packet of
peanuts,
and she resorts to using her teeth, what tool is she using?

Though, perhaps the better question would be - is she using a
tool.?


_________________________________

Paula M Towsey

PhD Candidate: Universiteit Leiden

Faculty of Social Sciences



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Videos: http://vimeo.com/user3478333/videos
Book: http://www.brill.nl/scss


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