But this is not just a question of ambiguous words or double meanings.Tool and result, product and mediator, is a *dialectical pair*. It is what is involved in being drawn into human society. It is essentially two sides of the same coin.
Consider the North Star. In what sense is it a product of labour? It is a material thing; us people in the Southern hemisphere don't have a South Star and we have to make do with poor substitutes. We can't invent a South Star.
Andy Martin Packer wrote:
Andy, Lucas, Carol...It seems to me we're using the term 'artifact' in two related but distinguishable ways. First, to say that something is a product of human activity, rathe than solely natural processes. Second, to say that something mediates human activity. I think a plausible case can be made that the human body is an artifact in both senses. The NYTimes article I sent recently illustrates that past cultural activity has shaped the form and functioning of the human body today. Lactose tolerance, which sadly I lack, was a mutation that conveyed advantage to those carrying it once farming and milking of cattle became widespread, and so it became increasingly common. Those of you who today drink milk and eat cheese have bodies are the products of our ancestors' activities in the milk shed.But, second, the human body can surely mediate human activity, as Marx described clearly. When I sell my labor power I am contributing my body as a mediator between capital and commodity. A less sobering example would be the developmental stage of the Great-We, when the infant needs and uses the bodies of adults to get anything accomplished. The first gestures and holophrastic utterances are calls for others to act on the infant's behalf, doing what his or her own body is not yet capable of. MartinOn Oct 16, 2010, at 5:27 AM, Lucas Bietti wrote:Andy,Thanks for the remark and my apologies if I was not clear enough. I understand your point about the historicity and cultural and social trajectories of artifacts and I agree on that. What I was suggesting was that gesturing could be an activity in which the body would act as an artifact without counting on external devices -if we claim that *the body is an artifact*. I was wondering how the mind-body unity and necessary interanimations would be operating indreaming?LucasOn October 16, 2010 at 4:51 AM Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:Lucas, I think the distributed mind idea emphasises certain aspects of human life, namely the involvement of *other people* in the production of artefacts and participation in institutions and other forms of social practice. But it should be remembered that an artefact is typically the product of *other people* working in institutions; as Hegel said: "the tool is the norm of labour." So both ideas are making the same claim but with slightly different emphasis. But when you say "if we believe that the body is crucial for perception and cognition, ..." surely this is not up for debate? And yet you seem to be suggesting that the body might not be needed for cognition and consequently, the body might not be an artefact. I'm really lost here. :) Andy Lucas Bietti wrote:Carol and Andy, As far as I know, the point of the extended mind/distributed cognition approach is the idea that in many cases cognitive processes are extended/distributed across social and material environments. So in writing both the pencil and paper are acting as mediating interfaces enabling us to perform certain cognitive tasks (e.g. basic math operations) that, otherwise, we would not be able to perform. Extended and distributed approaches to the mind don't consider the body as an artifact. The basis for the these approaches is that cognitive processes are embodied and situated in concrete activities. That's why cognitive and sensory-motor interanimations are part of the same mind-body unity. Gesturing can be thought as a cognitive-embodied activity in which the body acts as an artifact to represent and convey meaning. In gesturing the mediating interface is the space. However, if we believe that the body is crucial for perception and cognition, in my view, there would be no reason to claim that the body is an artifact -or I missed something of the discussion. Lucas On October 16, 2010 at 3:13 AM Carol Macdonald <carolmacdon@gmail.com> 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.comwrote: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 ofbiological 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 thebody 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 Martinis 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 astick 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 _______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca -------------------------------------------------------------------- -- ---- *Andy Blunden* Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/<http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/> <http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/>< http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/> Videos: http://vimeo.com/user3478333/videos Book: http://www.brill.nl/scss _______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca _______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca _______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca-- -------------------------------------------------------------------- -- -- *Andy Blunden* Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/<http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/>< http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/>< http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/> Videos: http://vimeo.com/user3478333/videos Book: http://www.brill.nl/scss _______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca_______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca_______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ *Andy Blunden* Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/ <http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/> < http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/> Videos: http://vimeo.com/user3478333/videos Book: http://www.brill.nl/scss _______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ *Andy Blunden* Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/ <http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/> Videos: http://vimeo.com/user3478333/videos Book: http://www.brill.nl/scss _______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca-- WORK as: Visiting Lecturer Wits School of Education HOME (please use these details) 6 Andover Road Westdene Johannesburg 2092 +27 (0)11 673 9265 +27 (0)82 562 1050 _______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmcaLucas M. Bietti Macquarie University Universitat Pompeu Fabra lucas@bietti.org www.collectivememory.net _______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ *Andy Blunden* Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/ Videos: http://vimeo.com/user3478333/videos Book: http://www.brill.nl/scss _______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmcaLucas M. Bietti Macquarie University Universitat Pompeu Fabra lucas@bietti.org www.collectivememory.net _______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca_______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
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