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"An artifact is an aspect of the material world that has been modified over the history of its incorporation into goal-directed human action. By virtue of the changes wrought in the process of their creation and use, artifacts are simultaneously ideal (conceptual) and material. They are ideal in that their material from has been shaped by their participation in the interactions of which they were previously a part and which they mediate in the present" (Cole 1996, 117). The materiality of categories, like that of other things associated with the purely cognitive, has been difficult to analyze. The Janus-faced conceptual-material notion of artifacts suggested by Cole combined with the attention to the use in practice of categories is a good way to begin. Classifications are both conceptual (in the sense of persistent patterns of change and action, resources for organizing abstractions) and material (in the sense of being inscribed, transported, and affixed to stuff). |
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Cole's intent is to emphasize the conceptual and symbolic sides of things often taken as only materials, tools, and other artifacts. It is similarly felicitous to emphasize the brute material force of that which has been considered ideal, such as categories. |
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The most radical turn taken by Pragmatist philosophers such as Dewey and Bentley, and closely followed by Chicago School sociologists such as Thomas and Hughes, is perhaps the least understood. It is related, both historically and conceptually, to the cognitive reforms detailed above. Consequences, asserted Dewey against a rising tide of analytic philosophy, are the thing to look at in any argumentnot ideal logical antecedents. What matters about an argument is who, under what conditions, takes it to be true. Carried over into sociology, W. I. and Dorothy Thomas used it (as Howard Becker would some decades later) to argue against essentialism in examining so-called deviants or problem children (Thomas and Thomas 1917, Becker 1963). If social scientists do not understand people's definition of a situation, they do not understand it at all. That definitionwhether it is the label of deviant or the performance of a religious ritualis what people will shape their behavior toward. |
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This is a much more profound cut on social construction than the mere notion that people construct their own realities. It makes no comment on where the definition of the situation may come from |
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