Re: [xmca] Tools, thought, & signs (Bruner, Peirce, Newton)

Thanks for the synoptic discussion, Tony.

I think Bruner is at least partially mistating things at the beginning of
your post:
"What is most characteristic of any kind of tool-using," he wrote, "is not
the tools themselves, but rather the program that guides their use. It is in
this broader sense that tools take on their proper meaning as amplifiers of
human capacities and implementers of human activity." ….

What bothers me about this well known formulation, even though I initially
thought it just fine, is two things: 1) the strong boundary between
the "program that guides the action" and the tool; 2) the notion of
amplification.

Re 1: See Bateson, (and, I believe, both Merleu-Ponty and Heidegger) using
the blind man and stick metaphor about "where the mind ends."
     Suppose I am a blind man, and I use a stick. I go tap, tap, tap. Where
do I start? Is my mental system bounded at the hand of stick? Is
it bounded by my skin? Doe it start half way up the stick? Does it start at
the tip of the stick? ((Steps to an ecology of mind, p. 459).

Bateson goes on to discuss how "the mind" slides up and down the stick and
out away from the stick, "depending."
Wertsch, in Mind as Action spends a lot of time discussing about a unit of
analysis he calls "person acting with mediational means in cultural
context." The short form of JSB's idea here belies that unit of analysis
and the fusions it points to.

Re 2: Tools may or may not amplify. But they certainly re-mediate-- they
change the morphology of action, in a sense, they "deform" "natural"
action. Peg Griffin and I wrote about this in an article called "Cultural
amplifiers reconsidered" which is not in electronic form. Anyone interested
we can get it into such form. The basic idea is to think of amplication as
increased amplitude of a signal without change in its form; that is
not human, artifact-mediated, activity.

Very interesting about Newton. It gives one pause to think when one hears
discussions of human progress. Now uneducated farmers can
kill hundreds, and soon thousands, with some simple apprenticeship in
killing, but they stand on the shoulders of giants of course.

Thanks Tony, thought provoking once again.
mike

On 7/8/07, Tony Whitson <twhitson@udel.edu> wrote:
>
> Before we move on to the next article, there are things I've said about
> tools, thought, and signs that were offered more or less as assertions,
> without the explanation needed to make sense of them. This longish post
> attempts to remedy that.
>
> A much more readable version (layout, formatting, live links, and even a
> photo of the inscription that was minted on the edge of Newton's coins) is
> posted at
> http://postcog.net/2007/06/16/tools-thoughts-signs/
> I would suggest that anybody who wants to read this post should read it
> there, and come back here if you would want to discuss anything from it on
> this email list.
> ------------
>
> This post relates to a discussion of Shaffer and Clinton (2007) on the
> eXtended Mind, Culture and Activity discussion list (XMCA) in June and
> July
> of 2007.
>
> 1. Bruner and tools for thought
>
> In the toolforthoughts article, computer technology is the focus of
> discussion about tools in relation to thought. Noting Levi-Strauss'
> observation "that totems (e.g., animals and other natural objects) were
> not
> chosen because they were good to eat, but because they were good to think
> with," Paul Dillon implicitly raised a question of tools for thought as
> something more general than computers in the world we live in.
>
> Other examples are suggested in Peter Dow's account of a curriculum
> development project headed by Jerome Bruner (circa 1965):
>
> Concern with teaching about technology had been a persistent [p. 87]
> theme from the beginning at ESI Social Studies. …. Bruner linked
> technology
> to the development of man's conceptual powers. "What is most
> characteristic
> of any kind of tool-using," he wrote, "is not the tools themselves, but
> rather the program that guides their use. It is in this broader sense that
> tools take on their proper meaning as amplifiers of human capacities and
> implementers of human activity." ….
>
> Early efforts to define the technology unit and translate these
> general
> notions into effective classroom materials bogged down in debates over how
> broadly to define the term tool. Should the discussion of tools be
> restricted to physical objects, or is a logarithm a tool? Is the Magna
> Carta
> a tool? Is E = mc2 a tool? Should the technology materials include
> perspectives from disciplines as diverse as mathematics and history? One
> of
> the difficulties in trying to construct a unit on this topic was the lack
> of
> a clear conceptual structure for defining what technology is and for
> considering its social implications. Here, as with the other topics, some
> of
> the most interesting issues and questions fell outside of the framework of
> established academic categories. … (Dow, 1991, pp. 86-7)
>
> 2. Peirce, thought, & signs
>
> Schaffer and Clinton draw from Latour's strategy for correcting what
> Latour
> sees as the problem of treating the human and the non-human
> asymmetrically.
> It seems to me, though, that what Latour sees as a problem arises from an
> assumed Cartesian dualism. The problem does not arise, in the first place,
> within a Peircean perspective that does not presume that kind of dualism
> between the human and the natural, or the human and the artificial.
>
> Peirce recognized the world as constituted semiosically, with humans
> ourselves emerging within our participation in the semiosis that was well
> underway before we got here. Peirce understood the entire universe as
> "perfused with signs":
>
> It seems a strange thing, when one comes to ponder over it, that a
> sign
> should leave its interpreter to supply a part of its meaning; but the
> explanation of the phenomenon lies in the fact that the entire universe —
> not merely the universe of existents, but all that wider universe,
> embracing
> the universe of existents as a part, … that all this universe is perfused
> with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs (Peirce, CP 5.448;
> cf. Whitson, 2007, p. 322 ).
>
> Peirce says "all thought is in signs," understanding "thought" as as an
> activity of the world (not just humans), and "signs" also in a sense
> that's
> not limited to human communication. From Whitson (2007, pp. 296-7):
>
> As distinguished from semiology [i.e., in the tradition of Saussure —
> including Greimas and Latour], as well as earlier historic forms of
> semiotics [e.g., with the Stoics], semiotics following the work of C. S.
> Peirce is today, first and foremost, the study of semiosis, or the
> activity
> of triadic sign-relations, recognizing that
>
> the whole of nature, not just our experience of it, but the whole
> of
> nature considered in itself and on the side of its own and proper being is
> the subject of semiosis — the process and product, that is, of an action
> of
> signs coextensive with and constructive of the actual world as well as the
> world of experience and imagination. (Deely 1994: 187-188)
>
> As Peirce observed, 'To say … that thought cannot happen in an
> instant,
> but requires a time, is but another way of saying that every thought must
> be
> interpreted in another, or that all thought is in signs' (CP 5.253). Once
> the semiosic character of thought is recognized, thought itself is
> understood in a more general sense, such that
>
> Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in
> the
> work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world; and
> one
> can no more deny that it is really there, than that the colors, the
> shapes,
> etc., of objects are really there. … Not only is thought in the organic
> world, but it develops there. (CP 4.551)
>
> What exactly is it that Peirce says is 'really there' in the physical
> world, as undeniably as the colors and the shapes of objects? What Peirce
> is
> referring to is the semiosic action of triadic sign-relations:
>
> It is important to understand what I mean by semiosis. All
> dynamical
> action, or action of brute force … either takes place between two subjects
> …
> or at any rate is a resultant of such actions between pairs. But by
> 'semiosis' I mean, on the contrary, an action, or influence, which is, or
> involves, a coöperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and
> its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way
> resolvable into actions between pairs. (CP 5.484; original emphasis)
>
> What, then, are tools, or toolforthoughts? Are they different from signs,
> species of signs, or what?
>
> 3. Newton, signs, and tools
>
> rough coinageAmong the problems tackled by Isaac Newton, over the course
> of
> his varied career, was the problem of preserving England's currency
> against
> counterfeiting and "clipping" (filing off precious metal from the edges of
> coins). As head of the Royal Mint, Newton oversaw torture to induce
> confessions, capital punishment, and even having offenders drawn and
> quartered to protect the value of the royal coinage.
>
> Newton's mint began the practice of making coins with ridges around the
> edge
> so that clipping could be easily detected; and also, at that time,
> actually
> engraving the edge with the words "DECUS ET TUTAMEN" — a phrase that might
> be literally translated as "an ornament and a safeguard," but which we
> might
> also recognize as an engraving that is announcing itself as "both a sign
> and
> a tool."
>
> 4. Of tools and signs (umbrella example)
>
> Let's try this example: Suppose I know that you always check the weather
> on
> your computer before you go out for lunch. Today I notice you picked up
> your
> umbrella on your way out the door. Without checking the weather for
> myself,
> I take my own umbrella with me when I go out. From a Peircean perspective,
> my action of taking my umbrella is one of the three terms in a triadic
> sign-relation: My action is an interpretant determined by your action (the
> representamen), interpreted as a sign of possible rain (the object-term in
> this triad). Here the umbrella participates in the activity of triadic
> sign-relations.
>
> When we get outside, either of us might be preoccupied with holding our
> umbrella in the right position so it doesn't get blown inside-out by the
> wind. Now our concern is with the umbrella in its tool-relations — or
> simply
> its instrumental use as a tool for keeping dry.
>
> There seems no reason for trying to sort things into categories, as being
> either "tools" or "signs" — the question, rather, would be whether we are
> presently concerned with something as it participates in the activity of
> sign-relations, or as it functions within tool-relations.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Dow, Peter B. Schoolhouse Politics: Lessons from the Sputnik Era.
> Cambridge,
> Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.
>
> Peirce, Charles S. Collected Papers. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard
> University Press, 1866-1913/1931-1958.
>
> Shaffer, David Williamson, and Katherine A. Clinton. "Toolforthoughts:
> Reexamining Thinking in the Digital Age." Mind, Culture, And Activity 13,
> no. 4 (2007): 283-300.
>
> Whitson, James Anthony. "Education à la Silhouette: The Need for
> Semiotically-Informed Curriculum Consciousness." Semiotica 164, no. 1/4
> (2007): 235-329.
>
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Received on Sun Jul 8 17:25 PDT 2007