We hold these truths to be self-evident

[drwex]

I am running into a situation where (my favorite, very intelligent) cow orker and I disagree on something I consider so self-evidently true that I'm having a hard time mustering coherent arguments for the proposition. I dig in and realize that no, not everyone believes this thing. It's still a subject of argument. So once again I turn to my unscientific polling audience (you) and ask:

Do you believe that tools we use are agnostic, or do you believe that our thoughts and behaviors are shaped by our tools?

Some explanatory blah-blah follows

This is sometimes referred to embodied cognition, or material engagement (see for example Malafouris's recounting) and in psychology it's congruent with ideas that get called "scaffolding". See also Hutchins' work on cognition in the wild (http://www.amazon.com/Cognition-Wild-Press-Edwin-Hutchins/dp/0262581469).

The idea is that we don't follow abstract processes, or think in some kind of isolation chamber. Instead, our thinking and behavior is shaped by the environment it's done in, and the tools present in that environment. Of course, it runs both ways in that we tend to invent tools that promote the processes we like or find useful.

The theory also abuts linguistic theories that are often credited to Worf (as in Sapir-Worf) which is an argument that the language(s) you think in affect your thinking.

Kevin Kelly once expressed a related idea as "function melts form", which I very much like. That is, you don't have an ideal process or behavior in mind and go out to create the (process-neutral) tools that allow you to execute it. Instead, you grab what's at hand and the result is that you get something influenced by the tools at hand, not an idealized instantiation of your mental model.

Comments

[sweetmmeblue.livejournal.com]

When you say tools what do you mean?

[drwex]

I mean it quite broadly. Tools are everything from a compass/sextant (Hutchins' book is a study of how navigation is done on ships) to computer tools such as programming languages and systems, to mental tools such as recipes/guidelines/checklists.

I believe that all of these things shape our thoughts. When all you have is a hammer...

[marius23.livejournal.com]

Is your friend some kind of Platonist?

[drwex]

Quite possibly.

[mangosteen]

Can you summarize what said co-worker believes?

[drwex]

She believes that tools are "agnostic" - that people follow processes and can value a tool more or less based on some independent metric of merit or fitness for purpose. Regardless, she believes that influence flows only in one direction: from person to tool, and not the other way.

[psybelle.livejournal.com]

ohHELLno

I was in grad school right when computer tools for doing literature searches started to get *good*, and I was observant/iintrospective enough to see how my basic thought processes in framing questions changed over time through the practice of shaping queries using Boolean logic.

Damn right our tools shape us…

(conversely, not saying a word about sloppy logic and "just dump search terms into the google box")

[drwex]

Yes, see, it's that evident to me. I'm just not cohering good arguments in favor.

[badseed1980.livejournal.com]

If you talk about emotional processing in particular as a tool, I wonder if your coworker might feel differently. Our environments, especially our upbringing, can influence how we process things emotionally: whether we try to squish our emotions down and subvert them, or talk it out with other people, or think about it over and over internally, or what have you. If you grow up in an environment where no one ever talks about their feelings, you likely lack a "tool" for processing your emotions openly, and are more likely to either do it internally or squash those emotions down. The way you process your emotions certainly has an effect on you, the processor. If you want the effect of having your emotions be invisible to the outside world, you're going to squash them down or process them internally. If you want the effect of getting support and counsel on the things that are affecting you emotionally, you'll more likely process them with other people.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

Oh, I disagree. Greatly.

[wotw]

In case it helps you to know this: Both your account of your own position and your account of your co-worker's position read to me as total gibberish, and I haven't the foggiest notion what you're arguing about, or what you're trying to ask.

[drwex]

is that a request for more explanation? It's difficult to summarize all-encompassing theories of cognition in a few sentences but I can try.

[wotw]

It's not really a request for more explanation so much as a heads-up that for people who aren't immersed in your jargon, it's quite impossible to tell what you're talking about. (Not that you should necessarily care about that.)

[drwex]

That's worth knowing. I am guessing that other commenters did understand so I'm curious what was opaque to you. My intuition is that other people who found it opaque wouldn't say anything, so thanks for chiming in at least.

[frobzwiththingz.livejournal.com]

*Tools* are agnostic.

*People* are habit-forming creatures, the vast majority of which abhor change.

Of course what set of tools you use regularly is going to to be correlated with what strategies you tend to default to to solve problems.
This isn't the fault of the tool, but it doesn't really matter; fixing any strategic tunnel vision exhibited by any given "person+tools" combination
is likely going to require swapping the tools out. Swapping the people out is probably more complicated.

[drwex]

I would love to hear your reaction to reading Hutchins' book.

[psybelle.livejournal.com]

Little Boy and Fat Man, land mines, weaponized anthrax, red-lining … these are all tools.

Define "agnostic"?

[dpolicar]

Sure, of course our "tools" (including our bodies, our environments, etc.) shape our cognition.

[drwex]

Hmm, I think of tools as different from those things, though I want to hold "bodies" in reserve. You're definitely following the history of philosophy here since this line of thought led directly to the phenomenologists and their exploration of embodied existence.

But I think I mean something different by "tool" in the sense that we think of ourselves as "tool-using mammals"; that is, tools are things we've created out of the available environment though some number of conscious choices and shaping decisions. A rock I pick up might be used as a "tool" but I think that tells us less than finding a person has selected a rock that cracks in a certain way and has deliberately cracked that rock so as to make something very much like a blade. That's us shaping the tool, which I think is indisputable. The question is whether it also runs the other direction.

[dpolicar]

Even given the narrower definition of "tool" you suggest here, agreed that our tools shape our cognition. (Of course, some tools do so utterly negligibly, while others do so significantly.)

That said, I think the ways in which our tools shape our cognition are basically similar to the ways our bodies and environments shape our cognition, so it seems weird to me to treat those as two different questions.

Not wrong, just weird, in the same way that treating addition of natural numbers and addition of integers as two different operations isn't wrong, and is even justifiable for didactic purposes, but is weird more broadly.

[drwex]

I generally agree with you; I'm just saying this equivalence is a more advanced topic (I think).