Member-only story
Tool Concepts
Five theoretical hypotheses of tool concept
This article is a section of Hammer, Hammering, Affordance: The Materiality Turn and Artifact-centered Interaction.
Hauser and Santos (2007) wrote an essay titled The Evolutionary Ancestry of Our Knowledge of Tools: From Percepts to Concepts and discussed the concept of tools. They identified three groups of conceptual theories of tools and offered the diagram below which presents five theoretical hypotheses.
Affordance is one of five theoretical hypotheses with a weak ontological structure. In other words, we probably don’t need the concept of HAMMER. Hauser and Laurie said, “Under this theoretical stance (the affordance perspective), human represent artifacts only on the basis of their physical features. The properties of a hammer, its graspable shape and hard, pounding edge, are taken in by our perceptual systems and simply cry out for the action of hammering. Under this view, however, there is no HAMMER representation, no ontological category of an object with a particular shape that is used for a particular function that tends to be found in a toolbox, and certainly no organizing theoretical framework for organizing HAMMER into the more general concept…
