Post on 29-Jan-2023
Tool use and the human mind: From basic to materially mediated
operative intentionality
Abstract:
This paper explores some of the cognitive-ecological dimensions of various manual forms of
tool use occurring among human agents. In particular, it clarifies what such forms reveal
about the intentionality of the human mind. Integrating phenomenological, philosophical
and anthropological findings and perspectives, I argue that there exist not one but at least
three different forms of operative types of intentionality, which are associated with three
specific forms of manual technical activity. First, there is the direct type of operative
intentionality that realizes itself through a human agent’s concrete bodily movements.
Second, there is a materially mediated form of operative intentionality, which is required for
performing those technical activities where the external tool directly extends the
movements of the human body. Third, there is a more complex variety of such materially
mediated intentionality, which underpins those forms of tool use where the dynamics of the
tool and those of the body significantly diverge. It is suggested that the relation between
these three forms of operative intentionality is best conceived in terms of a structural
hierarchy.
Keywords:
Operative Intentionality; Cognitive Ecology; Phenomenology; Tool use; Embodied Mind;
Merleau-Ponty; Leroi-Gourhan
1
Please do not cite this version. The final version of this paper is available online, DOI 10.1515/cogsem-2014-0014
Introduction
The domains of hominin technological activity and of material culture more generally have
until recently received relatively little attention in mainstream philosophy of mind and
philosophy of cognition, particularly if compared to the vast literature on human linguistic
activity and its cognitive dimensions (Preston 1998, 513-514). This has changed somewhat
over roughly the last two decades with the proliferation of approaches that conceptualize
the mind and its activity as an embodied, enactive, embedded, extended, distributed or
situated process (see, e.g., Chemero 2009; Clark 2011; Clark and Chalmers 1998; Hutchins
1995; Varela, Rosch and Thompson 1991).
In the context of this proliferation, the primary focus of investigation has however
been on those material artifacts that are designed and employed to support cognitive
activities (see, e.g., Hutchins 2001; Norman 1991; also Donald 2010) – and related to this,
on the study of those ‘external’ physical actions performed by an embodied cognitive agent
“that make mental computation easier, faster, or more reliable” (Kirsh and Maglio 1994,
513-514). By comparison, relatively little attention has been devoted to those material
artifacts whose ultimate purpose is not a cognitive one, but rather the causing of some
directed material change in bodies or the environment. So too, the cognitive processes that
are associated with the use of such artifacts have garnered relatively scant attention.1 This
is despite the fact that many of our tool-mediated technical activities are both highly
1 Among the notable exceptions are Preston’s groundbreaking paper on the cognitive dimensions of tool use
(1998); Menary’s discussions of manipulative actions that involve the use of tools (2009; 2010), and a range of
more recent papers exploring the distinctive cognitive traits of human forms of tool use (Vaesen 2012), or, from
a niche-constructionist perspective, the relations between hominin technical activity and the evolution of the
modern human mind (Jeffares 2010; see also Sterelny 2007). Besides the philosophical literature, there is
however a considerable and instructive archaeological literature on the cognitive dimensions of specific
hominin technical activities (see, e.g., Haidle 2009; Malafouris 2008; Malafouris and Renfrew 2010; Wynn 1993)
such as stone-knapping (e.g., De Beaune 2004; Nowell and Davidson 2010) and tool-making activities more
generally (Stout and Chaminade 2009). A more recent attempt to synthesize a wide range of recent research
findings on the cognitive dimensions of tool use from disciplines such as psychology, archaeology, biology and
ergonomics is Baber (2003).
2
complex and dynamic, and require a cognitively demanding, real-time and interactive
coordination of brain, body, and cultural artifacts for effective technical action to occur (see
Malafouris 2008).
This paper offers a novel contribution to the study of some of the cognitive-ecological
(see Hutchins 2010)2 dimensions pertaining to those manual forms of the use of external
tools that have been commonly occurring among enculturated human agents – more
dominantly in the past, yet which also still feature prominently in our contemporary
technological life-worlds.3 What distinguishes manual forms of tool use from other forms of
technical action is that a human agent employs “an unattached environmental object to alter
more efficiently the form, position, or condition of another object” (Beck 1980, 10), in such
a manner that this agent’s hands and arms guide and provide the power to the technical
process (as in using a hammer, or as in using knife and fork). There is of course also a wide
array of technical actions in which the hands and arms play an important controlling role, as
in using a light switch, an electric drill, or a computer key board. However, these technical
actions do not classify as manual forms of tool use due to the fact that the movements of the
human body only play a peripheral, non-essential role with regard to the actual technical
process and the forces involved (see Leroi-Gourhan 1993, chapter 8).
In particular, this paper explores what those manual forms of tool use can tell us about
the nature of the human mind’s directedness toward to the environment in which it is
situated – that is, to put it in phenomenological terms, about such a mind’s intentionality.
2 Edwin Hutchins has recently defined ‘cognitive ecology’ as an approach that aims to consider and study
“cognitive phenomena in context” (see Hutchins 2010). Such an approach entails, among other things, that close
attention is given to the ways in which cognitive forms of activities are not only informed by the individual
(human) agent’s own embodiment, but also linked to various types of concrete actions that impact on and are
impacted upon by real-world environmental settings. Among the important precursors of such an ecological
perspective on cognition are Gibson’s ecological psychology (1979) and Vygotksy’s cultural-historical
psychology (e.g., Vygotsky 1978).
3 In the broadest sense, enculturation refers to a social process of learning through which individual human
agents, first of all through imitation but then also through instruction and collaboration, acquire the skills and
stocks of knowledge of the culture that surrounds them (see Tomasello, Kruger & Ratner 1993).
3
There has been some disagreement as to what the phenomenological concept of
intentionality, and the Husserlian conception in particular, really amounts to in terms of the
cognitive relationship between mind and world (see Zahavi 2004). However, its core tenet is
clear: ‘Intentionality’ means that individual mind or individual consciousness are essentially
“of something” (Husserl 1982), that is, they are directed at objects, real or imaginary, and
the world at large. Moreover, phenomenological thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty and also to
some extent Husserl have argued that such cognitive form of directedness articulates iself,
in its most basic since pre-reflective and ‘operative’ form, in and through an embodied
agent’s concrete movements and practical engagement with its surroundings (see Merleau-
Ponty 1962, 266). In short, according to the phenomenological view, the most basic, even
primary form of intentionality is “in the in the movement, in the action, in the
environmentally attuned responses” of a living agent (Gallagher & Miyahara 2012, 136).
The major claim made in this paper is that a close descriptive scrutiny suggests the
existence of various interrelated yet distinct, embodied forms of intentionality that become
manifest in and through the manual use of tools. As will be shown, some of these forms
clearly go beyond the basic and direct form of ‘operative’ intentionality (Merleau-Ponty
1962) referred to above, which has been the major focus of attention in the more recent
philosophical literature on the embodied mind (see, e.g., Menary 2010; Dreyfus 2002; Kelly
2000; Rowlands 1999; Wakefield and Dreyfus 1991), and whose role has been emphasized
in particular with regard to those sorts of skilled, embodied forms of activity taking the
form of ‘smooth’ or ‘absorbed coping’ (Dreyfus 2002; for further discussions see Reynolds
2006; and more critically, Romdenh-Romluc 2012).
In particular, it is illustrated in this paper that in manual tool use, such basic and direct
form of operative intentionality generally needs to be supplemented by more indirect
materially mediated forms of operative intentionality in order for effective tool use to occur.
What characterizes such latter forms is that at least some of the operative intentionality
making effective technical activity possible is embedded in and realized through the
materiality of the external tool. Two specific varieties – one more basic and one more
complex – of such materially mediated forms of operative intentionality will be identified
and analyzed. It is finally suggested that the relation between these three forms of operative
4
intentionality is best conceived in terms of a structural hierarchy, wherein more abstract
variants presuppose and structurally integrate the basic variants without it being the case
that the former would be reducible to the latter. Overall, this paper thus further articulates
the view that “operative intentionality is clearly distributed” over various components
including the body and environmental structures (Gallagher & Miyahara 2012, 137; see also
Malafouris 2008, 22), through the analysis of several specific ways in which such
distribution occurs throughout tool-mediated technical activities.
The discussion presented in this paper is divided into three main parts. In the first
part I briefly discuss Merleau-Ponty’s conception of motor or operative intentionality. The
aim of this discussion is to clarify, first, the role such intentionality plays in the context of a
human agent’s concrete, manual engagement with its environment, and second, such
intentionality’s cognitive limitations as they pertain to the use of tools (section 1). In the
second part I explore the operative forms of intentionality that are associated with those
more basic forms of tool use in which the external tool directly extends a human agent’s
motor activity (section 2). Drawing also on the work of Ihde (1990) and Verbeek (2008) on
technologically mediated forms of intentionality, among others, it is illustrated that the
basic and direct form of operative intentionality that Merleau-Ponty refers to plays a
necessary yet not sufficient role in such basic forms of technical activity: For effective tool
use to occur, it needs to be supplemented by a materially mediated form of operative
intentionality. In the third part I discuss those specific forms of the manual use of tools
where the dynamics of the tool and those of the arms and hands of the tool user
significantly diverge (section 3), and identify and analyze the forms of operative
intentionality that make the coordination of such complex forms of tool behavior practically
possible.
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1) Basic operative intentionality: From the hand as tool to tools for the
hand
All forms of human technical activity that involve the use of external tools are
developmentally antedated by those more basic and direct forms where the human body
remains the primary locus of technical action. In order to better understand the practical and
cognitive-ecological dimensions of the shift to tool-based technical activities, it is thus helpful
to at least briefly elaborate upon the agentive role that the human body and the hands in
particular play in the context of a human agent’s direct, practical engagement with the
environment – and on the peculiar features of the body that make such an engagement
possible in the first place.
To begin with the latter point, biological evolution has endowed human agents with a
body that is capable of sophisticated forms of manual technical activity. Following the
enduringly instructive account of human evolution and its biological and technological
dimensions presented by French archaeologist André Leroi-Gourhan (1993), of particular
importance in this regard is that the human agent, as a consequence of the evolutionary
acquisition of bipedal locomotion, is gifted with two free hands which are liberated from the
task of locomotion. Owing to this liberation, Leroi-Gourhan suggests, the hands then became
available for being effectively employed for other behavioral purposes, including skillful
technical ones (see Leroi-Gourhan 1993; see on this point also Marzke 1996; Bryne 2004).4
In particular, in biologically modern human agents, the upright structure of the body
facilitates that the manipulative activity of the hands of the body and the perceptual activity
of the visual organs of the head can be combined effectively in many behavioral activities,
including many elaborate technical operations (Leroi-Gourhan 1993, 31). In addition to this,
the human hands further possess a range of distinctive, technically enabling features. These
4 Leroi-Gourhan’s overarching evolutionary of human evolution focuses on exploring the human organism’s
biological and cultural specificities which have allowed for technology to increasingly uncouple itself from the
structure and agency of the human body, and from the confines of biological evolution accordingly. An excellent
overview of, and introduction to, Leroi-Gourhan’s oeuvre is Audouze (2002).
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include opposable thumbs on each hand, the developed capacity for precision grips, and a
high degree of functional lateralization. It is reasonable to assume that without these various
manual features and capacities, the evolutionary pathway toward more sophisticated (and
distinctively human) manual forms of technical activity, including various, behaviorally
complex forms of manual tool use, would have remained blocked.
As indicated above, however, prior to using external tools, human agents technically
engage their environment directly by way of their own body. What generally characterizes
such more direct forms of a human agent’s engagement with its environment, among other
things, is that a relatively close coupling between the activity of this agent’s own perceptual
system and that of its motor systems is maintained. For instance, if a human agent perceives
a material object in the environment that offers an affordance, then this agent may in many
instances immediately respond to this perception by moving its own body toward the object
to inspect this object closer. Or, the agent may perform a grasping movement with its own
hands to get hold of it. It is one of the important and lasting contributions of the
phenomenological tradition to have shown that such concrete, embodied types of motor
action can be directly associated with the functioning of a pre-reflective, cognitive form of
directedness toward the environment, namely the aforementioned ‘motor’ or ‘operative
intentionality’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962). It is argued, maybe most convincingly by Merleau-
Ponty, that this form of intentionality becoming manifest in and through an embodied
agent’s movements effectively functions without involving or requiring any explicit recourse
to or mediation by representational or objectifying cognitive functions (see, e.g., Merleau-
Ponty 1962, 266; also 142; also Dreyfus 2002).5
5 Merleau-Ponty first of all introduced the notion of motor or operative intentionality in his discussion of
psychologists Goldstein and Gelb's clinical accounts of the pathological behaviors of their patient Schneider,
who suffered serious brain injuries in WWI. In a discerning discussion, Jensen (2009) has shown that Merleau-
Ponty's use of the pathological behavior of Schneider for his conceptualization of operative intentionality is not
free from ambiguities. These ambiguities, Jensen argues, can however be resolved without rendering Merleau-
Ponty's general account ineffective. With regard to the development of the notion of operative intentionality, it
is furthermore noteworthy that Husserl, prior to Merleau-Ponty, already offered a conception of a concrete,
embodied form of intentionality he referred to as “functioning [fungierend]” (e.g. Husserl 2001; see on this
point also Thomson 2007, 478-479).
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Following Merleau-Ponty, such a basic, operative form of intentionality plays a
cognitively and practically fundamental role in the context of an embodied agent’s active
engagement with its immediate surroundings. This is due to the fact that this basic, operative
form of intentionality allows such agents to effectively perform those ‘concrete’ bodily
movements that are geared to a situation that requires an immediate response (e.g., 1962,
111). According to Merleau-Ponty, movements can be labeled ‘concrete’ if they operate on a
level where no specifically conscious, anticipatory intervention is involved, for instance, as
when one scratches one’s arm, or grasps an object without conscious reflection upon the
object or the movement performed (see, e.g., 1962, 105-106). At the same time, however,
Merleau-Ponty also notes that the behavioral scope of such concrete movements remains
rather restricted. The reason for this restriction is that concrete motor actions remain
directly tied to the experienced ‘here and now’ of an embodied agent, and thus, one may add,
to the functioning of an agent’s own body as the ‘center of action and perception’ (see
Husserl 1989).
This contrasts with those movements performed by embodied agents, and embodied
human agents more specifically, that Merleau-Ponty labels ‘abstract’. According to Merleau-
Ponty, abstract movements are not so much concerned with directly responding to an actual
situation, but rather with constructively projecting a potential situation. In this sense,
Merleau-Ponty suggests, abstract movements can be attributed a “virtual” dimension (1962,
111). Examples of abstract movements are the act of pointing at one’s nose by way of a ruler
one holds in one’s hands (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 103), or the act of (declarative) pointing in
general. Merleau-Ponty observes that in order to perform abstract movements, embodied
agents must possess a cognitive capacity of liberating their own motor activity from their
own, immediate experiential immersion into the concrete situation (see 1962, 111-112;
121). Merleau-Ponty also speaks in this regard of the fact that abstract movements exhibit a
“centrifugal” orientation – in contrast to concrete movements which, in remaining oriented
toward the body and the concretely experienced ‘here and now’, remain “centripetal” in
nature (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 111). In making this observation, Merleau-Ponty draws heavily
on the classic psychological studies on the difference between (abstract and concrete)
gestures of pointing and grasping undertaken by Kurt Goldstein (1971). In a paper that is
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based on these studies, Goldstein claims that the successful execution of the gesture of
(declarative) pointing presupposes a specific form of transcendence on the part of the
pointing agent, which has its basis in this agents’ cognitive capacity of conceiving of itself as
an identity that is somewhat distinct from the environment (see 1971, 267-268).6
An embodied agent’s capacity to transcend the immediate ‘here and now’ in his own
bodily actions must ultimately also play a fundamental role in his effective manual
mobilization of mediating tools, that is, of external tools that function as a medium (see also
section 2). Among other things, what characterizes such a “mediating function” (Vygotksy
1978, 54) is that the tools employed redirect some of the behavioral activities of the
embodied agents who are using them (see Vygotsky 1978). For such a processes of
mediation to occur in the first place, the embodied agents must be cognitively capable of
attaining a relative displacement from their own bodies – and from the direct perceptual and
practical access to the environment that these bodies provide.7
In regard to such a displacement one can analytically discern both a spatial and a
temporal dimension. With regard to human agents, it has been noted that the practical
capacity for a spatial displacement expresses itself exemplarily in the coordinated use of the
“intervening space” (Straus 1952, 548) that is accessible through the movement of the hands
and arms of the human body, and which functions as a “medium” for action between the
human agent and this agent’s environment (549). In order to use such intervening space
effectively, a human agent requires a basic grasp of this space as something that is directly
constituted through the manipulative activity of its own body, and yet that, at the same time,
6 This cognitive requirement may explain why declarative forms of pointing appear to occur among primates
only, and more specifically, among primates that have been subjected to a process of enculturation. There
remains however some disagreement among researchers as to whether declarative varieties of pointing
activity are restricted to enculturated human primates (Tomasello, Carpenter and Liszkowski 2007), or
whether enculturation can also elicit similar capacities in non-human primates such as chimpanzees and
bonobos (Lyn, Russell and Hopkins 2010).
7 The notion of “displacement” is derived from a classic paper by Hockett (1960). Hockett, however, associates
such displacement exclusively with (human) language, which, he observes, allows language users to refer to
“things that are remote in space and time (or both) from where the talking goes on” (Hockett 1960: 90).
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is also separate from this body and its activity. This particular form of the comprehension of
space obviously is central to a human agent’s effective manual use of external tools, which
likewise are not a direct part of this agent’s own body, but which also only function
effectively if directly handled by this body. Related to such use of intervening space, effective
manual tool use further requires, on part on the tool user, the practical grasping and mastery
of some sort of spatial dialectics. On the one hand, tools tend to extend the spatial reach the
tool user has within the environment. Yet on the other hand, such expansion is based upon a
shifting of the center of the material, technical engagement with the environment away from
the tool user's own body.
Inseparable from the forms of spatial displacement just discussed, the effective use of
tools also rests upon the capacity of the embodied agents using them to partially liberate
their own behavioral activity from the confines of the experienced ‘now’. Among human
agents, this liberation expresses itself exemplarily in the occurrence of significantly delayed
responses to a problem immediately encountered in the environment, where the delayed
response may involve the use of tools that were not part of the initially encountered
situation (see Gardenförs 1996, 266). For example, human agents, if spotting a potential prey
in the environment, may not try to seize the prey directly, but instead resort to constructing
a sophisticated trap to capture the prey at a later stage. This sort of behavior naturally
presupposes the capacity of such agents to at least partially rein in some of their most
immediate, instinct-based motor responses when encountering environments and objects
that offer an affordance to them. Further vital, at least in the instance of more complex, tool-
mediated responses, is the capacity of human agents to recall a memory (of a particular tool
or technique) independently of the actual situation in which the memory was created (see
Gardenförs 1996, 166).
The prominence of such temporally delayed behavioral responses involving tools
clearly reveals that such agents are highly capable of what has been aptly referred to by
Miriam Haidle (2009) as a more indirect or ‘roundabout-thinking’ to solve given problems.
Haidle also makes the important observation that, in the case of many sophisticated forms of
tool-mediated behavior, tools may actually function in a way that involves a reversal of the
traditional relation between problem and solution orientation. For example, when using a
10
bow and arrow in hunting, human agents engage in activities where they start, not with a
concrete “problem for which a tool is sought as part of the solution”, but, as it were, “with the
solution and look for new problems to which they can apply it” (Haidle 2009, 72). In such
circumstances, one may justifiably say, the external tool really starts to mediate, that is, to
control and redirect a human agent’s technical activity.
To sum up, it has been shown in this section that the capacity of human agents to
engage in complex tool-mediated activities is linked to a) their capacity to achieve a cognitive
liberation from the directly experienced ‘here and now’, and b) to their capacity to partially
decouple their technical activity from that of their own bodies. As it stands, such a
cognitively demanding form of mediated activity can be neither completely nor directly
derived from an individual human agent’s basic, embodied operative intentionality alone. At
the very least, it cannot be derived from any type of operative intentionality that becomes
directly manifest, prior to any form of training and learning, in and through the concrete
movements of such an agent’s own body.
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2) Materially mediated operative intentionality I: Tool use in direct motor
function
If the basic operative intentionality underpinning a human agent’s concrete movements is
not sufficient for tool-mediated behavior to occur, then the question poses itself what
operative sort of intentionality is additionally required to make such behavior possible. At
the very least, this much can be said; the intentionality in question must be of such a sort
that it allows for engaging in more indirect forms of motor activity, where the environment
is acted upon not merely directly through the movements of this agent’s own body but also
through the tool that the body is engaging with.
That embodied forms of operative intentionality can indeed expand to incorporate
external tools has already been proposed repeatedly by Merleau-Ponty (1962); and the
notion of such ‘extended’ intentionality has later been developed upon further by
philosophers of technology Don Ihde (1990) and Peter-Paul Verbeek (2008). In his
phenomenological account of human-technology relations, Ihde (1990, chapter 5)
distinguishes several ways in which human agents engage with technology artifacts, and
through these artifacts, with the world more generally: Embodiment relations, hermeneutic
relations, alterity relations and background relations. Most relevant for the present analysis
of intentionality and tool use is what Ihde refers to as “embodiment relations” (1990, 72).
According to Ihde, what characterizes these embodiment relations is that the technological
artifact is “in a position of mediation” (1990, 73). What is meant by this is that the artifact,
both in spatial and in actional terms, is being situated between the human agent (and its
body) and the world that this agent engages with, thus functioning as a medium between
them. According to Ihde, the embodying of an external tool as a medium involves, among
other things, not only that the tool in question becomes increasingly transparent to the
user, but also that in order to achieve such transparency, the user has acquired a familiarity
with the tool and its use (1990, 73).8 Overall, Ihde’s analyses thus suggest that, in the case
8 For example, one can observe that in many routine types of technical activity, the act of writing for instance,
sufficiently skilled human agents generally do not direct their perceptual attention at the tool they directly
manually handle, but rather at the (visible or tangible transformation of) the external object that the tool is
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of embodiment relations, the technological intentionality in question includes “an extended
materiality within our relations with the world” (Ihde 2012, xii), where such materiality
functions as a medium.
Directly building upon Ihde’s analyses of human-technology relations and the notion
of technological mediation presented therein, Verbeek refers to technologically extended
forms of embodied intentionality as “mediated intentionality” (2008, 389). Similar to Ihde,
Verbeek proposes that in the instance of technologically mediated forms of intentionality,
human agents engage with and experience the world not directly through their own body
(and this body’s basic operative intentionality), “but always via a mediating artifact which
helps to shape a specific relation between humans and world” (Verbeek 2008, 389). Going
beyond Ihde’s analysis of human-technology relations, Verbeek further proposes that there
are at least two additional manifestations of technological intentionality that cannot be
subsumed easily under the rubric of mediated forms of intentionality: “hybrid
intentionality” and “composite intentionality” (2008, 309). What characterizes hybrid forms
of intentionality, Verbeek suggests, is that the technological and the human “form a new
experiencing entity” in such a manner that human and technological components becomes
indistinguishable (2008, 391). Such hybrid intentionality occurs when the technological
artifact shaping intentionality, a cochlear implant for example, physically merges with the
human body. By contrast, what characterizes composite forms of intentionality for Verbeek
is that the technological artifacts themselves realize their own form of directedness to the
world, where such directness becomes then accessible through the intentionality of human
agents (2008, 393).
Given the particular task at hand, both Ihde’s and Verbeek’s analyses however
remain limited in at least two ways, despite the instructive clues they offer to the analysis of
technologically extended or mediated forms of intentionality. First, in their analyses of
human-technology relations, both Ihde and Verbeek do not devote particular attention to
the manual use of tools, and the specific embodied and technical dynamics that are involved
materially interacting with. Such abstraction from the manually operated tool can be considered another
cognitive form of displacement underpinning the technically effective use of external tools.
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in such use. Second, and more generally, the embodiment relations that Ihde refers to (and
Verbeek generally seems to follow Ihde here) seem to be primarily based on the notion that
technology directly extends the activity of the human body.9
However, with regard to the forms of manual tool use occurring among enculturated
human agents and the associated embodied and technical dynamics more specifically, the
notion of technology as ‘extension of the body’ can only be meaningfully applied to those
more basic forms of tool use where both the human agent’s own motor action and the
external tool’s technical action remain closely aligned as to their respective direction.
Following Leroi-Gourhan one can refer to this form of technical activity as tool use in
“direct motor function” (1993, 234).10 Among the tools that are typically used in direct
motor function are the more basic implements such as sticks and knapping stones.
However, a wide range of the tools that are still commonly used in contemporary society,
hammer and pencil for example, are also examples of tools used in direct motor function.
Tool use in direct motor function is based on the direct transmission of muscular
power to an external tool, where the tool directly extends the movement performed by the
hands and arms of the body. This direct transmission and extension explains the direct
alignment between the movements of the tool user’s hands and arms and the external tool
9 Within the phenomenological tradition, the (ultimately limiting) notion of technology being and functioning as
an extension of the body can be traced back as far as Husserl, and it also features prominently in the work of
Merleau-Ponty. In Husserl’s writings, technical artifacts are repeatedly regarded as extensions of specific
functions that are originally performed by the individual human agent’s own body or Leib (see, e.g., Husserl
1973, 276), with some artifacts being understood to extend specific organs of the body and their function (e.g.,
microscopes and binoculars, which extend the eyes and their perceptual function), and others, a car for
instance, being understood to extend the body as a whole (ibid). Similarly, Merleau-Ponty overarchingly
considers technical use-objects to function as a direct sensory or motor extension of the “original structure” of a
human agent’s own body (1962, 91) – apparently regardless of whether the object in question is a simple hand-
held tool such as a cane, or a complex machine such as an automobile (see 1962, 143).
10 This contrasts with those forms of tool use that Leroi-Gourhan refers to as tool use in “indirect motor
function” (1993, 245), where such directional alignment no longer exists (see section 3 for more detail). The
limiting nature of the view that tools extend the human body is also noted by Malafouris in his theory of
‘material engagement’ (2008, 34).
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in terms of their direction. Notwithstanding this directional alignment, a wide range of
comparatively simple tools used in direct function are capable of significantly extending
both the scope and the force of the movements of the body. A cane or spear, for example,
extends the technical reach of the limbs of the human body, while a tool such as a hammer
is capable of exerting a concentrated force when impacting on target objects that exceeds
anything that could be achieved by bodily means alone.
The direct extension of movements ultimately appears to suggest that the
technologically mediated form of intentionally referred to above, in the instance of tool use in
direct motor function, can be conceived of as directly extending a human agent’s own,
embodied operative intentionality. At the same time, however, the notion of such direct and
smooth extension can be misleading given the mediating function of the tool and its
implications for the interlinking of basic embodied and technologically mediated forms of
operative intentionality. Crucial in this regard is that the mediating function entails a
significant decrease in the technical agency and efficacy of the human agent’s own body and
its movements, if compared to manual forms of activity where the hands directly function as
tools. The cause of this decrease is of course that in all forms of manual tool use, the hand of
the tool user cedes its own immediate technical function to the external tool. Yet at the same
time, it is precisely this ceding that provides the human tool user with a range of new, more
effective ways of materially engaging with the environment.11
The ceding of the technical function naturally entails that the human tool user’s basic
operative intentionality loses much of its direct technical purpose and efficacy, instead
requiring the mediation of the external tool for technically purposeful and effective action to
occur. This does not mean that such basic operative intentionality becomes technically
superfluous – any tool still has to be grasped through a concrete movement and be manually
driven in order for it to be technically effective (see Leroi-Gourhan 1993, 237). But overall,
for any effective use of external tools to occur, the basic embodied form of operative
intentionality needs to be complemented, on the part of the human tool user, by a materially
11 I have further elaborated upon this practical ‘dialectics’ of body and external tool in Woelert (2016). For a classic account of this dialetics see also Leroi-Gourhan (1993, chapter 8).
15
mediated form of operative intentionality that effectively integrates the former operative
intentionality into its own functioning.
16
3) Materially mediated operative intentionality II: Tool use in indirect
motor function
In addition to tool use in direct motor function, human agents also resort to manual forms of
tool use where the technical dynamics of the tool are no longer directionally aligned with the
movements of the human body which originally made the tool effective. It is argued in this
section that the (human) phenomenon of these forms of tool use in “indirect motor function”
(Leroi-Gourhan 1993, 245) suggests the existence of a third, more abstract and complex type
of operative intentionality. This intentionality is structurally distinct from both the embodied
operative type of intentionality that remains restricted to the concrete movements of the
human agent’s body, and the more basic mediated operative intentionality underpinning tool
use in direct motor action.
First, however, let me provide some examples of tool use in indirect motor function,
and illustrate the distinctive technical dynamics that characterize this form of tool use. Most
obviously, the directional divergence between the bodily movement of the tool user and that
of the tool impacting on its target object is apparent in the use of all manually operated tools
that make use of leverage. It is further generally characteristic of all manual tools that
facilitate the translation of movements from one shape to another, for example, that of linear
bodily movements into circular, technical ones.
The distinctive directional divergence between the bodily and technical dynamics
that characterizes tool use in indirect motor function can already be clearly observed in the
use of the most simple leverage tools. For example, when using a crowbar, the direction of
force of the leveraging tool impacting on another material object is diametrically opposed to
the direction of the force which is actively applied to this tool by the human agent’s hands
and arms. The same divergence also can be strikingly observed in the use of technically more
complex manual tools that use leverage, such as a bow and arrow. In shooting an arrow, the
main motor action performed by the human body (the backward drawing of the bowstring
by the hands and arms) is directionally opposed to the swift movement of the arrow flying
forward, towards and forcefully impacting upon its target, after release of the bowstring. An
interesting example of a tool effectively translating movements from one shape to another is 17
the bow drill. The bow drill is a tool that can be used not only for drilling holes but also to
make fire through friction. It is driven by linear movements of the arms of the human body,
which move the bow quickly back and forth. The bowstring in turn propels the drill, which
moves in a circular fashion.
Both the examples of the use of a bow and arrow as well as that of the bow drill
demonstrate that tools used in indirect motor function attain control over the technical
dynamics of the coupled system human tool user-tool to a degree that goes dramatically
beyond what is generally characteristic of tool use in direct motor function. In tool use in
direct motor function, the external tools, in line with their own specific technical structure
and functionality, come to restrict not only the human body’s direct contribution to technical
efficacy, but also significantly limit the scope of the body’s movements that make these tools
technically effective. What is shown overall in the examples discussed above is that tools
employed in indirect motor function partially take over from the body and its agency in
providing structure to the overall technical process. With respect to tool use in indirect
motor function in particular, it thus can be reasonably argued that an embodied human agent
and its external tools constitute a system in which technical agency is distributed (see
Noland 2009, 110).
The distributed agentive nature and the complex dynamics of tool use in indirect motor
function moreover suggest that the mind of the embodied agent capable of effectively
coordinating these more indirect technical activities likewise has to be relatively complex.
This is because the coordination of tool use in indirect motor function requires a mind
capable of coordinating the tool user's own bodily movements in a way that allows for the
anticipation and accommodation of the divergence between these movements and those of
the tool, also continuously taking into account the bearing of both of these movements on the
target object of technical action. Given these complexities, it may not come as a big surprise
that apparently only a very powerful mind has been found to be capable of inventing and
effectively coordinating tool use in indirect motor function: The enculturated human mind.
As a matter of fact, all available empirical evidence suggests that enculturated human agents
18
alone are capable of successfully engaging in more sophisticated forms of tool use in indirect
motor function.12
Ultimately, it can be inferred from the complex dynamics of tool use of indirect motor
function that the operative intentionality facilitating this form of tool use must be
structurally different from both the basic embodied as well as the more basic technologically
or materially mediated forms discussed in the previous two sections. This is because the
operative intentionality underpinning tool use in indirect motor function must be of such an
overarching and ‘abstract’ nature that it can accommodate into its own functioning, not only
the general mediation by the tool that has been discussed in the previous section, but also
the external tool’s semi-autonomous technical dynamics. It is consequently clear that the
form of operative intentionality facilitating tool use in indirect motor function goes beyond
the respective forms of operative intentionality that underpin technical activities where the
hands of the human body directly function as tools, or those technical activities in which the
tool directly extends the movements of the body. Furthermore, the example of tool use in
indirect motor function most clearly illustrates that in tool-mediated activities, the tool
employed does not constitute “the passive content or object of human intentionality”
(Malafouris 2008, 33), but rather functions as a material entity that ‘actively’ mediates and
transforms a human agent’s own, operative intentionality.
At the same time, however, it is obvious that in tool use in indirect motor function, the
high-level, more indirect form of a materially mediated operative intentionality must in its
own functioning integrate both the two lower level forms of operative intentionality for
effective tool use to occur. This is because in tool use in indirect motor function, the concrete
movements of the human body as well as the effective, direct linking of such movements with
the external tool continue to play a technically crucial role, as do consequently the associated
forms of operative intentionality – the basic, embodied intentionality discussed in section 1,
12 According to Beck (1980), some of the apes, for example chimpanzees and orang-utans, have been observed
using simple tools such as sticks in a way that involves applying leverage. However, there appears to be no
example of tool use among non-human animals where both the body’s motor action and the tool’s technical
action, with regard to their respective direction, significantly diverge.
19
and the more basic direct variant of a materially mediated intentionality discussed in section
2.
All of this suggests that the relation between, and interlinking of, the three forms of
operative intentionality discussed in this paper ought to be conceived of in structural terms,
namely in the form of what can be referred to as a ‘structural hierarchy’ (see Merleau-Ponty
1963) or “implication hierarchy” (Zlatev 2009, 169). Both of these notions generally amount
to a hierarchical yet integrative conception of the ways in which lower, more immediate
levels of an organism’s embodied activity are related to those higher, more indirect or
mediated levels of activity (see Merleau-Ponty, 104-124). More specifically, the notion of
structural hierarchy suggests a form of organization where the higher levels of an organism’s
activity and the associated cognitive processes – in this instance the mediated variants of an
operative intentionality – presuppose and structurally integrate the lower ones – the basic
embodied operative intentionality – without it being the case that the latter would ever be
reducible to the former.
20
Conclusion
This paper has explored some of the cognitive-ecological dimensions of various manual
forms of tool use occurring among enculturated human agents, with a particular emphasis
on the various forms of operative intentionality involved in such technical activities. By
means of a close scrutiny of the embodied and technical dynamics involved in three specific
forms of technical activity, it has been shown that there exists not one but at least three
different yet interrelated forms of a technically enabling form of operative intentionality.
There is first of all a basic and direct form of operative intentionality. This
intentionality, whose functioning has been well described by phenomenological thinkers
such as Merleau-Ponty, is directly tied to a human agent’s concrete motor activity and the
concretely experienced situation. However, as has been shown in section 1, this basic,
embodied form of an operative intentionality is necessary yet not sufficient for effective
manual tool use to occur. This is because throughout the use of external tools, this form of
operative intentionality needs to to be supplemented by more indirect and abstract,
materially mediated forms of operative intentionality.
With regard to materially mediated forms of operative intentionality, two varieties
were distinguished. First, extending on the work of Ihde and Verbeek, it has been shown in
section 2 that there is a more basic variety that is associated with forms of tool use where
the external tool directly extends the movements of the hands and arms of the human body.
It has been illustrated that in such forms of tool use, the human agent’s basic operative
intentionality loses much of its direct technical purpose and efficacy, instead requiring the
mediation of the external tool for technically purposeful and effective action to occur.
Second, it has been shown in section 3 that there is also a more complex variety of
materially mediated operative intentionality. This intentionality is associated with those
more indirect forms of manual tool use throughout which the technical dynamics of the tool
and those of the tool user’s own hands and arms significantly diverge as to their respective
direction.
It further has been illustrated in section 3 that in effective tool use in indirect motor
function, the more indirect variety of a materially mediated form of operative intentionality 21
functions in a manner that involves the apparently seamless integration of the two more
basic and direct, embodied and materially mediated forms of operative intentionality
discussed in sections 1 and 2. On this basis, I have proposed that the relation between the
three forms of an operative intentionality discussed in this paper ought best be conceived of
in the terms of a structural hierarchy, wherein the higher level, more indirect forms of
operative intentionality presuppose and structurally integrate the lower, more direct forms
without being reducible them.
The research presented here could be taken further in a number of ways. One
potential avenue for future research concerns the examination of the evolutionary
dimensions of the taxonomy of operative forms of intentionality proposed here. In addition,
the taxonomy proposed here could also enrich current experimental-psychological research
regarding the ways in which the manual use of external tools shapes an embodied agent’s
own body schema and peri-personal space (see for an overview Gallese & Sinigaglia 2010,
747-8). These experimental studies lend some support to the view that the use of tools
eventually leads to an extension of both one’s own peri-personal space and body-schema,
where the tool is incorporated into the representation one has of one’s own body. Utilizing
the taxonomy presented in this paper, it could be instructive to experimentally examine
whether these psychological processes articulate themselves differently depending on
whether a) the tool in question is employed in direct or indirect motor function, and related
to this, whether b) the form of operative intentionality involved is of the simple or of the
complex materially mediated variety.
22
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