260904: Tool Metaphors
The broadening of the concept of a "tool" may be the most important metaphorical development of our time.
Language is now a tool. Emotions are tools. Morality & ethics are systems of tools.
We have "psychotools" (Vervaeke), cognitive "gadgets" (Heyes), and "anthropotechnics" (Sloterdijk).
What is crucial about the tool-metaphor is two-fold:
A tool is designed to accomplish some function or end. We cannot understand its form without reference to that end.
A tool's efficacy depends upon the context in which it is embedded. We cannot understand its form without reference to that context.
This is part of a more general epistemological turn, in the 20th C, which Stephen Toulmin has described as a rejection of Enlightenment modernity in favor of Renaissance humanism.
Cartesian epistemology is interested in building axiomatic certainties—in logically wielding abstractions in a high-leverage, universal way. Modernist architecture, like that of Mies van der Rohe, pursues similar principles, attempting to abandon history and contingency in favor of pure Platonic geometry.
The Renaissance humanism of Montaigne, on the other hand, is skeptical and questioning; it is contextual and proto-ecological; it constantly re-embeds knowledge in nature. It embraces not just history but local flavor: the ambiguities of human psychology and the pluralist perspectives of anthropology.