ARTIFACTS AS DOMESTICATED KINDS OF PRACTICESSergio F. Martínez Muñoz

Abstract of "Artifacts as Domesticated Kinds of Practices".

After briefly reviewing arguments pointing to the impossibility of distinguishing in principle between natural and artifact kinds I suggest that contrary to usual accounts artifact kinds should be characterized independently of natural kinds. Artifacts (or at least a sizable diversity of them) can be characterized in terms of construction behaviors that constitute kinds through processes of domestication of materials and social relations (organized in practices), processes that in turn enter into the constitution of more sophisticated artifacts and social relations. Understanding domestication as niche construction allows for a generalization of the concept of domestication to encompass most (if not all) construction behaviors, and thus, modeling the evolution of construction behaviors is then a way of modeling the most distinctive kinds of artifacts widely accepted as characterizing human (biological and cultural) evolution.

You do not have to classify and label things in order to perceive what they afford.i

J. J. Gibson

1.Introduction. The thesis that the kindings that matter to natural science can be

characterized as “natural kinds” is widely accepted in philosophy. Several well known

characterizations of the issue focus on the metaphysical problem of characterizing

natural kinds with the aim of using such metaphysical characterization as a basis for

scientific epistemology. (refs) Characterizations of “human” or “social kinds” are

usually presented in contrast to natural kinds (refs). In the philosophy of science

nowadays, however, several discussions stem from the idea that we have to first

characterize natural kinds epistemologically, through the study of actual scientific

classifications, and then use the succesful characterization as constraints in our

metaphysics. (refs) But if, as can be argued, it is not possible to epistemologically

distinguish in principle between natural and artifact kinds, then we should start by

characterizing artifactuality as a first step towards a epistemology of kinding.

In section 2 I review arguments pointing to the impossibility of distinguishing in

principle between natural and artifact kinds. Thus, the usual philosophical account of

artifacts based on this distinction fail. In section 3 I present accounts of artifacts

relating them closely with behaviors (and routines). This way of characterizing

artifacts in order to be productive has to reject the traditional methodological

assumption that cognition and action can be decoupled. In section 4 I point out how

this assumption is behind claims that the way in which artifactuality is characterized

in different disciplines can be oblivious to the way it is characterized in others. In

section 5 I show relevant connections between anthropological theories of material

culture and accounts of artifactuality. In section 6, Niche Construction Theory is

introduced and advantages of understanding domestication within this framework

are pointed out. I suggest that such an account of domestication can be generalized if

we give credit to the idea that domestication involves the cultivation of affordances. In

particular, traditional accounts of tool use and tool making can be understood as

construction behaviors that are domesticated in the processes of conforming to

practices through which such behaviors reproduce and diversify. This provides a

general characterization of artifactuality that can be used to overcome the duality

between cognition and action and should allow for productive comparisons of

artifactuality in different disciplines.

2. Artifacts and natural kinds. Artifacts have not caught philosophers’ attention as

much as natural kinds have. They have, of course, been a topic in metaphysics, where

usually the discussion of artifacts is parasitic on views about natural kinds. A recent

collection of essays on artifacts is Creations of the Mindii ; a book which aims to

showcase the different ways in which philosophers and scientists deal with the topic

of artifacts. For most philosophers, the question of artifacts arises because artifacts

are madeiii, and the process of making them involves intentions, thus artifacts are

mind dependent, setting them up them in contrast to natural kinds. iv The

contributions of psychologists and anthropologists in the same book question this

duality from different perspectives. Two psychologists (Barbara Malt and Steven

Sloman) start their contribution to the anthology with the following sentence: “A

sizeable subfield of cognitive psychology is devoted to how humans categorize entities

in their world, yet there has been little explicit consideration of what it means to

categorize”.v The perspective held at an intuitive level by most lay people —they tell

us— is that when people see an object, such as a table, they look for the

metaphysically real category of objects this particular object belongs to. But if pressed,

most psychologists would probably claim to be agnostic about whether or not there

are objectively defined metaphysically real groupings of artifacts. Rather,

psychologists would be inclined to think that what they mean by ‘artifact kinds’ are

psychological kinds. For Malt and Sloman, the central question about artifacts in

psychology is the question of judging “which psychologically real, if not

metaphysically real, grouping an object belongs to”.vi

Malt and Sloman have been involved in a heated debate in cognitive psychology about

the nature of categorization. Most often, how an artifact is categorized in psychology

means choosing a task and with respect to this task, finding out how a judgment is

made about which grouping it belongs to. But not any grouping will do. As Malt and

Sloman put it: “An almost universal assumption is that the psychologically real

groupings are stable groupings that map directly onto mental representations

constituting ‘concepts’...”vii They think rather that the relevant groupings depend

crucially on the situation at hand. More importantly, they claim that since grouping

artifacts can be associated with different activities, it is very important to select the

methodologies that are appropriate to the different types of categorization.

Categorization, they claim, is not a coherent field of inquiry since it is not possible to

draw a sharp line between categorization and pragmatics. Gibson would agree (as the

epigraph suggests).

In the same book, Dan Sperber questions from a very different perspective the

assumption that one can in principle distinguish between kinds of artifacts and

natural kindsviii. Sperber provides a series of examples of objects that point to a

continuum of artifacts that are made and others that we can say occur naturally. The

boundary between what is made and what occurs naturally cannot be located in the

nature of things. Sperber gives the example of seedless grapes and bananas as

examples supporting the general thesis that domesticated plants and animals have

simultaneously biological, cultural, and artifactual functions. In trying to understand

how these different functions are related, Sperber argues that the common sense

distinction between two different classes of things with respect to the question “What

is it for?” should not be the basis for our ontology.

Sperber, Malt and Sloman question the widespread assumption in metaphysics that

intentions (by themselves) are crucially relevant to the classification of artifacts by

arguing against the idea that classifications in general are independent of the situation

or the task. There are other ways of questioning the central role attributed to

intentions in the classifications of artifacts. Whose intentions and which productive

activities are supposed to determine kind membership? The idea can be thought as

unproblematic if one focuses in artisan products, like the chair made by a carpenter.

But it is far from obvious what are the intentions in question, and how these

intentions relate to the artifact in cases like a car or an airplane. Different intentions

enter into the production of different parts, and the different parts can be used in

different artifacts. Further more, one can argue that whatever the intentions are, they

are not geared to the production of one single exemplar of a car (the car I own, for

example), but rather, to the production of kinds of things (cars, trucks, motorcycles)

that can travel roads and bridges and so on. In other words, the intention of

constructing a car cannot be decoupled from the intention of constructing roads and

bridges, nor it can be decoupled from the expectation of travelling these roads. ix As

Houkes and Vermaas put it, the idea that intentions determine the kind membership

of an artifact hardly fits the complex production processes and organized collective

efforts of even the most common artifacts nowadays in production.x Houkes and

Vermaas are promoters of what is called the Dual Nature program for an ontology of

artifacts. A technical artifact has a physical nature and a functional nature. A good

design provides a good fit between the two natures. Thus, an important task consists

of formulating criteria that any satisfactory account of the ontology of artifacts has to

satisfy. Such criteria should make clear the different contributions of the two natures

in the classification of an artifact.

Promoters of this approach have formulated these criteria in different ways xi and

there is no doubt that they have advanced our understanding of artifacts in a way that

is particularly helpful in engineering.xii A crucial advance of such an approach with

respect to metaphysical theories of artifacts is the recognition that the issue of

classification and kinding are paramount. But to the extent that the dual nature

approach relies on “natural kinds” in order to characterize artifact kinds this approach

ignores accounts of artifactuality that cannot be characterized as decomposable in

terms of “natures”. Decomposing in terms of natures is not always feasible or

desirable (as the work of Malt and Sloman and Sperber exemplifies and as we see

from a different perspective below).

3. What is an artifact (beyond metaphysics)? The first issue of the journal Artifact

appeared in 2007. It included articles by authors invited to answer the question “what

is an artifact?” from different disciplinary perspectives. Owen F. Smith says in his

contribution that, through the lens of his background as anthropologist, art historian

and new media professor, he can see that the term artifact is understood in different

ways, but he suggests that the most general way of understanding artifacts requires

characterizing them as “change agents”. He quotes Carrollxiii who talks of artifacts as

“support for a task that can radically redefine the task” for which the artifact was

originally developed.

Ken Friedman in his contribution to the same issue emphasizes the behavioral

dimension of artifacts (implicit in Owen´s characterization of artifact).xiv Physical

artifacts —he says— have a behavioral dimension characterized in terms of

affordances and interfaces that are effectuated in practices. Practices for Friedman can

be either of two related things: i) ways in which we organize our working habits and

living patterns around the artifacts we use, xv and ii) behavioral artifacts identifiable as

the result of expertise (in the sense that “an expert physician practices medicine or a

lawyer argues law”.)xvi From this perspective paths between buildings, organizational

structures, organizational memory, the behaviors of actors that constitute the reality

of a performance, but also the craft of an artisan or a scientist are behavioral artifacts

constrained and articulated by practices.

This behavioral dimension of artifacts was also important in early evolutionary

economy and institutional economics. Artifacts were thought to play a a crucial role in

the classification of routines. Routines were introduced and discussed in Nelson and

Winter as fixed patterns of behaviors or actions, but the relation to artifacts, even if

recognized, was not assimilated into the theoretical (evolutionary) model of change.

This led to a dismissal of the role of artifacts and its role in the characterization of

routines. More recently it has been increasingly recognized that the notion of artifact

cannot be dismissed. There have been several attemps to bring artifacts back into the

discussion about routines. D’Adderio, for example, suggests that artifacts and

“artifactual representations” have to be brought to the forefront of the routines

debate.xvii As Cohen points out, one important presupposition that has to be removed

in order for the notion of routine to be more productive in explanations is the

assumption that cognition and action can be decoupled, and thus, that routines cannot

be modeled as simply automatic or non-intelligent patterns of behavior. Cohen

suggests that in order to overcome the immense theoretical inertia of the concept of

routine we should do better to focus on the Deweyan notion of habit.xviii

I fully agree with this suggestion, but instead of using the notion of habit we can use a

concept of practice (as Friedman does) that allows us not only to talk of habits (in

Dewey’s sense) as part and parcel of collective enterprises, but that also allows us to

talk of the complex web of (behavioral) artifacts that constitute scientific enterprises

(laboratories, mathematical theories, and so on). What is crucial is avoiding the split

between cognition and action, a distinctive feature of the traditional concept of

routine. xix

Focusing on practices as the articulation of (behavioral) artifacts also allows us to

incorporate artifacts into an evolutionary model of change. This is not a topic I can

enter here; I just want to point out that (behavioral) artifacts can be seen as products

of the evolution of the human lineage as well as culturally evolving in historical time.

As Sterelny puts it (but with my terminology), there is a coevolution of the cognitive

capacities involved in the classification of behavioral artifacts and their

environments.xxxxi

As we shall see, this close relationship between practices, artifacts and behaviors is

also a key component of non-dualistic approaches to our understanding of

artifactuality in psychology and the social sciences.

4. Back to metaphysics: on the duality of natural kinds and artifacts. There is no

doubt that western scientific thinking, since the scientific revolution at least, has used

as a point of departure for framing methodological questions an opposition between

two kinds of things, passive, material or physical things that constitute and external

world (subject to natural laws) on the one hand, and agents having the capacity to

shape the material things following plans. Such opposition has played an important

role in the organization of scientific inquiry. For example, the belief in a passive

material world allowed the drawing of a sharp line between the way in which

anthropology studies artifacts and the way in which psychology studies them.

Psychologists study phenomena at a level of abstraction that allows such phenomena

to be detached from the (cultural) context in which they take place. Such an

assumption leads to a division of labor in which anthropology describes the content of

human experience while psychology aim to characterize the processes that interpret

such experience.xxii Many critics have pointed out such methodological divide. Even in

1981 Cole worried about this divide and pointed out the important role that the divide

had played in the framing of questions and development of both disciplines.xxiii Of

course there are many different characterizations of such methodological divide.; but

there is no doubt that as Jean Lave puts it in 1988 the source of the divide is a a

positivistic epistemology. xxiv

The important point is that, once this separation between passive matter and active

(human) agents is accepted, the opposition between natural kinds and artifacts as

mind-dependent follows. The separation also justifies thinking of artifacts in

psychology in a way that does not need to be contrasted or compared to the way

artifacts are modeled (theorized about) in anthropology (or in other social sciences).

The pre-supposition is generalizable for claims supporting the view that how we

think of artifactuality in each scientific discipline has to be decided by each discipline

(implicitly) through the choice of methods appropriate to the discipline. The

assumption also leads us to think of artifacts as classifiable in terms of parts and

functions, and abstract from the context or kind of expertise that is associated with

them.

5. Artifactuality as material culture. Taking on board the opposition between

passive artifacts and natural kinds leads to views in Anthropology like that of Gordon

Childe. Childe thought that anthropologists should not attempt to reconstruct past

cultures from the evidence of remains of those cultures. They should rather look for

objective knowledge of the past, and thus all efforts should be directed to

constructing bridges that lead from such passive artifacts to a theory of the past. Such

bridges should include at crucial junctures universal laws that would allow to draw

conclusions or to test out the theories in question.xxv Towards the third part of the

twentieth century there were several important lines of inquiry trying to overcome

such a methodological framework through reevaluations of materiality designed to

question (in different ways) the idea that materiality is just a passive recipient of

human agency. Overcoming the dichotomy, however, is not easy.

Tim Ingold has claimed that most of these approaches aiming to overcome the

dichotomy between passive matter and agency fail since they continue to think in

terms of incorporeal minds entering into contact with a material world. In a special

issue of the journal Archaeological Dialogues, Ingoldxxvi summarizes his critique of

current studies on material culture. The very notion of material culture —says Ingold

— takes things to be the embodiment of mental representations, static solidified

objects taken out from the “generative flux of the medium” that gave birth to them.

For Ingold, material cultural studies tend to assume that all that is material resides in

physical things. In this issue of Archaeological Dialogs several anthropologists

respond to Ingold’s challenge.

In his response to Ingold, Tilleyxxvii suggests that Ingold does not distinguish between

“brute” materials and their properties on the one hand, and the concept of materiality

that embraces subject-object relations on the other.. Anthropologists, as opposed to

geologists —says Tilley—, are concerned with what stones mean. All materials have

their properties but only some of these materials and their properties are significant

to people. Tilley complains that Ingold does not consider the manner in which

materials affect people’s lives and suggests that Ingold is falling in the old trap of a

simplistic empiricism that considers artifacts in and for, and only in terms of,

themselves.

In his response Knappettxxviii says that even though artifacts may have material

properties that are not merely “passive” properties, their study should be

subordinated to the role the artifact plays in social relationships. The paper in which

Miller respond to Ingold is called, Plastic age or Stone Age? Miller’s point is that Ingold

seems to be out of date. Our material culture —says Miller— has very little to do with

stone things or other basic materials that might have archaeological interest but little

anthropological interest nowadays.

Now, without denying that material culture in the sense promoted by studies on

material culture is an important anthropological tool, Ingold’s materials play an

explanatory part in an account of artifactuality that goes beyond what social relations

encoded in material things can explain. The patterns of growth that are distinctive of

(kinds of) artifacts cannot be explained simply in terms of structure and function, nor

in terms of social relations alone. What is overlooked can be characterized as a

circulatory system of material culture. Materials have patterns of growth that express

themselves through practices in artifacts and social relations, that in turn enter into the

constitution of more sophisticated artifacts and social relations. Such patterns of

growth embody affordances that co-evolve with cognitive capacities and that in turn

promote the reproduction and diversification of cycles of (kinds of) artifact-tasks. xxix

Domestication and tool making provide good examples of such patterns of growth, as

we will see next.

6. Domestication, tool making and tool use as artifact niche construction.

Darwin’s key argument for the importance of natural selection in his theory of

evolution relied to a great extent on evidence obtained from processes of human

induced variation under domestication.xxx Domestication is a topic that has promoted

an interdisciplinary approach to questions such as when and where humans made the

transition from hunting and gathering to herding and farming, and more generally in

models of human evolution. In the last two decades advances in genetics and

paleontology have allowed us to reconstruct in detail the shift from wild to

domesticated species of many plants and animals. The tendency, however, is to focus

on specific questions constrained by the application of specific technological advances

and ignore the implications of these advances for our understanding of domestication

as a whole.xxxi

Most approaches to domestication in anthropology start from the assumption that

domestication involves a relationship between humans and target organisms.

Approaches focusing on relationships between humans and animals tend to bring to

the fore the relation of dominance over all aspects of the reproduction and guided

care of domesticates. Domestication is defined as a product of the intentionality that

leads to the intervention in processes of reproduction, distribution and life cycles of

the target species. A variant of this approach characterizes domestication as the result

of interventions on the life cycle of other species to suit human needs.

If one focus more on the ecological or evolutionary relations between species one is

tempted to consider that instead of thinking in terms of dominance one should think

in terms of relations of mutual benefit between species particularly through enhanced

reproductive fitness. In these approaches there is a tendency to emphasize the

similarities between, for example, the relation that dogs and humans have established

through their evolutionary history and mutualistic relations like those of flowering

plants and bees. One can study domestication from different disciplinary perspectives,

but how can we characterize domestication as a general phenomenon? Niche

construction theory (NCT) seems to offer the most promising approach. To

understand domestication as niche construction allows modeling (behavioral)

artifacts as materially entrenched behaviors in practices. Their entrenchment grounds

their classification in kinds of artifacts.

Niche construction, as a “process of organism-driven environmental modification”,

and a study of its consequences in different areas of biology and the human sciences

was initially presented in systematic form in Odling-Smee et al. 2003.xxxii The basic

idea is that niche construction has hitherto neglected the implications for our

understanding of evolutionary processes. Niche construction should not be regarded

as a mere “enforcer” of natural selection but as a major participant in evolution. In

their book, Odling-Smee, Laland and Feldman tell us that niche construction is “the

process whereby organisms, through their metabolism, their activities and their

choices, modify their own and/or each other’s niches.”xxxiii They provide several

examples and comparative argument to show the way in which niche construction can

change the direction, rate and dynamics of the evolutionary process.

What is most relevant for us are the implications of this way of approaching an

explanation of domestication. Recently NCT has been used to explain domestication

and the origin of agriculture. For example, Bruce Smith shows how NCT can be used to

provide fresh understanding of how early humans developed the ability to

significantly alter their environment starting with the initial domestication of plants

and animals.xxxiv At a methodological level, NCT aims to integrate into a single

explanatory model studies on domestication carried out at the level of individual plant

and animal species and research that aims to identify causal “macro” variables like

climate change or distribution of resources that may help explain why human

communities were led to the domestication of dogs, for example.

Domestication is considered one of the key distinctive features of the human lineage.

Tool making is another. There are authors that have suggested that tool making and

domestication are closely related features in human evolution. Pat Shipman has

suggested domestication (of animals) should be seen as an extension of tool

making.xxxv My proposal goes along the same line but in the opposite direction. In an

important sense (that involves the recognition of the importance of the growth of

affordances through the co-evolution of cognitive capacities and niche structured

behavior) tool making should be seen as the domestication of affordances cultivated in a

space where social relations, materials, and cognitive capacities interact and mutually

shape each other.

As in the case of domestication, there is no consensus about what exactly itool-making

is, and how it relates to tool use. The problem starts with the characterization of what

is a tool. The classical view is that the notion of tool refers to any handheld physical

object that is used to make changes to other objects in the environment. A screw is not

a tool, but a screwdriver is a tool. A garden is not a tool but objects we use to tend the

garden are.

This is an unstable view. For example, it is not possible to make a clear distinction

between construction behavior (construction of a nest or a house) and tool use.xxxvi

What can be categorized are tool behaviors or construction behaviors, and such

categorization depends on the pragmatics of the situation. If we want to insist that

tool use or tool making can be categorized on the basis of a definition of what a tool is,

we confront serious problems. If we firmly fix a piece of sandpaper onto a table and

then sands a wooden block, according to the definition we would say that the wooden

block is the tool. If we throw a nut against a stone to break it, what the tool is and the

direction of change that allow us to identify what the tool is (according to the classic

definition) is not clear.

A behavior of tool use should then be categorized as a kind of behavior that is not

different in principle from construction behaviorsxxxvii Thus, domestication and tool

making and tool use can be understood as construction behaviors that modify the

environment in such a way that it has accumulative consequences for further changes,

including cognitive changes. Modeling the evolution of construction behaviors i.e.

artifacts, is then a way of modeling the most distinctive features that are widely

accepted as characterizing human (biological and cultural) evolution.xxxviii

In summary, what we are suggesting is that tool making and tool use should be

understood as special cases of domestication of environmental resources, which allow

for the cultivation of affordances and the entrenchment of cycles of behaviors. Such

cycles of behaviors reproduce and develop through kinds of artifacts. .

NOTES

i J.J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1986), p. 134.

ii E. Margolis & S. Laurence (eds.) Creations of the Mind. Theories of Artifacts and Their Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

iii Standard philosophical theories of action assume action to be constitutively connected to

intentions. I will be assuming in the following that this connection can be weaken. See for

example M. Rowlands, Body Language, Representation in Action (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006)

and D. Hutto and E. Myin, Radicalizing Enactivism, basic Minds without Content, (Massachusetts:

MIT Press, 2013).

iv R. Hilpinen, “Artifact”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (December 2011), at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2011/entries/artifact/

v B. Malt and S. Sloman, “Artifact Categorization: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” in E. Margolis & S. Laurence (eds.) Creations of the Mind. Theories of Artifacts and Their Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 85-123, on p. 85.

vi Malt & Sloman, “Artifact Categorization”, p. 85

vii .Malt & Sloman, “Artifact Categorization”, p. 86.

viii D. Sperber, “Seedles Grapes: Nature and Culture” in E. Margolis & S. Laurence (eds.) Creations of the Mind. Theories of Artifacts and Their Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 124-137.

ix Beth Preston questions from different perspectives the assumption that actions are oriented by plans and proposes that improvisation is a crucial component of actions. On this basis she provides additional criticisms of intentionalist theories of action and artifactuality. See A Philosophy of Material Culture: Action, Function and Mind (New York: Routledge, 2013).

x W. Houkes & P. Vermaas, “On What Is Made: Instruments, Products and Natural Kinds of Artefacts” in M. Franseen, P. Kroes, T. Reydon, and P. Vermaas(eds.), Artefact Kinds. Ontology and the Human-Made World (New York: Springer, 2014), pp. 167–190.

xi See for example W. Houkes & A. Meijers, “The ontology of artifacts: the hard problem”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 37:1 (2006), pp. 118–131.

xii See P. Kroes, “Coherence of Structural and Functional Descriptions of Technical Artefacts”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 37:1 (2006), pp. 137–151. See also U. Krohs & P. Kroes (eds.), Functions in Biological and Artificial Worlds. Comparative Philosophical Perspectives (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2009) and M. Franseen, P. Kroes, T. Reydon, and P. Vermaas (eds.), Artefact Kinds. Ontology and the Human-Made World (New York: Springer, 2014).

xiii J.M. Carroll, W.A. Kellogg & M.B. Rosson, “The Task Artifact-Cycle”, in J.M. Carroll (ed.), Designing Interaction, Psychology at the Human-computer Interface (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) quoted in O.F. Smith, “Object Artifacts, Image Artifacts and Conceptual Artifacts: Beyond the Object Into the Event”, Artifact, 1:1 (2007), pp. 4–6 on p. 5.

xiv K. Friedman, “Behavioral Artifacts: What is an Artifact? Or Who Does it?”, Artifact, 1:1 (2007), pp. 7–11.

xv Friedman, “Behavioral Artifacts”, p. 8.

xvi Friedman, “Behavioral Artifacts”, p. 8

xvii L. D’Adderio, “Artifacts at the Centre of Routines: performing the material turn in routines theory”, Journal Of Institutional Economics, 7:2 (2011), pp. 97-230.

xviii M. Cohen,“Reading Dewey: Reflections on the Study of Routine”, Organization Studies, 28:5 (2007), pp. 773-786

xix The role of the concept of affordance in avoiding the split will not be elaborated here. See, for example, A. Chemero, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (Massachusetts: MIT Press 2009), chapter 7 in particular.

xx K. Sterelny, Thought in a Hostile World, (UK: Blackwell, 2003). Section 2.2.

xxi For an elaboration of this way of looking at the role of construction behaviors (and in particular the way in which construction behaviors entwine heredity, development and reproduction), see W. Wimsatt & J. R. Griesemer, “Reproducing Entrenchments to Scaffold Culture: The Central Role of Development in Cultural Evolution”, in R. Sansom and R. Brandon (eds.), Integrating Evolution and Development: From Theory to Practice (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007) pp. 227-323. See also S. Martínez, “Technological Scaffoldings for the Evolution of Culture and Cognition”, in L. Caporael, R. Griesemer & W. Wimsatt (eds.), Developing Scaffolds in Evolution, Culture, and Cognition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014) pp. 249-263.

xxii Donald Campbell, for example, talks of the difference between anthropology and

psychology as a difference between the humanistic task of recording “all aspects of a specific

cultural instance and the psychological task of the abstractive and generalizing ‘scientist’ who

wants to test the concomitant variation of two isolated factors across instances in general”. D. T.

Campbell, “The mutual methodological relevance of anthropology and psychology” in F. L. K. Hsu

(ed.), Psychological Anthropology (Illinois: Dorsey Press, 1961), pp. 333–352.

xxiii M. Cole, “Society, mind and development”, Houston Symposium IV on Psychology and Society: the Child and other Cultural Inventions (1981).

xxiv J. Lave, Cognition in Practice. Mind, mathematics and culture in everyday life, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

xxv A. Jones, Archaeological Theory and Scientific Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) makes a review of this sort of approaches.

xxvi T. Ingold, “Materials against materiality”, Archaeological Dialogues, 14:1 (2007), pp. 1–16.

xxvii C. Tilley, “Materiality in Materials”, Archaeological Dialogues, 14:1 (2007), pp. 16–20.

xxviii C. Knappett, “Material with Materiality?”, Archaeological Dialogues, 14:1 (2007), pp. 20–23.

xxix For an elaboration of this point see S. F. Martinez and Xiang Huang, , Epistemic Grounding of Abstraction and their Cognitive Dimension. Philosophy of Science, vol.78, 3, 2011, pp. 490-511. See also W. Wimsatt & J. Griesemer, “Reproducing Entrenchments to Scaffold Culture. The Central Role of Development in Cultural Evolution” in R. Sansom & R. Brandon (eds.), Integrating Evolution and Development: From Theory to Practice (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 227–323. Preston in 2013 proposes an alternative way of approaching the problem of reproducibility that relies on an analysis of function in material culture. Either approach would be sufficient for my purposes here.

xxx C. Darwin, The Origin of Species (London: Murray, 1859); C. Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, (London: Murray, 1868).

xxxi M. A. Zeder, E. Emshwiller, D. Bradley & B. D. Smith (eds.), Documenting Domestication: New Genetic and Archaeological Paradigms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

xxxii J. F. Odling-Smee, K. N. Laland & M. W. Feldman (eds.), Niche construction. The Neglected Process in Evolution, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003).

xxxiii Odling- Smee, Laland and Feldman, Niche construction, p. 419.

xxxiv B. Smith, “The Ultimate Ecosystem Engineers”, Science, 315:5820 (2007), pp. 1797–1798; B. Smith, “Niche Construction and the Behavioral Context of Plant and Animal Domestication”, Evolutionary Anthropology, 16:5 (2007), pp. 188–199; B. Smith, “A cultural Niche Construction of Initial Domestication”, Biological Theory, 6:3 (2012), pp. 260–271.

xxxv P. Shipman, “The Animal Connection and Human Evolution”, Current Anthropology, 51:4 (2010), pp. 519–538.

xxxvi B. Beck, Animal Tool Behavior: The Use and Manufacture of Tools by Animals (New York: Garland STPM Press, 1980).

xxxvii See F. Osiurak, C. Jarry & D. Le Gall, “Grasping the Affordances, Understanding the Reasoning: Toward a Dialectical Theory of Human Tool Use”, Psychological Review, 117:2 (2010), pp. 517–540. They argue that any definition of tool use as a kind of behavior is one of

convenience since we do not perceive the properties of tools per se, but what they afford as technical reasoning. I take it that the point is that behaviors associated with tool use (and more generally with construction behaviors) have to be understood as part of behavioral-artifact kinds whose categorization depends on tasks organized in practices.

xxxviii A third distinctive feature of human evolution in this traditional account is symbolic thinking. D. Bickerton in Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010) provides an account of the evolution of language that fits with the above account of human evolution as evolution of construction behaviors.