Acceso usuarios
Gunnar Declerck
In this article I defend what could be termed a transcendentalist approach to the human technological system (HTS). Comparative Psychology and Anthropology generally try to explain human technology by focusing on the cognitive abilities that are necessary to use, manufacture and transmit tools. Based on Heidegger’s phenomenology of everyday coping, I will focus instead on an understudied aspect of human technology, namely its phenomenological conditions of existence. I will defend three claims: (i) Human beings have a technological system to the extent that they are able to present intraworldly entities with the mode of being of equipment (Zeug). This presupposes an ability to perceive normatively the possibilities that are supported by technical items (what they are for) and a background familiarity with the social practices and system of functional references that these practices define. (ii) The ability to perceive equipment, though it amounts in a sense to anticipating what it offers to do (action possibilities), cannot be equated to the perception of what the object affords in a strict Gibsonian sense. At least four features distinguish Heidegger’s equipment from Gibsonian affordances: standardization of functions; holistic structure; modal status (i.e. type of possibilities); teleological reference to projected possibilities of oneself. (iii) The irreducibility of equipment to affordances offers to highlight what is specific to human beings’ understanding of “tools” and what makes it so different from the kind of perceptual and cognitive ability that is implied in animal tool-use. While human beings tend to discover their surrounding world as an equipmental totality, non-human animals can only perceive it in terms of affordances. The possibilities that they perceive are not framed by some background knowledge about equipment assigned to functions, organized holistically, and connected to social practices and ultimately to social roles.
