# A Philosophy of Material Culture  ## Metadata - Author: [[Beth Preston]] - Full Title: A Philosophy of Material Culture - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: Traditional action theory wrongly treats action as individual planning in the head. Everyday production of material culture is often collaborative, improvisational, and supported by tools and practices. Material culture shapes and opens up possibilities for creative, situated action rather than just enforcing fixed functions. - URL: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/394596594 - Source File: A Philosophy of Material Culture Action, Function, and Mind by Beth Preston.pdf ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > Here we see the importance of the fact that design processes are not just typically collaborative, but universally social, in the sense that they are dependent on pre-existing social and cultural resources. Design and invention are not a matter of creation *ex nihilo* resulting in radical novelty, but rather of incremental improvements or extensions of existing material culture resulting in relative novelty. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kc3q9ph3mzw5zky17dycacrp)) > Given the strict biological definition of selection, we are forced to say that the flint knives in the first culture do not have a proper function, whereas those in the second culture do. We may call this the problem of *absent variation.* ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kc1eryecd9va2191mdqn06n5)) > There is also a problem we may call *persisting variation* where variations are produced but there is no selection of one over the others. This is more obvious when we consider selection as an economic process, where the operative concept is market share, not sink or swim. For example, fountain pens may have lost market share in the wake of the introduction of ballpoint pens, but they are still available and preferred by some consumers. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kc1espx3pyj8j55959h5q1tc)) > Consideration of the marketplace as the locus of variation and selection leads to another worry, as well. When a variation does disappear, the reasons for its disappearance do not necessarily have anything to do with how well it fulfilled its erstwhile function. Perhaps it actually worked better than all the competing variations, but the company was poorly managed and went under, or it ran afoul of Microsoft, or the advertising or distribution were not adequate, or the colors were unfashionable, or whatever. This phenomenon is like genetic drift in biology, where the frequency of genes in a population can change for reasons extraneous to natural selection, like natural disasters that randomly wipe out members of a population with no regard to their fitness. Let us call this phenomenon *cultural drift.* The problem here is that the winnowing out of variations has been carried out by a non-selective process. So here again, we would have to say the variation left standing at the end has no proper function. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kc1evqfbxtqmabfs9z8csk4n)) > But this should not be very surprising, since similar doubts have also eroded the appeal to natural selection as a criterion for proper function in biology (Preston 2009b). Because absent variation, persisting variation, and drift can occur in the biological realm as well as the cultural one, accounts of biological proper function that do not appeal to natural selection as the decisive criterion (Schwartz 1999, 2002) or that appeal only to fitness and heredity instead of natural selection (Buller 1998) have been proposed. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kc1f1wnmf8b983abygqzxf86)) > On his view, natural selection does not account for the establishment of proper functions, even in the cases in which it does occur. The target of Cummins's argument is a widely held view he calls *neo-teleology* . On this view, natural selection accounts for the existence of proper-functional traits, because it builds complex traits incrementally. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kc1f3j2bgtvvebyspj3pjtap)) > In the previous chapter, we started with theories of function oriented primarily to biology and went some distance toward a theory of function in material culture. This had the effect of de-emphasizing the role of intention in the establishment of function. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kc1k3h55hyktmr377bdhm587)) > n a more recent paper, they have articulated this view more precisely in terms of use plans shared between designers and users (Houkes and Vermaas 2004). This theory copes easily with the attribution of proper function to novel prototypes. The designer of the prototype has a use plan in accordance with which the prototype is constructed, and which is communicated to potential users. The capacities of the prototype that are highlighted in that > plan are its proper function (or 'standard function,' as Houkes and Vermaas term it). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kc2146ds1vm2zkrxf6pteds3)) > This suggests that the assumptions of the intentionalist view as to the existence of a bright line distinction between the designer role and the user role and as to the privilege of the former do not reflect natural cleavages or features of the phenomena, but rather some parochial, entrenched ways of thinking about certain social roles and who is or is not a candidate for filling them. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kc3qptq0h6qy70f30aeyj5a8))