Beth Preston, A Philosophy of Material Culture. Action, Function, and Mind
| Autor | Diego Parente - Andrés Crelier |
| Cargo | Mar del Plata University, CONICET - Mar del Plata University, CONICET |
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BIBLIOGRAFÍA
Aliseda, A., 2006, Abductive Reasoning. Logical Investigations into Discovery and Explanation, Springer, Dordrecht.
Rott, H., 1990, “Approximation Versus Idealization: The Kepler-Newton Case”, en J. Brzezinski, F. Coniglione, T. Kuipers, y L. Nowak (eds.), Idealization II: Forms and Applications, Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of Science and the Humanities, vol. 17, Rodopi, Amsterdam, pp. 101–124.
XAVIER DE DONATO RODRÍGUEZ
Departamento de Lógica y Filosofía Moral Universidad de Santiago de Compostela xavier_donato@yahoo.com
Beth Preston, A Philosophy of Material Culture. Action, Function, and Mind, (Routledge Studies in contemporary philosophy, v. 48), New York, Routledge, 2013, 264pp.
The central purpose of Beth Preston in her book is to answer the following question: “What is involved in our own production and use of material culture?” (p. 2). With this aim in mind, the author goes a wide-ranging way through a variety of crucial topics in the philosophy of technology: What is the ontological status of technical objects? What is the relevance of the designers’ intentions in the attribution of functions to items in the process of technical making? What is exactly a “proper function” and how can it be identified?
In her previous work, Preston has discussed these issues, but this book represents a systematic approach from the viewpoint of the notion of “material culture.” According to this novel notion, “the focus is on things made and/or used, and secondarily on the making and/or using of them” (p. 7). This methodological choice allows her, on the one side, to leave behind those positions centered on the idea of thing or object, related to a modern subject/object division that is, in her view, incapable of apprehending the dynamism of culture, and, on the other side, to do without the notion of artifact and its related quandaries —issuing from the image of an isolated object and the secondary place assigned to practices and skills, among others things—.
The focus on “material culture”, however, does not entail mainly discussions in the fields of anthropology or archaeology, but primarily
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on Action Theory and the philosophy of biology. Thus, chapters 1 to 4 approach contemporary action theory with the aim of clarifying the status of technical action through an analysis of creativity and improvisation, whereas the philosophy of biology is the starting point of a discussion (especially in chapter 5) of the question whether the notion of biological function (and its related concepts) can be coherently transferred to the sphere of material culture.
In chapter 1, Preston rightly criticizes the “Centralized Control Model” of technical production and its core assumption that the poietic stage is divided into two steps: a first phase of mental design —the form in the mind of the producer—, and a second phase of actual construction, consisting mainly in an unintelligent and automatic execution of the previous plan. A main assumption of this model is that the exclusive locus of the design phase is the mind of a single individual, who controls her actions completely through explicit plans and is not (and need not be) in collaborative interactions with other individuals.
Chapter 3 continues the critique of contemporary action theory, focusing on the distinction between individual and social action. Here, Preston analyses those views that aim to explain multiple agents’ intentions using notions such as “shared action,” “joint action,” or “collective action”. These perspectives assume wrongly that sociality —that is, social roles, norms, and institutions— can be explained by means of the “we-intentions” of small groups, which can be reduced to the agreements, commitments, and obligations of pre-existing individuals conceived in a non-social way.
Preston labels this view “suigenerism” and offers the alternative notion of “sociogenerism”, according to which the individual and the...
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