Theoretical assumptions
Stable function representations cannot account for the peculiar human ability to generate functions that go beyond what is physically feasible to perform with any material thing. The generation of such functions is the result of the dual nature of artifacts (material and ideal), as expressed in cultural-historical psychology (Ilyenkov Reference Ilyenkov and Fedoseyev1977). Vaesen (Reference Vaesen2011) recognizes the dual nature of tools, but addresses the ideal side as representing the intentions of the designers embodied in the tool (i.e., functional aspects) as well as by other roles involved in the production of the material object (marketing, manufacturing). But the ideal component is not a matter of capturing the functional or pragmatic factors that in different moments inform the production of a material tool. It has to do rather with how people harness material things (natural and artificial, abiotic and biotic) for thought.
It has to do with two complementary sides of the same coin: on the one side, with the ability to perceive, understand, and use for their own goals the intentional relations that other persons have with an object or tool in their everyday practice – the intentional relations that other people have to the world through that object (i.e., intentional affordances; Tomasello Reference Tomasello1999). This intentional relation may or may not be related to the intentions of the people involved in the original production of the artifacts (Rizzo Reference Rizzo2000; Reference Rizzo2006). Indeed, as observed by the Victorian writer Samuel Butler (Reference Butler, Keynes and Hill1912/1951): “Strictly speaking, nothing is a tool except during use. The essence of a tool, therefore, lies in something outside the tool itself” (p. 121).
On the other side, the ideal component has to do with our capacity to go beyond what is physically feasible to perform with any material thing. This is an ability humans show very early in their development; for example, in pretend play. In pretend play, meaning is cast on objects in virtue of the actions the objects allow the children to perform, yet these actions are performed away from conventional use of the object. Pretend objects still need to support the pretend act, but a pretend horse does not need to afford riding or feeding; it only needs to afford pretend riding or feeding. Actually, the child can select very different objects as a pretend horse, insofar as the objects are good enough to support the specific enactment. It's the pattern of action that specifies the meaning, not the object (Szolonsky Reference Szolonsky, Costall and Dreier2006). Lev Vygotsky (Reference Vygotsky1933/1967) gave a clear description of this phenomenon:
In play the child creates the structure meaning/object, in which the semantic aspect – the meaning of the thing – dominates and determines his behavior. To a certain extent meaning is freed from the object with which it was directly fused before. I would say that in play a child concentrates on meaning severed from objects. (p. 11)
And Vygotsky was quite explicit in stating that “a child does not symbolize in play”:
A symbol is a sign, but the stick is not the sign of a horse. Properties of things are retained, but their meaning is inverted, i.e., the idea becomes the central point. It can be said that in this structure things are moved from a dominating to a subordinate position. (p. 11)
Pretend play is most likely a uniquely human social activity (Rakoczy Reference Rakoczy2008); and, like speech, it has to do with the emancipation of situational constraints and with the creation of a new reality, which exists only in virtue of the human ability to share intentions. This allows the arbitrary creation of what Searle (Reference Searle1995) has named the status function of objects. For example, there is nothing in the physical constitution of a 10-euro note that makes it money, as even if I could clone a 10-euro note atom by atom, the result would not be money. It is the collective, yet subjective, intentionality that creates an objective and factual reality, which exists only for humans.
Therefore, specifically human functional knowledge would be better characterized not by stable function representation but by pretend play and drama inquiry. Indeed, these are just the key components of human innovative strategies such as generative scenarios (Rizzo & Bacigalupo Reference Rizzo, Bacigalupo, Reed, Baxter and Blythe2004) and tinkering with things:
Tinkering is what happens when you try something you don't quite know how to do, guided by whim, imagination, and curiosity. When you tinker, there are no instructions – but there are also no failures, no right or wrong ways of doing things. It's about figuring out how things work and reworking them. Contraptions, machines, wildly mismatched objects working in harmony – this is the stuff of tinkering. Tinkering is, at its most basic, a process that marries play and inquiry. (Banzi Reference Banzi2008, vi–vii)
In his target article, Vaesen acknowledges the fundamental role of tools in characterizing uniquely human psychological skills, but he perseveres with a vision that distinguishes material tools from psychological (ideal) ones. The argument he develops in the article omits a long-standing and important conceptual tradition in psychology, namely the cultural-historical tradition (e.g., Cole Reference Cole1996). In this approach, tools have a dual nature; they are at the same time both material and ideal. The dual nature of tools has implications for many of the nine cognitive capacities noted by Vaesen. I will focus on functional representation, as it has important implications for how we understand and develop novel forms of artifacts. Vaesen argues that functional knowledge differentiates humans from non-human primates, but his argumentation is problematic – with respect both to the empirical evidence and to certain of his theoretical assumptions, which I outline briefly below.
Problems concerning empirical evidence
There is some recent empirical evidence that seems to show that functional fixedness is not uniquely human. Hanus et al. (Reference Hanus, Mendes, Tennie and Call2011) have provided suggestive evidence for the hypothesis, put forward by Tennie et al. (Reference Tennie, Call and Tomasello2010), that the difference they observed between chimpanzees and orangutans in their ability to solve the Floating Peanuts task (Mendes et al. Reference Mendes, Hanus and Call2007) was due to the functional fixedness of the chimpanzees with respect to the water dispenser. In Experiment 3, Hanus and colleagues showed that simply adding a new water dispenser in the experimental settings led the chimpanzees to use water as a tool for recovering the peanuts – but by taking water from the new dispenser only, and not from the one from which they used to drink. This would seem to indicate that the chimps also show functional fixedness.
Theoretical assumptions
Stable function representations cannot account for the peculiar human ability to generate functions that go beyond what is physically feasible to perform with any material thing. The generation of such functions is the result of the dual nature of artifacts (material and ideal), as expressed in cultural-historical psychology (Ilyenkov Reference Ilyenkov and Fedoseyev1977). Vaesen (Reference Vaesen2011) recognizes the dual nature of tools, but addresses the ideal side as representing the intentions of the designers embodied in the tool (i.e., functional aspects) as well as by other roles involved in the production of the material object (marketing, manufacturing). But the ideal component is not a matter of capturing the functional or pragmatic factors that in different moments inform the production of a material tool. It has to do rather with how people harness material things (natural and artificial, abiotic and biotic) for thought.
It has to do with two complementary sides of the same coin: on the one side, with the ability to perceive, understand, and use for their own goals the intentional relations that other persons have with an object or tool in their everyday practice – the intentional relations that other people have to the world through that object (i.e., intentional affordances; Tomasello Reference Tomasello1999). This intentional relation may or may not be related to the intentions of the people involved in the original production of the artifacts (Rizzo Reference Rizzo2000; Reference Rizzo2006). Indeed, as observed by the Victorian writer Samuel Butler (Reference Butler, Keynes and Hill1912/1951): “Strictly speaking, nothing is a tool except during use. The essence of a tool, therefore, lies in something outside the tool itself” (p. 121).
On the other side, the ideal component has to do with our capacity to go beyond what is physically feasible to perform with any material thing. This is an ability humans show very early in their development; for example, in pretend play. In pretend play, meaning is cast on objects in virtue of the actions the objects allow the children to perform, yet these actions are performed away from conventional use of the object. Pretend objects still need to support the pretend act, but a pretend horse does not need to afford riding or feeding; it only needs to afford pretend riding or feeding. Actually, the child can select very different objects as a pretend horse, insofar as the objects are good enough to support the specific enactment. It's the pattern of action that specifies the meaning, not the object (Szolonsky Reference Szolonsky, Costall and Dreier2006). Lev Vygotsky (Reference Vygotsky1933/1967) gave a clear description of this phenomenon:
In play the child creates the structure meaning/object, in which the semantic aspect – the meaning of the thing – dominates and determines his behavior. To a certain extent meaning is freed from the object with which it was directly fused before. I would say that in play a child concentrates on meaning severed from objects. (p. 11)
And Vygotsky was quite explicit in stating that “a child does not symbolize in play”:
A symbol is a sign, but the stick is not the sign of a horse. Properties of things are retained, but their meaning is inverted, i.e., the idea becomes the central point. It can be said that in this structure things are moved from a dominating to a subordinate position. (p. 11)
Pretend play is most likely a uniquely human social activity (Rakoczy Reference Rakoczy2008); and, like speech, it has to do with the emancipation of situational constraints and with the creation of a new reality, which exists only in virtue of the human ability to share intentions. This allows the arbitrary creation of what Searle (Reference Searle1995) has named the status function of objects. For example, there is nothing in the physical constitution of a 10-euro note that makes it money, as even if I could clone a 10-euro note atom by atom, the result would not be money. It is the collective, yet subjective, intentionality that creates an objective and factual reality, which exists only for humans.
Therefore, specifically human functional knowledge would be better characterized not by stable function representation but by pretend play and drama inquiry. Indeed, these are just the key components of human innovative strategies such as generative scenarios (Rizzo & Bacigalupo Reference Rizzo, Bacigalupo, Reed, Baxter and Blythe2004) and tinkering with things:
Tinkering is what happens when you try something you don't quite know how to do, guided by whim, imagination, and curiosity. When you tinker, there are no instructions – but there are also no failures, no right or wrong ways of doing things. It's about figuring out how things work and reworking them. Contraptions, machines, wildly mismatched objects working in harmony – this is the stuff of tinkering. Tinkering is, at its most basic, a process that marries play and inquiry. (Banzi Reference Banzi2008, vi–vii)