Toole use

There is a certain complexity in the ordinary perceptual experience of using a tool, at any rate in the case of what I’ll call ‘intelligent’ tool use.  In intelligent tool use, your awareness of the causally relevant physical characteristics of the tool and your target are what guide your use of the tool to perform a given task.  If you’re using a chisel to shape a piece of wood, for example, your awareness of the sharpness of the blade of the chisel, and the texture of the wood, inform your use of the tool.  They do so in a structured way; a skilled tool-user is using the tool in a way systematically responsive to variation in properties like sharpness and texture.  Although the intelligent  tool user has to be systematically responsive to those characteristics, though, they enter experience only recessively; the attentional focus of the tool user will typically be on the characteristics of the target they are attempting to modify.  One of the contrasts between animal tool use and human tool use is that animal tool use generally does not seem to be intelligent in this sense.  In this lecture I elaborate on that point and look at the relation between intelligent tool use and grasp of a structured language.