The Philosophy of ToolsAuthor(s): James K. FeiblemanSource: Social Forces, Vol. 45, No. 3 (Mar., 1967), pp. 329-337Published by: University of North Carolina PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2575191Accessed: 13/12/2010 10:20

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THE PHILOSOPHY OF TOOLS 329

THE PHILOSOPHY OF TOOLS JAMES K. FEIBLEMAN

Tulane University

ABSTRACT Man has transformed his immediate environment into one of material culture, and conse-

quently himself into civilized man, by means of tools and languages. Although tools are no less important than languages, they have been underestimated. For tools are not merely articles of utility but serve all of the human needs. Tools are material objects employed to alter other material objects (where man himself is one of the material objects). Tools may be anything from a bulldozer to a violin. With the increase in civilization the use of tools rises sharply. Human inheritance is genetic and cultural. The cultural inheritance is external and is transmitted through learning: how to make and use tools. There is a feedback from tools; in a certain sense it is true that tools make the man. But man can choose his responses: what is it that he wants to feel? Tools tie man to his material environment but they also make it possible for him to achieve goals which are purely human; they lift him above the other animals. It is man the toolmaker who is the spiritual adventurer. The values carried by some tools are those toward which he aspires: what Bach could do with the organ and Shakespeare with the stage. It is the tools which are manufactured on his own planet which enable him to escape from it.

M an has transformed his immediate en- vironment into one of material culture and consequently also himself into

civilized man through meanings conveyed by his tools and his languages. Since nearly all human enterprises have required the use of languages, their importance can scarcely be overestimated. However tools are hardly less important, yet they have received far less atten- tion. This is perhaps because hammers are regarded as tools but not paintings, cooking pots but not theatres. Ordinarily, one thinks of tools as merely articles of utility, having a function for man of serving only his most basic needs. However, I shall try to show that tools serve all of his needs, including those usually thought of in less material terms.

I should like to use the name artifacts for material objects which have been altered through human agency. There are two kinds of artifacts: tools and signs. Tools are mate- rial objects employed to alter other material objects. Signs are material objects employed to refer to other material objects. Tools are artifacts which enable man to change material objects more than he could without them. It is less familiar that signs are artifacts also; but these are merely sounds or marks on some hard material shaped to carry meaning. A combina- tion of signs is called a language. There is no special name for a combination of tools but the

occurrence is quite common. Tools may be combined in industry, as in a production unit, or they may be combined in a science, as when spectroscopes and cameras are attached to tele- scopes in astronomy. Here, however, we shall confine our attention to tools.

In general, tools are material objects directed toward other material objects, bulldozers to move earth, drills to sink oil wells, dams to conserve water or to produce power by utilizing its gravity fall. But tools are employed by man also to effect alterations in himself. These range all the way from surgical instruments which alter his physiological mechanism to works of art which affect his aesthetic sensi- bilities. I use the term "tool" as a synonym for instrument, apparatus, device, contrivance, appliance, utensil, vehicle, machine, and engine.

Tools are of many kinds. A thimble is a tool, a book is a tool, but so is a house or a street. There is little within the immediate environment of any inhabitant of a modern city which has not been altered through human agency, little if anything which is as it was before the advent of man; not the ground be- neath his feet, which is paved, nor the walls before his eyes, which are the sides of the buildings he has constructed, nor even the air he breathes, which is sure to be mixed with the smoke and dust of industrial waste.

But what is true in the city is almost equally

330 SOCI0L FORCES true on the modern farm. Consider, for exam- ple, the particular kinds of plants and animals which have been bred on farms to serve as human food: the collagens; these are tools un- der the definition adopted above, although liv- ing organisms they constitute one variety of artifact for they too are material objects which have been altered through human agency. And the farm was constructed to breed them and perhaps to further alter them in the process.

What I have been describing of course is the use of tools in a modern industrial civilization where such practices are extensive. The de- scription would be no less true of a primitive culture, merely less extensive. It is possible to see from an airplane that the men and women of a primitive culture have made alterations in their environment also, though in a more re- strictive way.

It is possible to measure the degree of a civilization by its proliferated use of tools. The rate tends to increase sharply, until in a modern civilization almost no move can be made with- out tools. Tools may serve human purposes in- directly as well as directly. I call the use indirect if it does not directly affect the senses. There are for instance tools operated by men, such as airplanes, and tools operated by other tools, such as automated machinery which per- form an indirect service. In this class too are those tools which are employed only in connec- tion with other tools, such as photometers and spectroscopes. But tools may also serve human purposes directly. One subvariety of these tools is designed to affect the senses. All tools are of course related to man, but some more inti- mately involve the central nervous system. Some tools for instance engage the sensory re- ceptors, such tools as the violin, the cinema, paintings, spices and perfumes; some engage the effectors, such as levers and wheels; while some engage the association cortex, such as compu- ters. Other tools more intimately extend the senses. Some like spectacles, telescopes and vibrating membranes extend the receptors; others like spades and bicycles extend the effec- tors; and while others like books and data- processing mechanisms extend the association cortex.

Tools of course do not exist in a vacuum. The designing and construction of tools is the crucial segment of the discipline of technology. After that, a further technology (and a more

common one) is needed to guide the correct use of the tool. Together with every tool there is an appropriate technology. A technology is a sequence of procedures for employing a tool. These will include the instructions for the op- eration of the tool itself as well as directions and formulas for using it in the context for which it was designed. The use of a bulldozer' requires not only the knowledge of the opera- tion of the bulldozer but also the knowledge of the terrain in which it can and cannot be em- ployed. Not all bulldozers are operated in exactly the same way, and not all soils lend themselves to the operation of a bulldozer. Thus the technology is an intimate and neces- sary part of the tool.

Every bit of ingenuity is expended in the effort to secure external aid for human aims, to enlist the powerful support of material ob- jects in reaching human goals. Men fashion and use tools as extensions of themselves, de- veloping skills in designing and employing tools. The articulation of muscle and bone is too weak to accomplish much directly. More can be done indirectly, through the use of in- struments and mechanisms of one sort or an- other. Machine and muscle blend together in a way which makes either meaningless without the other.

From the point of view of function the dis- tinction between the human body and the tool becomes arbitrary. A man with an artificial arm operating electric lights which are con- trolled by a toggle switch is integrated with his environment in an intermediate series of steps which make it difficult to say where he leaves off and the environment begins. With the use of material tools designed to alter ma- terial objects in the environment it would be true to say that the human individual acts merely as an intermediary; he furnishes the direction and sometimes the energy whereby one affects the other. The presence of the tool in any case indicates an objective and material goal of some sort.

Thus tools are imbedded deeply in the cul- tural life of man. He cannot answer questions about himself without taking his tools into account. The isolation of man from his mate- rial environment in some philosophical specu- lations has been a false one. For tools connect man intimately with his background. Like anything man-made they are at once human and

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not human. Man as such is not merely a human individual; and he is not entirely encompassed by the social group or by the whole of human society. Man is man-and-his-works: man or- ganized into society but including also his tools and his languages and all that he has succeeded in accomplishing with their aid.

The language is deficient in a word to de- scribe nonhuman nature. Man is a natural ani- mal, a part of nature. The rest of nature is divided between that part of nature which he has disturbed and that part which he has not. We call that part which he has disturbed cul- ture and the particular elements of culture arti- facts or tools. Tools link man with his back- ground; they constitute that extension by means of which he seeks to intrude himself into that part of nature which he has not yet altered. For he would exceed himself and alter as much of nature as possible in order to incorporate it within himself. In pursuing his ordinary needs (which is where other animals stop) he has been led to new ones: to the need to in- crease himself by knowledge, by activity, and finally by that craving for ultimate survival which amounts to a need to grow larger and more permanent. In all these he is aided by tools; they express his additional needs through the means adopted to reduce them. In short, if man is to amount to more than a brief-lived animal he must extend himself considerably into the area which has been that of nonhuman nature, include it and reduce it to the human. He tries to do this through an increase in cul- ture and by means of tools.

Being human, then, means living with tools. To think of humanity as a collection of inde- pendent individuals or as a conglomerate of social groups, societies or nations, located in a physical environment but somehow sharply marked off from it, is to subscribe to a false conception. Man attains to higher modes of being not by denying his material background and seeking to escape from it but by utilizing it and so escaping through it.

That part of man's physical environment which he has turned to his own uses constitutes for him an intimate connection. Thus human culture is not exclusively human and cannot be thought of without artifacts. Tools may be material objects but they are not merely mate- rial in the gross sense of brute matter; they consist in formed material, material shaped in

a certain way for certain uses, which makes them cultural. Human culture is a closely-knit organization of men and artifacts.

In this sense man depends upon his tools for his very humanity. The use of tools dates back to the earliest records. Some authorities recog- nize the advent of early man not by his anato- my but by his use of tools, the flaked stone, the hand ax. With the functioning of tools went a beginning of society;- the development of speech occurred at the same time. It was necessary to communicate about the use of tools.

The inheritance of man is twofold: genetic and cultural. His genetic inheritance is trans- mitted through his genes, it is biological, and the mechanism is sexual reproduction. His cul- tural inheritance is external and is transmitted through the process of learning. Mendel de- scribed genetic inheritance, and Lamarck with- out knowing that he was doing so described cultural inheritance. The inheritance of ac- quired characters is cultural, not genetic. Tools are not freshly constructed by each generation, but instead are handed on from one generation to the next, together with the skills necessary to replace and improve them.

Human individuals live brief enough lives. But thanks to genetic inheritance there is an unbroken order of such brief-lived individuals. And thanks to the process of learning there is an unbroken order of material tools. The rhythm of succession and replacement, of de- struction and substitution, takes place in an even flow of continuous development. In some cultures men have preserved the same tools and their use so that replacement is almost unrecog- nizable generation after generation for hun- dreds and even thousands of years. In other cultures the rate of advance has been so rapid at times that tools only serve as models for their improvement. In both cases there is an internal and an external inheritance. The in- ternal inheritance transmits capacities. The external inheritance transmits the skills to make tools and to use them.

That civilization upon which all men so much depend to produce the life they desire, is simply a device for insuring that there shall be spe- cialists who excel at producing certain kinds of tools. Farmers, makers of clothing, practi- tioners of medicine, are equally good examples. We have sadly neglected the extent to which

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332 SOCIAL FORCES

we depend upon material tools for every one of our activities. We do not ordinarily think of a banker, for instance, as one occupied with tools, but he needs for his profession bank buildings, safes, paper, ink, accounting ma- chinery, and many other devices.

All the aims and ambitions of men are in- corporated in the invention and use of artifacts, and even within the literary arts, of material tools. The efforts to contribute to the continu- ing treasury of humanity consists as much in tools as it does in ideas. A tool is, so to speak, an objectified idea, a theorem whose force is imposed on its consequences. It is a thought in action and must not be conceived in terms of the crudities of early materialism. Ideas are either general or particular, abstract or concrete. Tools are particular and concrete ideas which have been externalized and fixed. General and abstract ideas may in the end be more powerful, but their transmission also de- pends upon tools. The incorporation of values is in material tools: buildings and their con- tents, works of art and of learning, scientific tools and techniques, all are tool-transmitted.

The tool, the material object which is to be altered by it, and the function which together they are to perform, carry the individual be- yond himself and into the external sequences to which now he has become somewhat subor- dinate. A man fits a tire on a wheel with an implement designed for the purpose. And now the wheel together with three others is ready to be moved by the engine within the motor car. Most such operations are parts of a whole, but at the level of the whole there is a further involvement with other tools and most prob- ably now with many other individuals. Tools thus belong to society, but even more: they dic- tate the terms according to which the human individual himself belongs to the same society. They call the social turn for him as well as for themselves.

For there is something irrefrangible about the purpose of the tool and the way it fits into the cultural whole, moreso than the unaided human purpose and fitting. Human nature is to some extent plastic and adaptable, whereas tool nature is not. A tool is an idea, external- ized and materialized, and thus made rigid and inflexible. A tool is like a man with a fixed idea: it can go in one direction only and can- not be changed. And so it must be reckoned

with on its own terms, a thing in the world which man confronts as he confronts his fellow man or some material object he has not altered, such as a mountain. When men make a tool they commit themselves, to a larger extent than they recognize, to the tool's existence, its aims and purpose, its need, so to speak, to be used in a certain way.

Ordinarily, one thinks of tools as means and of the uses to which they are put as ends. But the situation is no longer that simple, if indeed it ever was. For the tools employed can enter into the business of aims and to some extent at least determine not only their use but also the goals toward which they are directed. It was not the division of labor which first determined the use of tools but the use of tools which first determined the division of labor. With the development of special devices and skills in hunting or fighting those who excelled in these crucial practices may have been delegated to concentrate on them. Thus professions were logical extensions of particular equipment in the name of greater social efficiency.

Tools are through their use important factors in the making of decisions. The man who was best with a bow and arrow had no choice but to become a hunter. And if it be discovered today that a youth has a natural aptitude for playing the piano he can hardly escape becom- ing a musician. Thus it is that artifacts lead lives of their own and drag professionals in their wake. The human individuals often seem mere appendages, somehow necessary in order that the tool may function correctly. It is in this sense that we say that the craftsman is devoted to his craft or the artist dedicated to his art. It is not necessary to put the cart before the horse in order to see what service the horse is performing.

Men make tools, but in another and equally important sense, it is also true that tools make men. For the tools that men make they after- ward use, and by this use they are conditioned. Thus the aviator is an important component of the airplane. What would a professional vio- linist be without his violin, a writer without his pen, typewriter or dictaphone? To some extent man is a beneficiary of his tools since without them he would not even be a man; but he is a victim also, for he can so design his life that he lives chiefly for his tools. And he can suffer from them, as indeed he does with occupational

THE PHILOSOPHY OF TOOLS 333 diseases and injuries. Means can so easily in fact become ends when the tools designed for a certain purpose themselves pre-empt that purpose.

The tool is not a unique particular material object but rather a collection of such objects, a class. When a man says, "I need a hammer for this job," he is not referring to any singular hammer but to the class in such a way that any member of the class will satisfy his need. He needs a hammer, not this hammer or that ham- mer. Essentially, tools are general. This state- ment applies to all artifacts in their ordinary functional use. When there are exceptions, it is another use that has become involved. It is possible to become attached to a particular tool in such a way that no substitute would do, as when a man thinks he has a lucky baseball bat or a priceless and unique violin. But in gen- eral the tool's proper function takes precedence and reduces any member of a class of tools to class status.

What is true of the tool becomes true also to some extent of its user. There is an anonymity to the tool-user as well as to the tool. The man who says, "Send for a plumber," has a drain that needs fixing or a broken pipe. Any pro- fessional plumber will serve the purpose of re- pairing the damage as well as any other. The tool-user somehow becomes an extension of the tool rather than the reverse. Thus the more advanced the function the more the burden of it is lifted from the man and assumed by the tool. He has objectified his skill in the artifact which extends and accelerates it.

If learning consists in eliciting from re- sponses the capacity to respond, then man is taught by his responses to the stimulation of tools. When this situation is fully under his control, the method consists in first selecting the responses he wishes to make, then in de- signing tools which will elicit those responses from him. This process occurs most clearly in works of art. The artist selects the response he wishes (the pleasure of aesthetic apprecia- tion) and then designs the work of art, a paint- ing, say, which will produce this response (the process of art production). The response is then shared by others who come to his work for it.

Moral considerations are very much involved in the production of tools and in their selection and operation. Is it good or bad that men

should make engines of human destruction ? In the very design and manufacture of nuclear weapons there are such grave moral considera- tions that the involvement can hardly be checked out through technology alone. In the end perhaps all human activity-including thoughts and feelings as well as actions-are answerable to ethical theory. Now, what men do is not ordinarily done with their bare hands, and the more advanced the ci-vilization the more this is true. The making and use of artifacts is very much a part of all human endeavor, and so what is to be made and used is primarily a moral question. Technology is a subdivision of ethics.

Ethics has been always thought of partly in terms of responses: what should man do? But this is a question which cannot be answered until he has answered previously the question of what it is that he wants done to him. For there is also an ethics concerned with the choice of stimuli: what should he wish to feel? And secondarily there is an ethics concerned with the association fibers: what should he be obliged to think? Since man is intimately con- nected with the material world through an in- termediate set of material objects, the artifacts, it is difficult to answer any of the above ques- tions on an exclusively human basis. What he should feel, do and think cannot be decided without that considerable segment of the world with which he interacts and upon whose con- stitution he is so completely dependent being involved in such judgments. The interaction is conditioned by artifacts, and thus tools form an important part of the judgments.

The large and continuous dependence of or- ganisms upon interchange with their imme- diate environment is no less effective in the case of human individuals. Whether the need be for air, food, water, clothing, shelter, or in the human instance for a prolonged planning for the continual supply of these, or for some more complex articles for more complex pur- poses, such as knowledge, aggression or se- curity, the fact remains that direct intervention conducted by man to obtain, and to insure the continuance of obtaining what he needs from the environment, will always be conducted by means of artifacts, the use, that is, of the ap- propriate tools.

Throughout the entire span of human history expediency has always provided the occasions

334 SOCIAL FORCES

for the making and using of artifacts. The various fine arts, such as painting, sculpture and music have been provided with appropriate tools. We have religions with their edifices and ceremonials. But a few centuries ago a new development greatly accelerated the pro- cesses of toolmaking. This new development was the discovery of the scientific method, the hypothetico-experimental procedures for inves- tigating the laws of nature. Hitherto tools had been constructed chiefly by means of trial and error. But the scientific method soon proved to have important by-products of its own. The advent of experimental science has given to technology in all fields a marked acceleration. But there was a reverse effect also felt; for technology was placed at the service of experi- mental science. The tools of inquiry, the elec- tron microscope, the cyclotron, all of the in- struments of "big science" as well as smaller laboratory equipment have been in part if not in whole technological developments. More recently, the distinctions between basic science, applied science and technology have been obliterated, so far as toolmaking is concerned. Each pursuit has stimulated the other two, and the result has been a steep increase in the per- fection of instruments and techniques.

That the phenomenon of man is also the phe- nomenon of tools must make formal materialists of us all. But this does not mean seventeenth century materialists like Hobbes, who thought of matter as simple; nor eiglhteenth century materialists like Diderot, who denied the exis- tence of ideals; nor nineteenth century mate- rialists like Feuerbach, who insisted on the divorce of matter from form; it means twentieth century materialists who recognize in matter the repository of all forms.

Formal materialists understand matter better now thanks to the recent advances in physics. Matter is a porous stuff, and consists in forms which together have the capacity to resist. Substance, whether active as energy or passive as matter, is both irreducible and analyzable into forms. It can be combined and altered into further forms. Life is the result of the complications of matter, and man, that complex organization of matter, has acquired the ca- pacity to reach below him into the material world in order to transform lower forms of matter into instruments which are capable of material effects suggestive of higher forms

which would otherwise be beyond his powers. If he cannot move mountains with his bare hands, at least he can do so with atomic energy. If he cannot attain to such complexities of quality and structure as Levi-Civita's tensor calculus or MNlozart's Requiemt Mllass without signs and tools, at least he can do so with them. There is more space than matter within the atom, but matter there is highly organized. It can be used more efficiently the more knowledge we have of its forms.

Recently, new forms of matter have been discovered. A few examples will suffice to give some indication of the wealth of resources buried within matter; such materials as the various kinds of plastics with their assorted properties, artificial silk and artificial leather. Now any kind of material which is needed can be constructed. The important point here is, however, that all such materials are in a sense tools. They are material objects altered through human agency, and they do not occur otherwise in nature. The distinction between materials and tools has at last been broken down. Man constructs the matter he wants in the way he wants it.

Matter and energy are interchangeable ac- cording to the well-known Einstein formula. And so just as the distinction between matter and tools disappeared with the discovery of the new kinds of material, so the distinction between energy and tools has disappeared with the dis- covery of new kinds of energy. There has been a marked advance in relating power to tools. Where formerly tools were powered by muscle, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they had begun to be powered by steam and then by electricity. Now they can be powered by nu- clear reactors. Engines now often contain their own sources of energy, and as machines they take their almost autonomous place in the cul- ture. Their effect was to transform it. In addition to this there have been the novel kinds of energy and with them untold new powers. Radioactive elements, nuclear energy, the co- herent beams of light called lasers, and the new control devices, such as the electron tube, tran- sistors and, more recently, microcircuits, all have contributed.

An indefinitely large number of forms reside in matter, and it is by means of matter, and only by means of matter, that these forms can be reached. And it is in the end the forms that

THE PHILOSOPHY OF TOOLS 335

man wants, the forms of energy as well as the forms of mass. Thus so-called spiritual ends are attained through the adroit use of the forms contained in matter. There is as Aristotle said no unformed matter and no immaterial forms. But the forms in matter are not equal, for there is a hierarchy of forms. We use the simpler to reach the more complex. The environment of material objects and forces offers all of the opportunities required for human advancement from lower to higher goals.

Now a still further development threatens to produce an altogether different type of culture. For not only is power built into the machine (as the tools are called) but information as well. The instructions about the operation of the machines as well as the power to carry out the instructions are parts of the machines. The result is continuously-operating machines which can perform their tasks in the absence of human operators. Examples are: gyroscopes, thermo- stats and computers. Ships are kept on course, temperatures are maintained in houses, calcu- lations are carried out in offices, all in the ab- sence of men.

Tools are man-made and designed to serve human purposes. But there are many ways of doing so. Tools may serve human purposes by acting in(lependently of man. Electric clocks operate so long as power is continuously sup- plie(l. So do gasoline engines and atomic power plants. Just as the two kinds of artifacts, tools and signs, have shown a tendency to be built together into the same artifact, so they have shown also a tendency to be constructed in a way which enables them to function indepen- dently of human operators, with built-in in- structions in their place: computers, for in- stance. And finally, they have shown a ten- (lency to be linke(d in series operating inde- pendently, as with automated factories. With the development of tools accelerating as it has of late, and with tools able now to assimilate the technique of communicating by means of signs, the artifactual nature of human endeavor threatens to go its own way.

Men understand very well the processes by which they manufacture machines, an(d for this reason they suppose also that they understand equally well the consequences of such manu- facture. Yet they do not. For what is true of simple acts is true also of complex ones. And even in the case of simple acts it is impossible

to predict the ramification of effects. Causes are deliberate but effects are not; for the effects are parts of events which must of necessity interact with a bewildering array of other ef- fects in ways which could not be anticipated without a previous knowledge of the number of variables involved. Thus man is defeated in advance of his efforts by the fact that he acts out of partial knowledge, which means also out of partial ignorance or even out of false knowledge. For this reason he often fails to control his own artifacts. He discovers pos- sibilities but he is at the same time unable to foresee consequences. Thus novelty is often acquired only at a price. The first use of any- thing new is sometimes a misuse. Many tech- nical advances show an immediate ten(lency to get alarmingly out of hand. Airplanes were developed and employed to bomb people in war before serving as rapid peacetime transporta- tion. The linotype was no sooner invented than it was placed at the disposal of the yellow press.

Tools dominate their inventors and users by assuming too large a role as ends when they were designed only as means. The automobile was intended to provide rapid and efficient transportation, but it has accumulated other functions: it serves an aesthetic interest ancl it furnishes social prestige, it may be regar(led as a symbol of beauty or of social status. The amount of time and energy given over to the maintenance of machinery is out of proportion to its usefulness. Automobiles provide effec- tive transportation, but they require consider- able refueling, servicing and repairs. Witness the army of attendants and mechanics and the forest of service stations and garages which have sprung up in response to the nee(ds of automobiles.

In the highly industrialized countries, such as the United States, the human beings are actually in danger of turning into a species of machine-tenders, existing primarily for the operation and care of mechanisms of one sort or another. Man lives today surrounded by little motors which open his windows, heat or cool his rooms, run his ra(lio and television sets, operate his clocks, shave his face and even brush his teeth. Tools such as these ale so new that men do not know how to control them and at the same time how to avoid being controlled by them. It is possible to envisage the entire enterprise turned around so that imia-

336 SOCIAL FORCES chines instead of being employed by men em- ploy the men to their own purposes.

It is easy to see what must be done in order to live successfully the new life of culture which the development of complex tools has forced. Man in the future may improve his tools and techniques to the point where he is the complete master of his immediate environment. But it is one thing to alter that environment and quite another to direct it. Man will learn how to make tools which are self-reproducing; and he may even develop them to the point where they become original and do some of his intuitive and inductive thinking for him. But by the very fact that he turns out such machines he proves himself more capable than they. So long as he can produce machines which cannot produce him, he will remain at least the poten- tial master. He must in addition, however, learn how to be the actual master. He must by his calculations learn how to foresee and pre- dict the outcome of the steps he himself ini- tiates, and he must take these predictions into the evaluation in order to determine whether from his point of view such steps are worth- while. Machines are the tools which must be especially included in such calculations.

Tools are what lift man for a time above the level of other animals. It is his tools and not merely his needs and drives which render him human, for being human means, as we should now understand more readily, being cultural. Man is not merely a social animal, he is a cul- tural one. It is culture and not merely the animal needs which holds the tribe together and sounds the note of a common humanity. The values he has discovered and preserved to hand on to the successive generations are carried and transmitted through material objects which have been altered in expert and revered ways. He tends to forget that the words of Jesus or of Buddha, the plays of Shakespeare, the music of Bach, the paintings of Rembrandt, are in- corporated irrefrangibly in tools, tools for pro- ducing feeling, for acquiring knowledge, for reaching exaltation. And it is as tools that he receives them and hands them on.

With the use of the tool it becomes impos- sible for individual man to remain enclosed within himself, impervious to the influences of the external world. He is at once a social being and beyond that an environmental being, for the environment contains more, much more, than

a society. With tools and with tools alone man becomes part of culture. He is directed out- ward toward being in the world, away from himself and thus extensive of himself, enlarged and aggrandized in a way he could never have achieved by merely concentrating on himself. In making tools and in using them he never anticipates such consequences. But this does not matter. It is a mistake to suppose that only what we know affects us, and when we make a tool we invite consequences we cannot envisage, we start a sequence of causes and effects the end of which we cannot anticipate or predict. Man the toolmaker is also in a sense man the spiritual adventurer, when will- ingly and deliberately, and with a sense of origination, he allows the tools to take him off in their own directions, mindful at the same time that they must not be allowed to dominate him. For he can if he will remain the master and yet allow his tools to uncover for him new areas of experience and new dimensions of participation in that wider environment which his being in the world has provided for him.

The values carried by tools are those toward which he aspires. In the combination of sounds selected by a Mozart or a Beethoven he touches for a moment the qualities which he recognizes as lying at the very basis of being, something beyond him and better than he, of which he is worthy only through recognition and appre- hension. And these are imbedded in matter and its potentialities. It is by means of the symbols of a religion that he best comprehends through his emotions that there is reason in the world, and these too are imbedded in matter and so exist among its potentialities. And it is by means of technology that he is enabled to provide himself with the instruments which insure that as much as possible he shall leave behind him that aspect of matter which tended to hold him down to the merely animal. For it is the aim of his use of matter to achieve the greatest formalism with the least material. Matter is precious, and with only a small amount of it he can do a lot. He can hit some very large targets with some very small am- munition. With just paper and a pencil great literature can be written, and with just a violin-a thin and fragile wooden thing at best-great music can be performed.

It is characteristic of man that he strives to aspire beyond the world only to have his tools

REALISM IN LABORATORY SIMULATION 337

link him back with it, and in this way he finds that all his aspirations and strivings must lie through the world. And the "world" for this purpose is the earth together with the narrow ribbon of its atmosphere. Man has very lately begun to explore the earth and has penetrated successfully into a wider band around it. He is planning to go to the neighboring planets, beginning with the moon.

But for all the achievements and prospects of the "space age," his chief destiny lies here. It is the tools manufactured from the products of his own planet which sustain him in his brief temporary flights from it. For all his brief efforts to penetrate beyond the earth, man

is an earthbound creature who is just begin- ning to explore in some detail the instrumental potentialities of his own planet. He was born perhaps to actualize the possibilities of the sphere from which he springs and to which he is confined. He may learn, then, before he is done that some of the far-flung ambitions which he has carried with him from his birth and by means of which he would exceed himself were after all very much in his immediate environ- ment as a part of that earth which in contain- ing him contained also his aspirations and even, though at a somewhat more complex remove, their fulfillment.

REALISM IN LABORATORY SIMULATION: MYTH OR METHOD?*

THOMAS E. DRABEK J. EUGENE HAAS University of Denver The Ohio State University

ABSTRACT

By asking the question "What is it that makes an experiment 'realistic' ?" we seek to recast previous discussions focused on "realism versus artificiality." It is suggested that relationships between variables may vary under different experimental conditions. The degree of realism is used as a means of identifying experimental characteristics. This analysis of the concept of realism provides a meaningful alternative for future synthesis of small group research, both field and laboratory. Characteristics of a research method labeled "realistic simulation" are also identified.

T here is increasing interest in laboratory simulation by sociologists.1 A wide range of research efforts have been

categorized as "simulations" which on the sur- face appear to have little similarity. Some researchers have restricted their efforts to com- puter programming, e.g., simulation of voting

behavior and other social processes.2 Efforts also have been made to combine the use of computers and human subjects in a variety of

*Revision of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Chicago, Illinois, September 1965. Financial sup- port for this research was provided by United States Air Force Grant #AF-AFOSR-572-65, monitored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research of the Office of Aero Space Research.

1 It is of special interest that a recent introduc- tory methods text includes a chapter on simula- tion; see Bernard S. Phillips, Social Research: Strategy and Tactics (New York: The Macmil- lan Co., 1966), pp. 145-152.

2 Ithiel De Sola Pool and Robert Anderson, "The Simulmatics Project," Simulation in Social Science, (ed.) Harold Guetzkow (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1962), pp. 70-81. Three such papers were presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Septem- ber 1965, Chicago, Illinois, in a section entitled "Three Models Simulating Work and its Discon- tents": Raymond Breton, "Output Norms and Pro- ductive Behavior In Non-Cooperative Work Groups" (Johns Hopkins University); R. R. RiHi and C. P. Fair, "Simulating the Behavioral Con- sequences of Changes In Organizational Systems" (IBM, Armonk); and John T. Gullahorn and Jeanne E. Gullahorn, "Computer Simulation of Role Conflict Resolution" (Michigan State University).

Article Contentsp. 329p. 330p. 331p. 332p. 333p. 334p. 335p. 336p. 337

Issue Table of ContentsThe Journal of General Education, Vol. 27, No. 1 (SPRING 1975), pp. 1-90Front MatterObviating the Functions of Functionalism [pp. 319 - 328]The Philosophy of Tools [pp. 329 - 337]Realism in Laboratory Simulation: Myth or Method? [pp. 337 - 346]A Study of the Association among Verbal Attitudes, Commitment and Overt Behavior in Different Experimental Situations [pp. 347 - 355]An Examination of Some Religious and Political Attitude Correlates of Bigotry [pp. 356 - 362]Parental Encouragement, Occupation, Education and Family Size: Artifactual or Independent Determinants of Adolescent Educational Expectations? [pp. 362 - 374]Class Position and Success Stereotypes in Greek and American Cultures [pp. 374 - 383]An Evaluation of the Concept "Culture of Poverty" [pp. 383 - 392]Social Stratification and the Family in Mass Society [pp. 392 - 402]The Futures of South Africa [pp. 402 - 412]Ethnic Concentration and Assimilation: An Australian Case Study [pp. 412 - 423]Role Constellation As a Variable in Women's Leisure Activities [pp. 423 - 431]Speech and Social Status in America [pp. 431 - 437]Research NotesNegro Student Rebellion against Parental Political Beliefs [pp. 438 - 440]Measuring the Extent, Character, and Direction of Occupational Changes [pp. 440 - 444]

Book Reviewsuntitled [pp. 445 - 446]untitled [pp. 446 - 447]untitled [pp. 447 - 448]untitled [p. 448]untitled [pp. 448 - 449]untitled [p. 449]untitled [pp. 449 - 450]untitled [pp. 450 - 451]untitled [p. 451]untitled [p. 452]untitled [pp. 452 - 453]untitled [p. 453]untitled [pp. 453 - 454]untitled [p. 454]untitled [pp. 454 - 455]untitled [pp. 455 - 456]untitled [p. 456]untitled [pp. 456 - 457]untitled [pp. 457 - 458]untitled [p. 458]untitled [pp. 458 - 459]untitled [pp. 459 - 460]untitled [pp. 460 - 461]untitled [pp. 461 - 462]untitled [p. 462]untitled [pp. 462 - 463]untitled [pp. 463 - 464]untitled [p. 464]untitled [pp. 464 - 465]untitled [pp. 465 - 466]untitled [p. 466]untitled [pp. 466 - 467]untitled [p. 467]untitled [pp. 467 - 468]untitled [p. 468]untitled [pp. 468 - 469]untitled [pp. 469 - 470]untitled [pp. 470 - 471]untitled [pp. 471 - 472]untitled [p. 472]untitled [pp. 472 - 473]untitled [p. 473]untitled [pp. 473 - 474]untitled [p. 474]untitled [pp. 474 - 475]untitled [p. 475]untitled [p. 475]untitled [pp. 475 - 476]New Books Received [pp. 476 - 481]

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