Artefacts as Social Things

Abstract

In these reflections, we want to prove a thesis whereby normativity of rules and norms may be linked to the domain of artefacts which we understand as social things. We claim that some norms and rules are situated in human socio-material ecosystems especially when it comes to the role played by affordances. The thesis advanced in this article will also enable us to indicate one of the potential interpretations of Wittgenstein’s ‘forms of life’ concept, demonstrating that some solutions suggested by the author of Philosophical Investigations are still relevant today. We will relate the issue of the normativity of artefacts to the problem of rule recognition which Wittgenstein also raises in some of his later studies. We will demonstrate that the problem of normativity recognition is linked to (1) relational properties of objects, that is affordances; (2) structured nature of the world of human communities; and (3) the ability to recognise affordances related to the ability to create predictions about future states of affairs. The analyses presented herein will show that it is possible to link the perspectives of cognitive ecology, design practice and philosophical analyses focused on the problem of normativity.

Normativity of Predictions: A New Research Perspective

“…By this I mean that it is necessary to refer not so much to the structure of a given system as to its actual interactions with the environment. Therefore, the normativity of prediction is less determined by its functional role in the generative model and the selection and management of actions than by its reference to relevant properties of the environment which, according to some researchers (e.g., Bruineberg and Rietveld, 2014; Bruineberg, 2017; Piekarski and Wachowski, 2018), is already structured. Due to the fact that the world is already “pre-structured,” it may present to the organism certain values of reward or punishment which cannot be reduced to log-evidence or negative surprise (Friston et al, 2012a).…”