Concept
Tool
Overview
A tool is an object that can extend an individual's ability to modify features of the surrounding environment or help them accomplish a particular task, and proto-typically refers to solid hand-operated non-biological objects with a single broad purpose that lack multiple functions, unlike machines or computers. Although human beings are proportionally most active in using and making tools in the animal kingdom, as use of stone tools dates back hundreds of millennia, and also in using tools to make other tools, many animals have demonstrated tool use in both instances.
Early human tools, made of such materials as stone, bone, and wood, were used for the preparation of food, hunting, the manufacture of weapons, and the working of materials to produce clothing and useful artifacts and crafts such as pottery, along with the construction of housing, businesses, infrastructure, and transportation. The development of metalworking made additional types of tools possible. Harnessing energy sources, such as animal power, wind, or steam, allowed increasingly complex tools to produce an even larger range of items, with the Industrial Revolution marking an inflection point in the use of tools. The introduction of widespread automation in the 19th and 20th centuries allowed tools to operate with minimal human supervision, further increasing the productivity of human labor. By extension, concepts that support systematic or investigative thought are often referred to as "tools" or "toolkits".
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Only in the former case can the scaffolding be considered as a _mere_ tool. In the latter case the external scaffolding is not itself the instrumentality; the actual tool is the _action_ of erecting the building, and this action involves the scaffolding as a constituent part of itself. The work of erecting is not set over against the completed building as mere means to an end; it _is_ the end taken in process or…
John Dewey, Studies in Logical Theory
Names Tool several times; states what Tool is.
There is no miracle in the fact that tool and material are adapted to each other in the process of reaching a valid conclusion. Were they external in origin to each other and to the result, the whole affair would, indeed, present an insoluble problem--so insoluble that, if this were the true condition of affairs, we never should even know that…
John Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic
Names Tool several times; opens on Tool.
And when the producer, after buying the tools and employing them in his own occupation, comes to estimate his gains, he must set aside a portion of the produce to replace not only the wages paid both by himself and by the tool-maker, but also the profits of the tool-maker, advanced by himself out of his own capital. It is not correct, therefore, to state that all which the capitalist retains after replacing wages…
John Stuart Mill, Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy
Names Tool several times; opens on Tool.
Related ideas
- Dark Ages (historiography)
- Iran
- Industrial Revolution
- Cultural artifact
- Infrastructure
- Ethiopia
- Prehistory
- Mechanics
- Mesopotamia
- Nanotechnology
- Ancient Near East
- Writing system
- Craft
- Business
- The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
- Ancient Rome
- Ancient Greece
- Human
- Concept
- Computer
- Charles Darwin
- Animal communication
- Eisenbrauns
- Personal grooming
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Mental representation.