In the philosophy of technology, artifacts are an important concept that relates people, nature, and artificial nature, and are also a key perspective for exploring social systems, technological systems, and human life in the empirical world. Among them, the humanistic artifacts that meet people's spiritual needs have shaped the basic appearance of human cultural and recreational activities, and the published artifacts represented by various publications are a typical category for constructing an objective knowledge world.
1
Associated Concepts: Artifacts and Humanistic Artifacts
Artefacts originated from the study of the nature of technology in the philosophy of technology, and are regarded as the core of the inquiry into technology-related issues. (1) As opposed to natural objects, the source of the creation of artificial objects is not the artificial objects themselves, but outside the artificial objects. Marx once analyzed from the standpoint of labor, believing that labor is the process of inducing, adjusting and controlling the material exchange between man and nature through man's own activities, and that artificial objects are the products of human labor. (2) Chen Changshu, a domestic scholar, pointed out that the logical starting point of the philosophy of technology is artificial nature, which is a basic concept of natural transformation. (3) Subsequently, Wang Dewei divides artificial nature into three categories: the artificial material level, the engineering level and the tool level, and believes that artificial objects are the second natural objects that meet the needs of people or society, and are the most common forms of artificial nature. ④
For a long time, the focus of artefact research has been on the research of technical artefacts. Affected by different research projects or research trends, although relevant researchers have frequently invested in technical artifacts and have paid a lot of attention, in the expression of related concepts, they either generalize the concept of technical artifacts to cover the basic meaning of "artifacts", or tighten the concept of technological artifacts and exclude "humanistic artifacts". Although the Dutch school of thought such as Peter Kroes and Anthonie Meijers put forward the philosophical proposition of the "function-structure" duality of technical artifacts earlier, they were unable to extend the broader meaning of artifacts due to the limitations of the project itself. In response to this shortcoming, the American scholar Carl Mitcham pointed out that the Dutch school uses "technical artifacts" to discuss the problem of artifacts, but in fact excludes non-engineering artifacts in a broader sense, such as works of art and other objects. (5) When discussing the trifectality of technological artifacts, domestic scholars such as Yin Xunfa also explicitly excluded artefacts related to ideology, superstructure, and economic relations, such as culture, art, games, law, religion, enterprises, and currency. (6) In fact, in addition to technical practical activities, there are many forms of social practical activities, and the conceptual study of artifacts should be directed to a wider range of activities, and special attention should be given to practical activities such as literary and artistic knowledge in a broad sense. (7) For example, it is difficult to say that all kinds of cultural products such as novels, films, books, newspapers and periodicals, and works of art, as well as the social economy, state apparatus, and legal system, do not belong to the category of artifacts. (8) With the help of semiotic discourse construction, Li Sanhu tries to enhance the flexibility of the interpretation of technical artifacts, so that in a broader sense, technological artifacts include not only immaterial artifacts such as computer software, but also artifacts with both material and non-material meanings such as paintings, sculptures, and paper books. (9) Regrettably, in the process of discourse, he still uses technical artifacts as the main object to map the meaning interpretation of artifacts in a wider range.
Obscured by the momentum of technological artifact research, although the research on humanistic artifacts is dwarfed, some scholars have found that the symbolic information attributes of artifacts also contain the information of humanistic symbols through the investigation of the nature of artifacts, and most importantly, there are a large number of artifacts in social life that meet people's spiritual and cultural life, such as books, periodicals, film and television, games, artworks and other cultural and entertainment products. (10) Therefore, these artifacts are collectively referred to as human artifacts. Just as "technical facts" themselves cannot be understood simply as singular "things" or "things",(11) so are human artifacts, which are the collection of various states of being that appear in the empirical world of human recreation. As the penetration scope of modern technology has been widely spread in all fields of people's production and life, the number and variety of human artifacts are more abundant, and the classification of types is becoming more and more difficult. In particular, the dependence and relationship between culture and technology is gradually deepening, and the overall trend of technologization of humanistic artifacts and human culture of technical artifacts will gradually blur the boundaries between the two and make it more difficult to distinguish between them.
2
Definition of the concept: the basic meaning of publishing artifacts
The activity of publishing is essentially an activity that gives objectivity to knowledge. In the famous philosopher Karl Popper's theory of "three worlds": the objective knowledge world in the form of books, libraries, computers, etc., which exists in solid form, is clearly different from the external objective physical world (world 1) and the internal subjective spiritual world (world 2), because "world three" includes not only the human spiritual world such as theory and thought, but also many conceptual entities such as the digital world, artworks and institutions (such as libraries), (12) It is composed and expressed by various symbols, The world of knowledge content in the form of materialization. (13) The reason why the published artifact is placed in this third world composed of objective knowledge, which is the world of form carried by symbols, rather than the material world of material carriers, is because the existence or absence of material carriers carrying subjective content does not affect the objective meaning of the content world represented by symbols. The symbolic production of published artifacts in the third world is a typical existence: on the one hand, published artifacts cannot completely exist independently from the formal carrier in "World One"; On the other hand, knowledge production and civilization evolution are inseparable from the subjective thinking activities of human beings in "World II". In addition, published artifacts cannot exist independently or evolve on their own in isolation from the overall practice of cognitive behavior in human social relations. Before the advent of Internet technology, objective knowledge was composed of various statements spoken, written, and printed,(14) Publishing artifacts mainly appeared in magazines, books, libraries and other related environments with static substrates (such as paper) as carriers. (15) As the Internet has become a synthesizer of objective knowledge construction, the technical processing and socialization practices of publishing activities in terms of knowledge creation, production, representation, dissemination and storage have undergone fundamental changes, but the symbolic production of knowledge content, which is the core task of publishing activities, has remained unchanged. Published artifacts remain the most widespread form of objective representation of knowledge in the Third World.
Therefore, we can understand the publishing artifact in this way: it is an existence that endows objective knowledge meaning to the subjective thinking content and satisfies people's spiritual and cultural needs by the groups related to publishing activities through their own knowledge, ability or values, through productive labor such as knowledge production, technological processing and social practice. The particularity that distinguishes publishing artifacts from other humanities artifacts lies in the fact that the purpose of their existence is not only derived from people's spiritual and cultural needs, but also takes knowledge information as the representation content, and its generation process not only needs to give knowledge information an "objective" symbolic production, but also needs to be formed through various practices of publishing activities. Among them, symbolic production, technical intervention and industrialization practice in publishing activities are important parameters that affect the development and continuous evolution of publishing artefacts, and these evolutionary parameters often drive the changes of publishing artefacts in terms of cultural characteristics, generation conditions, industrial practices and social situations, and drive the linkage changes in the material retreat, technical enhancement, and socialization transfer of publishing artefacts in the process of evolution, which is not only the key quality in the evolution process of publishing artefacts. It also makes the publication of artifacts a type of artifact with more comprehensive attribute characteristics.
(Excerpted from "Publishing Artifacts: Basic Concepts, Attribute Characteristics and Evolutionary Essentials", published in Modern Publishing, Issue 5, 2022)
exegesis
(1) Liu Zhen. What is the function of the "function" of an artifact? Research on Dialectics of Nature,2021,37(2):32.)
(2) Marx. Beijing:People's Publishing House,1975:202-205.
(3) Chen Changshu. Introduction to the philosophy of technology[M].Beijing:Science Press,2012.36.
(4) Wang Dewei. Harbin:Heilongjiang People's Publishing House,2004:63-65,6.
⑤ SVEN O H.Understanding technological function:introduction to the special issue on the dual nature programme[J]. Techné:journal of the society for philosophy and technology,2002,6(2):1-3.
(6) Yin Discipline Method, Chen Fan. On the Triduality of "Technical Artefacts"[J].Dialectics of Nature,2004(7): 28-31.
⑦ KRIST V.The functional bias of the dual nature of technical artefacts program[J]. Studies in history and philosophy of science,2011, 42(1):190-197.
(8) Li Fu. Journal of Changsha University of Science and Technology (Social Science Edition),2021,36(4):3.)
(9) Li Sanhu. Dialectics of Nature Communications,2018,40(7): 106-114.
(10) Wang Dewei. On the basic concept of artefacts[J].Dialectics of Nature,2003(5):44-45.
(11) Ge Yongyi. Shenyang:Northeastern University,2007:88.
(12) Popper. The Theory of the Evolution of Scientific Knowledge—Selected Works of Popper's Philosophy of Science[M].Ji Lili,Compilation. Beijing: Life, Reading, New Knowledge, 1987:309.
(13) Guo Bin. A brief analysis of the similarities and differences between "World Three" and Cassirer's Symbolic World: Popper's "Three Worlds" Theory from Cassirer's Symbolic World[J].Dialectics of Nature Communications,2015,37(6):132.)
(14) Zhao Tao. Electronic network and knowledge production: An investigation based on the perspective of Popper's "three worlds" theory[J].Academia,2013(10):76.)
(15) Popper. Objective Knowledge: A Study of Evolution[M].Shu Weiguang, et al. trans. Shanghai:Shanghai Translation Publishing House,2001:5.
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About the Author
Xiaoli Zhou holds a Ph.D. in Publishing and Distribution, School of Information Management, Wuhan University.
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