Oct. 22, 2026, 4 p.m. UTC // Oct. 22, 2026, 4 p.m. in UTC
Using tools and artifacts is fundamental for human sensorimotor agency. Yet we cannot understand their influence solely in terms of individual skillful use. Tools are historically constituted through collective and material processes which shape agency. On the one hand, social practices transmit, refine, and transform the skills through which objects acquire and maintain their functionality. On the other hand, the design and manufacture of increasingly specialized artifacts impose correct ways of using them. These processes become effective in shaping agency when an agent uses an object as a tool. In use, object and agent become concrete. An object is concretized as a tool when some of its possibilities are actualized. In this process, the object’s collectively and historically constituted functionality normatively shapes the agent’s sensorimotor engagements, while in those engagements the agent can also resist or transform the ways the tool is meant to be used. Likewise, an individual becomes a concrete agent through their use of tools as their potentialities for interacting with and transforming the environment become actualized. In use, agent and tool form an agential unit that is also recognizable as an intelligible participant in established social practices. Concrete agents and tools are thus mutually constituted across nested timescales. Historically and collectively constituted tools and practices shape the concrete enactment of sensorimotor agency, while concrete enactments in turn sustain or transform the practices and material arrangements through which tools and forms of agency are constituted.
