Every day we experience relationships with artefacts, which describe material objects made by humans in order to reach a goal and exploit the human feature to plan ahead. Artefacts bring together cognitive evolution a...Every day we experience relationships with artefacts, which describe material objects made by humans in order to reach a goal and exploit the human feature to plan ahead. Artefacts bring together cognitive evolution and technical enhancement. Although artefacts are conceived as technical, we are now facing a relationship with Information Technology （IT） artefacts. IT artefacts include both hardware and software, as a two-sided entity. The definition of IT artefact corresponds with the Saussurean linguistic sign： a two-sided entity constituted by the signifier （hardware） and the signified （software）. I claim that IT artefacts share this ontological trait with the linguistic sign. I will show that IT artefacts are the result of design and planning, while language--which is an institution--is not the fabrication of one human but linked to collective human activity.展开更多
文摘Every day we experience relationships with artefacts, which describe material objects made by humans in order to reach a goal and exploit the human feature to plan ahead. Artefacts bring together cognitive evolution and technical enhancement. Although artefacts are conceived as technical, we are now facing a relationship with Information Technology （IT） artefacts. IT artefacts include both hardware and software, as a two-sided entity. The definition of IT artefact corresponds with the Saussurean linguistic sign： a two-sided entity constituted by the signifier （hardware） and the signified （software）. I claim that IT artefacts share this ontological trait with the linguistic sign. I will show that IT artefacts are the result of design and planning, while language--which is an institution--is not the fabrication of one human but linked to collective human activity.
