http://www.hyle.org/journal/issues/9-2/kretzenbacher.htm

I, toyMaker

“Tinkering, by the way, is an excellent translation for the French bricoler which Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962, p. 27) advocates as a means for researchers of culture. It has also been variously described as a particularly linguistic strategy of cognition, not only by Heinrich von Kleist almost 200 years ago (cf. Kleist 1990), but also more recently in linguistics proper (cf. Hopper 1987, pp. 144-145). Chemists tinker – guided by theory – with substances in their laboratories and – guided by theory as well – with thoughts in their heads. Of course, substances (as matter) have an aesthetic quality accessible to human senses that thoughts lack – or do they? Much of what chemists have to deal with in their practical work is hardly accessible to human senses in a direct way. I have not seen an electron lately, neither have I seen much sunshine lately while I have been working on this paper. Both phenomena are accessible to my eyes, although the electron only so in the form that a machine extending my senses presents it to them. Language as a machine extending my cognitive abilities does not work in an entirely different way. But can abstract concepts in linguistic form become accessible to a sensory as well as a purely theoretical perception? “