ABSTRACT
My concern in this chapter is with the role of artifacts in human cognition. The mind/brain of humans is a product of evolution and the growth of mind can be studied as the gradual development and recruitment of those biological resources, a tradition which owes much to Jean Piaget. This tradition treats artifacts just as it would treat other objects in the natural world, that is, as a part of reality that the cognizer can progressively accommodate to in the course of development. Thus there are assumed to be stages in the development of understanding of manmade artifacts such as alphabetic writing just as there are stages of understanding motion or living things.
