ABSTRACT
Although tool use might require specific technical reasoning skills, patients with selective semantic memory deficits have peculiar difficulties showing how to use single familiar tools. In this chapter, we introduce views that foreground semantic knowledge and technical reasoning on tool use, discuss their role for using tools in isolation (i.e., single tool use) or not (i.e., real tool use), and hypothesize that semantic knowledge might be more pragmatic than thought in providing socio-contextual information relevant to tool use. This epistemological shift is in line with the neurosemiotic approach, which stresses the role of context-dependence effects on everyday cognition.
