Human nature, tool-making or language

Quiz 3 Assignment Please answer the following study questions below. You will be graded on the following:

a) Answering the questions and all parts of the prompts (simply and directly more than extended responses)

b) Justifying your position through engagement with the text and/or using a relevant example(s)

c) Addressing counter-arguments to your position through engagement with the text and/or a relevant example(s)

Study Questions (adapted) from Chapter 8:

1) What is your own judgment as to which, if either, is more fundamental to human nature, tool-making or language? Does the idea that humans produce tools to make tools that make tools show a genuine difference from animal tool-making, or do the discoveries of animal tool-making destroy the characterization of humans as tool-makers?

2) Does Arendt’s analysis of work, labor, and action still hold in the computerized factory after the transition from the industrial to the post-industrial or information age? Does the Internet reinvent the political space that Arendt claims disappeared in the modern world (think about propaganda here)?

3) Does the rise of information technology and electronic communication undermine Habermas’s dualism between instrumental/technological action and communicative action? If so, how? (Consider a society in which production of information rather than physical objects is the central activity. Does this blur the distinction between action and work, or does information become merely another artifact?)

*To demonstrate your engagement with the text, please use parenthetical citations for Dusek and be sure to put language directly from the source into double quotation marks.