The products of Artefaction are not just made things but making things. Included in this class are tangible things with a capacity for rhetorical performance – for example a statue or a flag – as well as intangible things, of which the preeminent example is the word. Where words combine in sentences and in speech, they can attain monumental status and influence. Contemplating Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, in which Burke argued that a word like ‘freedom’ is only as good as the use to which it is put, Richard Dawson observes that for Burke, words are ‘evolving cultural artefacts that shape us and are shaped by us as we use them’. This serves as an excellent definition of the Making Sense informing the term ‘Artefaction’ as it is used in this chapter, as does James Boyd White’s idea (as summarized by Dawson) that language is ‘an evolving cultural artefact for making and remaking ourselves and our world – the real world’. In defence of ‘underwater basket weaving’, this chapter turns to material culture to consider the relationship between the weaving of words and such handcrafts as the weaving of baskets.

Jeffrey Gore’s entry on technē offers a survey of diverse workers throughout Shakespeare’s writing: artisans, lawyers, medical doctors, and educators. It situates the Greek word technē – meaning “technical expertise,” “craft,” or “skill” – within Aristotle’s intellectual virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics as both a pedagogical model (“the craft analogy”) and a marker of social class among different laborers, from “leather apron” craftspeople to elite Latin learners and modern teachers of the liberal arts. In brief accounts of Hannah Arendt’s and Alasdair MacIntyre’s writings on Aristotle, the entry addresses how technē was often believed incompatible with some ancient and early modern notions of citizenship and demonstrates how many of Shakespeare’s characters – such as the “rude mechanicals” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – challenge us to understand the role of craft in facilitating artistic expression and strengthening political community.