But I am a person {66 yr's old} with 25 plus year's as a body & fender guy, Painted Aircraft for Boeing, for 5 yr's, and 19 yr's and still counting welding (5 yr's ship yard's, working on small boat's of 400 foot length's) & metal fabrication. I also just in the last 4 yr's have invested heavily into machinist equipment metal lathe, milling machine, machinist tooling (would have been cheaper to do drugs.)
The statement: “Even the concept of this kind of precision does not occur to an artisan unless there is no other means of accomplishing what the artifact is intended to do. The only other reason that such precision would be created in an object would be that the tools that are used to create it are so precise that they are incapable of producing anything less than precision.”
Makes a LOT OF SENSE to me.
With dripping sarcasm let me use a saying I like, when wanting to put a person in their place: if I put a scalpel in your hand it doesn't make you a F-ing neurosurgeon.
But that scalpel could & would improve even a modest say wood caver, for example, I could go on, put I'm hoping you can at least smell the coffee, by now. FACE to PALM, rolling my eye's now. Shaking my head in disbelief.
You see in the cutting of a rectangular slab of stone (unfinished) which shows multiple swipes at chopping off pieces, evidence of a tool so precise that it cannot do anything other than “such precision”?
I’ve looked at marble sculpture by Michelangelo and Bernini that are fantastic and listened to discussions of both the tools used and the mistakes made. The artists could have taken their most precise tool and chopped off a head had they so desired (or missed).
I doubt that in the cutting of giant pieces of stone TODAY, the tools used are so precise they are capable of nothing other than the intended precision.