 Cognition is intimately bound up with action on any construal, but the situated cognition framework makes it even more difficult to tease them apart. On a more traditional view, the emphasis is on how cognition shapes action. But on the situated cognition family of views, the emphasis is on how bodily activity antecedently shapes cognition, and indeed the mind in general (Gallagher 2005). Since human action typically involves the making and manipulation of artifacts, they, too, contribute to this mind-shaping process (Malafouris 2013). But artifacts shape action and patterns of behavior in the first instance. Some writers have focused on this action-shaping aspect of artifacts rather than on the cognition-shaping aspect. The locus classicus in this case is Michel Foucault’s (1975 [1977]) Discipline and Punish. On Foucault’s view, human action is substantially shaped by the very layout of the built environment and the specifics of the smaller artifacts that furnish it, not—as we naively tend to assume—primarily by the interpersonal relationships of the inhabitants. The most obvious examples seem innocuous. In chair cultures, for instance, people sit upright and off the floor to eat meals, while in non-chair cultures such as Japan they sit in various postures—depending on the social situation—on cushions on the floor. But Foucault focuses on less innocuous examples such as prisons, which shape action in ways that manifest the exercise of social power. He contrasts the dungeon model, in which behavior is temporarily shaped simply by sheer physical control over the prisoners’ freedom of movement, with the Panopticon model, in which the prisoners are kept under constant surveillance by invisible observers, prompting them to shape their own behavior in various habitual ways that survive the term of their imprisonment. This ensures a kind of continuing social control not available under the dungeon model. Foucault’s further point is that this “disciplinary” model is now pervasive in social institutions from education to workplace to health care to the “smart” home. Related themes surface in Bruno Latour’s (1994; 1999) technical mediation theory. On his view, agency is not a property of individual humans, but rather of collectives of “actants”—humans and nonhumans related to each other in specific, systematic ways. In contemporary western culture, the non-human actants are typically artifacts. Latour’s telling illustration starts with the well-known dispute between gun control advocates, who insist that “guns kill” and the National Rifle Association, which insists that “people kill”. Against both of these positions, Latour argues that the agent who kills is neither the gun nor the person, but a composite person-gun (or gun-person). Neither the person nor the gun remains the same in this relational context as they were before. Moreover, Latour argues, the relationship is symmetrical. Just as humans have intentions that enable them to enlist specific artifacts, artifacts have “scripts”—features of their design that enable them to enlist humans, facilitating certain behaviors and inhibiting others. Both Foucault and Latour tend to study the phenomena of human action in large-scale, institutional contexts—prisons and hospitals in the case of Foucault, scientific laboratories and transportation systems in the case of the actor-network theory pioneered by Latour and others. But there are also a number of writers who focus on the role of artifacts in small-scale, everyday contexts. Tim Ingold (2013), for example, focuses on skilled practice, particularly in the context of making things, from stone tools to baskets to paintings. His work shows that the generation of artifactual structure is as much due to the nature of the materials used as to any intention or plan on the part of the maker. Moreover, the nature of the materials and the tools used structure the activity of making itself. In a similar vein, Beth Preston (2013) argues that human action is more a matter of improvisation than planning, and that the continuously evolving structure of improvisatory action owes much to the opportunities artifacts afford. Furthermore, it is in interaction with artifacts in daily life that we develop the purposes and behavior patterns appropriate to them. Thus, having started with a traditional definition of “artifact” that emphasizes the dependence of artifacts on human intentions and purposes, the epistemology of artifacts brings us back around to a view that emphasizes instead the dependence of human cognition and action on artifacts.