William Clower, review of Philosophy and Memory Traces, J Hist Neuroscis 2000 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Memory (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2010
Winter 2012 Edition 3 memory and the non-conscious ways in which we are influenced by the past does not drive a useful wedge between philosophy and the sciences. On the one hand, scientific psychology is not, either in principle or in practice, restricted to the study of implicit learning and the varieties of conditioning: indeed, the study of our rich, socially-embedded capacities to remember our personal experiences is at the heart of much current research. On the other hand, philosophers too want to understand the operations of habit memory, skill memory, and involuntary memory, and their implications for expanded notions of agency and identity.
Traces, Brains, and History [introduction to *Philosophy and Memory Traces*]
Porous memories fuse and interpenetrate. Fragments of song mingle in hot remembered afternoons, mysterious angers return at a flush with a chance forgotten postcard. Such memories were once the motions of old fluids, animal spirits which meandered and rummaged through the pores of the brain. They held experience and history in bodies which were themselves porous, uncertainly coupled across tissues and skin with their air, their ethics, their land. Now they are patterns of activation across vast neural networks, condensing and compressing innumerable possible trajectories into the particular vectors of flashing or torpid memories. Dynamic cognitive systems coevolving with the physiological, environmental, and social systems in which they are embedded (van Gelder and Port 1995: 27-30) need the wishful mixings of absence which interfering traces bring. These studies in the history of theories of memory are grounded in new interpretations of strange, neglected old French and English neurophilosophy. But only late twentieth-century worries about memory, science, and truth make sense of indulgent attention to 'seventeenth-century French connectionism' (Diamond 1969), and to bizarre historical beliefs about interactive relations between self, body, mind, and coursing nervous fluids. This kind of historical cognitive science aims to demonstrate that it is possible to attend to contexts and to brains at once. ... I undertake both the description and the defence of related theories of memory, from animal spirits to connectionism, which employ superpositional storage: memories are blended, not laid down independently once and for all, and are reconstructed rather than reproduced. In dissolving old and new lines of attack on such theories, I suggest that they exemplifY the sensitivity to culture and history which good psychological science can exhibit. Working between historical and contemporary material suggests that wider issues about the self and psychological control are also implicated in current debates. The models of memory distributed through these studies, in mosaic from Descartes to connectionism, hintata more reckless algebra, an understanding of how complex self-organising physical systems like us can be so psychologically plastic, attuned to the configurations of culture in which cognition and remembering are situated.
Integrating the philosophy and psychology of memory: two case studies
Cartographies of the Mind: philosophy and psychology in intersection, 2007
Memory is studied across a bewildering range of disciplines and subdisciplines in the neural, cognitive, and social sciences, and the term covers a wide range of related phenomena. In an integrative spirit, this chapter examines two case studies in memory research in which empirically-informed philosophy and philosophically-informed sciences of the mind can be mutually informative, such that the interaction between psychology and philosophy can open up new research problems—and set new challenges—for our understanding of certain aspects of memory. In each case, there is already enough interdisciplinary interaction on specific issues to give some confidence in the potential productivity of mutual exchange: but in each case, residual gulfs in research style and background assumptions remain to be addressed. The two areas are the developmental psychology of autobiographical memory, and the study of shared memories and social memory phenomena.
Book review symposium: The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory
Memory Studies, 2019
As a psychologist, when I think about memory, I think about questions such as the following: How do people-and other species-remember the past? What neurological or cognitive mechanisms are involved? What are its properties? Is there one form of memory or many different forms of memory? If more than one, how does one characterize them? To some extent, the philosophy of memory tackles at least some of the same issues, but it appears on the surface to involve much more. As a cursory examination of the Table of Contents of The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory indicates, there are concerns about the metaphysics and epistemology of memory and the morality of memory. When are you, for instance, morally obligated to remember? But then, when should you feel the obligation to forget? Questions such as these remain largely either unexplored or unrecognized by psychologists and neuroscientists, and one could reasonably argue, rightly so. One could equally argue, however, that psychologists have a great deal to learn about memory from philosophers. This volume is a good place to start. The editors-Sven Bernecker and Kourken Michaelian-have masterfully found articulate and authoritative contributors who address these topics and many more. I particularly welcomed the section on the history of the philosophy of memory. There are separate chapters on Plato (Chapter 30), Aristotle (Chapter 31), Augustine (Chapter 35), Indian Buddhist philosophy (Chapter 33), Hume (Chapter 39), Hegel (Chapter 40), Bergson (Chapter 42), Halbwachs (Chapter 44), and Ricoeur (Chapter 48), to name just of a handful of the 18 separate historical chapters. These will serve as a ready guide for anyone who wants to understand the contributions of different scholars to the study of memory. As I read through the altogether 48 chapters in this volume, I found myself thinking back to my graduate school days. After a year or two studying the psychology and neuroscience of memory, I decided that I needed to know something about the philosophy of memory. At the time, at Cornell, the formidable Wittgensteinian philosopher Norman Malcolm was teaching a course on memory. I distinctly remember being hopelessly confused from the start. At least in the beginning of the course, Malcolm appeared to treat a memory as a memory only if it captured "truthfully" the past. As Bernecker states in his entry on "Memory and Truth" (Chapter 4), "'To remember' is factive in the sense that an utterance of 'S remembers that p' (where 'S' stands for a subject and 'p' stands for a proposition) is true only if p is the case. If not-p, then S may think that she remembers that p, but she doesn't actually remember that p" (p. 52). A large number of chapters in this volume either embrace this notion, or feel that one must take it seriously enough to tackle it at length. To return to Bernecker again, many philosophers find the statement "I remember such-and-such, but suchand-such never happened," if not literally contradictory, paradoxical. For them, it is "not really a 883205M SS0010.1177/1750698019883205Memory Studies book-review2019 Book review symposium
Paul Coates, review of *Philosophy and Memory Traces* (BJHP 8, 2000, 559-561)
British Journal for the History of Philosophy 8 (3), 2000, 559-561, 2000
John Sutton’s rich and absorbing book interweaves two related themes. ... Throughout, Sutton counters both explicitly and implicitly the idea that there is a sharp divide between philosophical and scientific issues. ... All those interested in the history and philosophy of memory should benefit from this work.
Memory science in the twentieth century
Topics covered here include Freud’s psychoanalysis (section 2), Ebbinghaus’s repurposing of psychophysics (section 3), Bartlett’s notion of constructive remembering (section 4), post-war efforts to assimilate human memory to computer memory (section 5), and the present connectionist paradigm (section 6). One unifying theme is the striking role of metaphor and simile in scientific memory discourse. [Penultimate draft. Final version forthcoming in S. Berger and J. Olick (eds.), A Cultural History of Memory (Bloomsbury Academic).]
This article presents an evaluation of research strategy in the psychology of memory. To the extent that a strategy can be discerned, it appears less than optimal in several respects. It relates only weakly to subjective experience, it does not clearly differentiate between structure and strategy, and it is oriented more toward remembering which words were in a list than to the diverse functions that memory serves. This last limitation fosters assumptions about memory that are false: that encoding and retrieval are distinct modes of operation; that the effects of repetition, duration, and recency are interchangeable; and that memory is ahistorical. Theories that parsimoniously explain data from single tasks will never generalize to memory as a whole because their core assumptions are too limited. Instead, memory theory should be based on a broad variety of evidence. Using findings from several memory tasks and observations of everyday memory, I suggest some ways in which involuntary reminding plays a central role in cognition. The evolutionary purpose of memory may have been the construction and maintenance—through reminding—of a spatio-temporal model of the environment. I conclude by recommending ways in which efficiency of the field's research strategy might be improved. Everyone has heard the East Indian fable of the blind philosophers and the elephant. The philosophers' descriptions of the animal are drastically different, because each is feeling a different part of its anatomy. Knowing what they do not know, we find their disagreement mildly amusing, as well as instructive. But now consider a revised version of the story, in which all the blind philosophers are feeling the elephant's tail. There would be good agreement on what the elephant is like, and a correspondingly high degree of confidence, but the mutually accepted description would be seriously wide of the mark. Sometimes it seems that students of human memory have gotten themselves into a similar fix. In what follows, I describe several aspects of the field's dilemma and discuss how we might work our way out of it.