Acts of Remembering: From A Radically Enactive Point of View (original) (raw)
Related papers
Remembering as a mental action
New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory (ed. K. Michaelian, D. Debus & D. Perrin). Routledge., 2018
Many philosophers consider that memory is just a passive information retention and retrieval capacity. Some information and experiences are encoded, stored, and subsequently retrieved in a passive way, without any control or intervention on the subject’s part. In this paper, we will defend an active account of memory according to which remembering is a mental action and not merely a passive mental event. According to the reconstructive account, memory is an imaginative reconstruction of past experience. A key feature of the reconstructive account is that given the imperfect character of memory outputs, some kind of control is needed. Metacognition is the control of mental processes and dispositions. Drawing from recent work on the normativity of automaticity and automatic control, we distinguish two kinds of metacognitive control: top-down, reflective control, on the one hand, and automatic, intuitive, feeling-based control on the other. Thus, we propose that whenever the mental process of remembering is controlled by means of intuitive or feeling-based metacognitive processes, it is an action.
Remembering without Stored Contents: A Philosophical Reflection on Memory
This paper defends a view of remembering that is in tune with radically enactive and embodied accounts of mind – accounts that assume cognition is not all of a piece, and not always and everywhere representational and content-involving. An implication of this emerging framework for thinking about minds, when extended to memory, is that successful acts of remembering should always be understood as cognitively extensive; to remember is to be connected in cognitively appropriate ways with the right external events. Remembering is a matter of actively reconnecting with past happenings, and this is a process that involves constructing contents and it may involve having attendant sensory imagery. Nevertheless all of this can be understood without assuming the existence of anything like stored contentful proxies or stand-ins.
The purpose of this essay is to determine how we should construe the content of memories or, in other words, to determine what the intentional objects of memory are The issue that will concern us is, then, analogous to the traditional philosophical question of whether perception directly puts us in cognitive contact with entities in the world or with entities in our own minds. As we shall see, there are some interesting aspects of the phenomenology and the epistemology of memory, and I shall aim at a specification of the content of memories that is in accordance with those aspects of them.
New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory
New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory presents newly commissioned work from well-established, leading scholars in the philosophy of memory as well as from young scholars who are currently emerging as important contributors to the field. The commissioned contributions to the volume deal with a broad range of issues in the philosophy of memory, from issues in the metaphysics and the phenomenology of memory, through questions about memory and norms, to issues related to memory and affectivity. While the topic of memory has until recently been somewhat neglected in contemporary philosophical debates, a broader interest in relevant themes is currently developing; indeed, the philosophy of memory is emerging as a growing research area and at present it is attracting a substantial amount of attention. In line with this recent development, the volume provides a timely venue for new and original research in the philosophy of memory.
The philosophy of memory today and tomorrow: Editors' introduction
New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory
This introductory chapter provides an overview of the chapters making up the book, which are grouped into six sections: challenges and alternatives to the causal theory of memory; activity and passivity in remembering; the affective dimension of memory; memory in groups; memory failures: concepts and ethical implications; and the content and phenomenology of episodic and semantic memory.
The Roots of Remembering: Extensively Enactive RECollection
New theories of remembering cast it as dynamic and, sometimes, wide-reaching. They not only challenge the idea that remembering is a type of passive recollection but that it always takes place wholly and solely inside the head. Yet a common feature of many of these new theories of remembering, in line with information processing paradigm, is their conservative endorsement of the traditional assumption that interesting forms of remembering are rooted in the retrieval of some kind of remembered content. This paper reviews various contemporary theories of memory that make the content assumption and shows how they can be modified by an alternative vision that is both empirically adequate and yet avoids having to face up to the Hard Problem of Content. We demonstrate how the radically enactive account of the roots of remembering on offer can successfully handle classic cases discussed in the extended memory literature as well as explain experientially rich forms of episodic memory.
Fernández, J. (2019). Memory: a self-referential account. Oxford University Press
Estudios de Filosofía, No 64, 2021
Fernández’ most recent book constitutes an articulated development of several philosophical considerations on memory displayed in previous, and forthcoming publications. The result of such articulated development ends up being a consistent account that provides an innovative and thought-provoking perspective on episodic remembering. This volume not only gathers and articulates the author’s previous ideas, but also provides new reflections, and objections that encompasses four significant domains in the philosophy of memory. In the first part of the book (Chapters 1, 2, and 3), Fernández offers an account of both the metaphysics and the intentionality of episodic memory; in the second part (Chapters 4 and 5), the author deals with certain phenomenological aspects involved in remembering; in the third part (Chapters 6 and 7), two important debates in the epistemology of memory are discussed.
S. Bernecker and K. Michaelian (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Memory, 2017
The most salient aspect of memory is its role in preserving previously acquired information so as to make it available for further activities. Anna realizes that something is amiss in a book on Roman history because she learned and remembers that Caesar was murdered. Max turned up at the party and distinctively remembers where he was seated, so he easily gets his hands on his lost cell phone. The fact that information is not gained anew distinguishes memory from perception. The fact that information is preserved distinguishes memory from imagination. But how do acquisition and retrieval of information contribute to the phenomenology of memory?The exclusive aim of this chapter is to sketch a map of the phenomenology of memory. It is structured as follows. In section 1, I introduce the contrast between content (what is remembered) and psychological attitude (remembering). This distinction will be helpful in disentangling issues in the phenomenology of memory. Section 2 is devoted to the contribution of memory content to phenomenology, section 3 to the contribution of the attitude of remembering.