Memory science in the twentieth century (original) (raw)
Related papers
Selected bibliography of Memory Studies
International Social Science Journal, 2011
The current international research on the social phenomena of memory and the conditions explained in the general introduction of a sort of globalisation of the body of references are two factors explaining both the extent of the bibliography presented in all the articles in this issue and the heterogeneity of these references. It seemed thus useful to sum up in one list the different references that are, so to speak, common to all articles of this issue. Each article has also its own list of references with its own specificities. The combination of this list of references with those provided by Erll and Nünning (2008), Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi and Levy (2011), and by Gensburger (2011) will give those who want to explore these issues in greater depth a comprehensive state of the relevant work, old and new.
Creating a new discipline of memory studies
Memory Studies, 2008
The multidisciplinary field of memory studies combines,intellectual strands from many domains, including (but not limited to) anthropology, education, literature, history, phil- osophy, psychology and sociology. Our article has four parts. We first consider defin- itions of memory and note that the single term itself is not particularly useful. Rather, scholars must specify the type or variety of memory under
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.
Social Studies of Science, 2009
pbk), 0 26202 589 2 (hbk) £11.95/$17.95/13.99 (pbk), £22.95/$90.00/34.95 (hbk). ISBN 0 26252 489 9 the Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 261 pp.,
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
Memory metaphors in cognitive psychology
Memory & Cognition, 1980
In describing memory phenomena in natural language, a spatial metaphor is typically employed. Memories are considered to be objects that are stored in a mind space, and the process of retrieval is conceived as a search for these objects. It is argued that this metaphor has been carried over into many of the popular theories of memory in cognitive psychology and that seemingly diverse theories employ the same underlying set of assumptions. A survey of the analogies that have been used to explain memory is presented and alternatives to the dominant spatial storage and search assumptions are discussed. The spatial metaphor is evaluated, and the role of analogical explanation in psychology is briefly considered. One result of the increasing number of analogical models is the proliferation of hypothetical mental constructs that are only loosely connected to behavioral measures. COMMON CONCEPTIONS OF MIND Jaynes (1976) puts forth the remarkable thesis that subjective consciousness has evolved only in the last