Collaborative remembering, in which two or more individuals cooperate to remember together, is an ordinary occurrence. Ordinary though it may be, it challenges traditional understandings of remembering as a cognitive process unfolding within a single subject, as well as traditional understandings of memory knowledge as a justified memory belief held within the mind of a single subject. Collaborative memory has come to be a major area of research in psychology, but it has so far not been investigated in epistemology. In (...) this chapter, we attempt an initial exploration of the epistemological implications of collaborative memory research, taking as our starting point the “extended knowledge” debate which has resulted from the recent encounter between extracranialist theories of cognition and externalist theories of knowledge (Carter et al., 2014; Carter et al., forthcoming). Various forms of socially and technologically augmented memory have played important roles in the extended knowledge debate, but the debate has so far not taken collaborative memory, in particular, into account. We will argue that collaborative memory supports a novel externalist theory of knowledge: distributed reliabilism. Distributed reliabilism departs in two important respects from both traditional reliabilism (Goldman, 2012) and updated theories such as extended (Goldberg, 2010) and social reliabilism (Goldman, 2014). First, it acknowledges that belief-forming processes may extend extracranially to include processing performed both by other subjects and by technological artifacts. Second, it acknowledges that distributed sociotechnical systems themselves may be knowing subjects. Overall, then, the main aim of the chapter is to draw out the philosophical implications of psychological research on collaborative memory. But our argument will also suggest that it may be useful to broaden the standard conception of collaborative memory to include not only the sorts of direct interactions among subjects that have been the focus of psychological research so far but also a range of more indirect, technology-supported and -mediated interactions, and it thus has implications for psychology as well. (shrink)

Remembering is one of the most characteristic and most puzzling of human activities. Personal memory, in particular - the ability mentally to travel back into the past, as leading psychologist Endel Tulving puts it - often has intense emotional or moral significance: it is perhaps the most striking manifestation of the peculiar way human beings are embedded in time, and of our limited but genuine freedom from our present environment and our immediate needs. Memory has been significant in the history (...) of philosophy as much in relation to ethics and to epistemology as in theories of psyche, mind, and self. (shrink)

Everyday joint remembering, from family remembering around the dinner table to team remembering in the operating theatre, relies on the successful interweaving of multiple cognitive, bodily, social and material resources, anchored in specific cultural ecosystems. Such systems for joint remembering in social interactions are composed of processes unfolding over multiple but complementary timescales, which we distinguish for analytic purposes so as better to study their interanimation in practice: faster, lower-levelcoordination processesof behavioral matching and interactional synchrony occurring at timescale t1; mid-rangecollaborative (...) processeswhich re-evoke past experiences in groups, unfolding at timescale t2; cooperative processesinvolved in the transmission of memories over longer periods occurring at timescale t3; and cultural processesand practices operating within distributed socio-cognitive networks over evolutionary and historical timeframes, unfolding at timescale t4. In this paper we survey studies of how the processes operating across these overlapping and complementary timescales constitute joint remembering in social interactions. We describe coordination, collaboration, cooperation, and culture as complementary aspects of interacting to remember, which we consider as a complex phenomenon unfolding over multiple timescales. (shrink)

Mandevillian intelligence is a specific form of collective intelligence in which individual cognitive vices are seen to play a positive functional role in yielding collective forms of cognitive success. The present paper introduces the concept of mandevillian intelligence and reviews a number of strands of empirical research that help to shed light on the phenomenon. The paper also attempts to highlight the value of the concept of mandevillian intelligence from a philosophical, scientific and engineering perspective. Inasmuch as we accept the (...) notion of mandevillian intelligence, then it seems that the cognitive and epistemic value of a specific social or technological intervention will vary according to whether our attention is focused at the individual or collective level of analysis. This has a number of important implications for how we think about the design and evaluation of collective cognitive systems. For example, the notion of mandevillian intelligence forces us to take seriously the idea that the exploitation of individual cognitive shortcomings could, in some situations, provide a productive route to collective forms of cognitive and epistemic success. (shrink)

Everyday joint remembering, from family remembering around the dinner table to team remembering in the operating theatre, relies on the successful interweaving of multiple cognitive, bodily, social and material resources, anchored in specific cultural ecosystems. Such systems for joint remembering in social interactions are composed of processes unfolding over multiple but complementary timescales, which we distinguish for analytic purposes so as better to study their interanimation in practice: (i) faster, lower-level coordination processes of behavioral matching and interactional synchrony occurring at (...) timescale t1; (ii) mid-range collaborative processes which re-evoke past experiences in groups, unfolding at timescale t2; (iii) cooperative processes involved in the transmission of memories over longer periods occurring at timescale t3; and (iv) cultural processes and practices operating within distributed socio-cognitive networks over evolutionary and historical timeframes, unfolding at timescale t4. In this paper we survey studies of how the processes operating across these overlapping and complementary timescales constitute joint remembering in social interactions. We describe coordination, collaboration, cooperation, and culture as complementary aspects of interacting to remember, which we consider as a complex phenomenon unfolding over multiple timescales (t1, t2, t3, t4). (shrink)

The tendency for people to remember less as members of a group than they would be capable of were they to remember alone is a phenomenon known as collaborative inhibition. The article offers a phenomenological account of this highly counterintuitive effect of group remembering. It argues that the mutual failure to live up to one’s potential does not warrant the standard, strongly negative views about the role of others in recall. Rather, the phenomenon may imply that sharedness itself becomes constitutive (...) of the process in the sense that interaction partners co-determine what and how to remember. Drawing on phenomenological approaches to remembering and second-person engagement, the article argues that individuals participating in shared remembering co-construct their memories by reciprocally and dynamically incorporating each other’s perspectives, attitudes, and emotions about their shared past. (shrink)