This thesis will address the question of whether there are any situated cognition concepts of memory functioning as investigative kinds in the sciences of memory. Situated cognition is an umbrella term, subsuming extended, embedded, embodied, enacted and distributed cognition. I will be looking closely at case studies of investigations into memory where such concepts seem prima facie most likely to be found in order to establish a) whether the researchers in question are in fact employing such concepts, and b) whether (...) the concepts are functioning well – functioning as investigative kinds – and should therefore continue to be employed, or whether something has gone wrong in the practice of the science and they should employ a different kind of concept. An historically situated approach to the case studies will allow me to answer part b) here. -/- Along the way, I will argue for a way of construing scientific research that I call the dynamic framework account, an account of (im)maturity for science, a variety of conceptual role semantics with respect to scientific concepts, and the historically situated case study-based method I will employ in answering the central question. My conclusions, and the way I reach them, constitute contributions to debates about situated cognition particularly, and to philosophy of science more generally, as well as recommendations for scientific practice. (shrink)

The system of realist philosophy developed by John Anderson — situational realism — has recently been dismissed as ‘positivist’ by a prominent critical realist. The reason for this dismissal appears not to be the usual list of ideas deemed positivist, but the conviction that situational realism mistakenly defends a form of actualism, i.e. that to conceive of causal laws as constant conjunctions reduces the domain of the real to the domain of the actual. This is, in part, a misreading of (...) Anderson’s philosophy because, contrary to Hume’s constant conjunction account, Anderson viewed causation as pluralistic and non-linear. However, the critical realist charge does point to two important ontological differences between these realist philosophies — a levels-of-reality thesis and the notion of causal powers. Situational realism has always maintained that the arguments for both lead to difficulties that are logically insurmountable. Unfortunately, this is not addressed in the critical realists’ dismissal of Anderson’s philosophy. Regardless of who makes the charge of positivism, it frequently involves inattention to the real character of its target. (shrink)