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)

Joint attention is recognised by many philosophers and psychologists as a fundamental cornerstone of our engagement with one another and the world around us. The most familiar paradigm of joint attention is joint perceptual—specifically visual—attention to an object in the present environment. However, some recent discussions have focused on a potentially different form of joint attention: namely, ‘joint reminiscing’ conversations in which two or more people discuss something in the past which they both remember. These exchanges are in some ways (...) comparable to joint perceptual attention to something present, and have been characterised by some as a form of joint attention to the past. In this paper, I will assess the prospects for characterising joint reminiscing as a genuine form of joint attention to the past, as understood on the model of joint perceptual attention to something present. My conclusions will be tentative, and my primary aim will be to explore how different commitments regarding the nature of both joint attention and episodic memory give rise to different possibilities for characterising joint reminiscing as a distinctive form of collective engagement with the past. I will suggest that joint reminiscing is unlike ordinary joint attention at least insofar as joint reminiscing trades on the participants’ mutual recognition of one another as having been present at an earlier experience. This is connected with joint reminiscing’s social function, and its role in facilitating the special kind of relationship conveyed by the idea of knowing a person. (shrink)

In response to the commentaries, we clarify and defend our characterization of both the nature and function of episodic memory. Regarding the nature of episodic memory, we extend the distinction between event and episodic memory and discuss the relational role of episodic memory. We also address arguments against our characterization of autonoesis and argue that, while self-referential, it needs to be distinguished from an agentive notion of self. Regarding the function of episodic memory, we review arguments about the relation between (...) future mental time travel and memory veridicality; clarify the relation between autonoesis, veridicality, and confidence; and finally discuss the role of episodic memory in diachronic commitments. (shrink)

We spend much of our adult lives thinking and reminiscing about particular events of the past, which, by their very nature, can never be repeated. What is involved in a capacity to think thoughts of this kind? In this paper, I propose that such thoughts are essentially connected with a capacity to communicate about past events, and specifically in the special way in which events of the past are valued and shared in our relationships with one another. I motivate this (...) proposal by way of the claim that such thoughts are practically useless: there are no practical, forward-looking tasks that require information which is specific to particular past events. Thus I suggest that thoughts of this specific kind have a home only in the cognitive economy of a creature who finds past events to be of interest for their own sake, and that this interest in the past is a peculiar feature of human social life. (shrink)