Philosophy and Memory Traces defends two theories of autobiographical memory. One is a bewildering historical view of memories as dynamic patterns in fleeting animal spirits, nervous fluids which rummaged through the pores of brain and body. The other is new connectionism, in which memories are 'stored' only superpositionally, and reconstructed rather than reproduced. Both models, argues John Sutton, depart from static archival metaphors by employing distributed representation, which brings interference and confusion between memory traces. Both raise urgent issues about (...) control of the personal past, and about relations between self and body. Sutton demonstrates the role of bizarre body fluids in moral physiology, as philosophers from Descartes and Locke to Coleridge struggled to control their own innards and impose cognitive discipline on 'the phantasmal chaos of association'. Going on to defend connectionism against Fodor and critics of passive mental representations, he shows how problems of the self are implicated in cognitive science. (shrink)

1. The restless mind[1] Like us, early modern philosophers, both natural and moral, didn’t always understand the springs of their own actions. They didn’t want to feel everything they felt, and couldn’t trace the sources of all their thoughts and imaginings. Events from past experience come to mind again unwilled: abstract thought is interrupted by fantastical images, like the ‘winged horses, fiery dragons, and monstrous giants’ by which Hume exemplified ‘the liberty of the imagination’[2]. Then, as now, a failure to (...) keep a train of thought on track could be blamed for both personal and social ills, for wasted lives and erratic policies. The ongoing struggle to distinguish the deliverances of reason from what Hume called ‘the loose and indolent reveries of a castle-builder’ (1739/ 1978, p.624) thus required scrutiny of daydream and fancy as much as belief and knowledge (see also Tierney- Hynes 2007 on the ‘castle-builder’). The mind’s tendencies to float and to roam were of great interest to early modern philosophers as well as to others concerned with medicine, mental health, morals, education, and taste. This paper sketches one local line of thinking and theorizing about ‘mind-wandering’ and its bodily causes in British philosophy over the first decades of the 18th century, as a small exemplar of a form of cognitive history intended to illuminate independent historical and contemporary concerns about our understanding of mental life. The dual aim is to see problems in our historical material that we might otherwise miss, and to use history to explore phenomena more or less marginalized by modern psychology[3]. (shrink)

Synthesizing the domains of investigation highlighted in current research in distributed cognition and related fields, this paper offers an initial taxonomy of the overlapping types of resources which typically contribute to distributed or extended cognitive systems. It then outlines a number of key dimensions on which to analyse both the resulting integrated systems and the components which coalesce into more or less tightly coupled interaction over the course of their formation and renegotiation.

This paper introduces a new, expanded range of relevant cognitive psychological research on collaborative recall and social memory to the philosophical debate on extended and distributed cognition. We start by examining the case for extended cognition based on the complementarity of inner and outer resources, by which neural, bodily, social, and environmental resources with disparate but complementary properties are integrated into hybrid cognitive systems, transforming or augmenting the nature of remembering or decision-making. Adams and Aizawa, noting this distinctive complementarity argument, (...) say that they agree with it completely: but they describe it as “a non-revolutionary approach” which leaves “the cognitive psychology of memory as the study of processes that take place, essentially without exception, within nervous systems.” In response, we carve out, on distinct conceptual and empirical grounds, a rich middle ground between internalist forms of cognitivism and radical anti-cognitivism. Drawing both on extended cognition literature and on Sterelny’s account of the “scaffolded mind” (this issue), we develop a multidimensional framework for understanding varying relations between agents and external resources, both technological and social. On this basis we argue that, independent of any more “revolutionary” metaphysical claims about the partial constitution of cognitive processes by external resources, a thesis of scaffolded or distributed cognition can substantially influence or transform explanatory practice in cognitive science. Critics also cite various empirical results as evidence against the idea that remembering can extend beyond skull and skin. We respond with a more principled, representative survey of the scientific psychology of memory, focussing in particular on robust recent empirical traditions for the study of collaborative recall and transactive social memory. We describe our own empirical research on socially distributed remembering, aimed at identifying conditions for mnemonic emergence in collaborative groups. Philosophical debates about extended, embedded, and distributed cognition can thus make richer, mutually beneficial contact with independently motivated research programs in the cognitive psychology of memory. (shrink)

‘There is no place in the phenomenology of fully absorbed coping’, writes Hubert Dreyfus, ‘for mindfulness. In flow, as Sartre sees, there are only attractive and repulsive forces drawing appropriate activity out of an active body’1. Among the many ways in which history animates dynamical systems at a range of distinctive timescales, the phenomena of embodied human habit, skilful movement, and absorbed coping are among the most pervasive and mundane, and the most philosophically puzzling. In this essay we examine both (...) habitual and skilled movement, sketching the outlines of a multidimensional framework within which the many differences across distinctive cases and domains might be fruitfully understood. Both the range of movement phenomena which can plausibly be seen as instances of habit or skill, and the space of possible theories of such phenomena are richer and more disparate than philosophy easily encompasses. We seek to bring phenomenology into contact with relevant movements in psychological theories of skilful action, in the belief that phenomenological philosophy and cognitive science can be allies rather than antagonists. (shrink)

Martin and Deutscher’s remarkable 1966 paper ‘Remembering’ still offers great riches to memory researchers across distinctive traditions, both in its methodological ambition (successfully marrying phenomenological and causal discourses) and in its content. In this short discussion, after briefly setting the paper in its context, we hone in on two live and under-explored issues which have gained attention recently under new labels – the extended mind hypothesis, and the constructive nature of memory. We suggest that Martin and Deutscher’s causal analysis of (...) memory is compatible with the idea that activities of remembering may be distributed across heterogeneous social and external resources, focussing in on their neglected example of creatures who ‘remember as we do’ as long as they carry round metal boxes which are given to them at birth. We then argue that the causal analysis is in some tension with the extent to which remembering is a constructive activity, because there may be no clear way to determine the appropriate ‘limits of accuracy’ within which a past event or experience must be represented. (shrink)

Through a selective historical, theoretical, and critical survey of the uses of the concept of scaffolding over the past 30 years, this chapter traces the development of the concept across developmental psychology, educational theory, and cognitive anthropology, and its place in the interdisciplinary field of distributed cognition from the 1990s. Offering a big-picture overview of the uses of the notion of scaffolding, it suggests three ways to taxonomise forms of scaffolding, and addresses the possible criticism that the metaphor of scaffolding (...) retains an overly individualist vision of cognition. The chapter is aimed at a broad interdisciplinary audience interested in processes of learning, teaching, and apprenticeship as they apply to the study of memory. (shrink)

Embodied human minds operate in and spread across a vast and uneven world of things—artifacts, technologies, and institutions which they have collectively constructed and maintained through cultural and individual history. This chapter seeks to add a historical dimension to the enthusiastically future-oriented study of “natural-born cyborgs” in the philosophy of cognitive science,3 and a cognitive dimension to recent work on material memories and symbol systems in early modern England, bringing humoral psychophysiology together with material culture studies. The aim is to (...) sketch an integrative framework which spans early modern ideas and practices relating to brains, bodies, memory, and objects. Embodiment and environment, I’ll argue, were not (always) merely external influences on feeling, thinking, and remembering, but (in certain circumstances) partly constitutive of these activities. (shrink)

In the first two chapters of his 1925 book Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (The Social Frameworks of Memory), the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945) develops a sustained comparison between remembering and dreaming. Engaging in detail with large bodies of contemporary research in psychology, physiology, philosophy, and linguistics, he aims to combat what he calls the ‘surprising’ tendency of ‘psychological treatises that deal with memory’ to treat each of us as ‘an isolated being’ (1925/ 1994, vi) 1. In the (...) course of making a case that memory is deeply situated and social, Halbwachs offers a subtle and challenging treatment of dreams. (shrink)

This paper addresses relations between memory and imagery in expert sport in relation to visual or visuospatial perspective. Imagining, remembering, and moving potentially interact via related forms of episodic simulation, whether future- or past-directed. Sometimes I see myself engaged in action: many experts report switching between such external visual perspectives and an internal, 'own-eyes', or field perspective on their past or possible performance. Perspective in retrieval and in imagery may be flexible and multiple. I raise a range of topics for (...) empirical research on perspective and visualization. (shrink)

Delusional beliefs have sometimes been considered as rational inferences from abnormal experiences. We explore this idea in more detail, making the following points. Firstly, the abnormalities of cognition which initially prompt the entertaining of a delusional belief are not always conscious and since we prefer to restrict the term “experience” to consciousness we refer to “abnormal data” rather than “abnormal experience”. Secondly, we argue that in relation to many delusions (we consider eight) one can clearly identify what the abnormal cognitive (...) data are which prompted the delusion and what the neuropsychological impairment is which is responsible for the occurrence of these data; but one can equally clearly point to cases where this impairments is present but delusion is not. So the impairment is not sufficient for delusion to occur. A second cognitive impairment, one which impairs the ability to evaluate beliefs, must also be present. Thirdly (and this is the main thrust of our chapter) we consider in detail what the nature of the inference is that leads from the abnormal data to the belief. This is not deductive inference and it is not inference by enumerative induction; it is abductive inference. We offer a Bayesian account of abductive inference and apply it to the explanation of delusional belief. (shrink)

Sterelny and Hiscock (S&H) argue against the centrality of high-fidelity copying in cumulative culture. I address one key strand of their case, the decoupling of expertise from precise imitation. This advances understanding of hominin skill acquisition, and underlines a puzzle about domain-specificity.

Sutton's review of Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age.

In the history of external information systems, the World Wide Web presents a significant change in terms of the accessibility and amount of available information. Constant access to various kinds of online information has consequences for the way we think, act and remember. Philosophers and cognitive scientists have recently started to examine the interactions between the human mind and the Web, mainly focussing on the way online information influences our biological memory systems. In this article, we use concepts from the (...) extended cognition and distributed cognition frameworks and from transactive memory theory to analyse the cognitive relations between humans and the Web. We first argue that while neither of these approaches neatly capture the nature of human-Web interactions, both offer useful concepts to describe aspects of such interactions. We then conceptualize relations between the Web and its users in terms of cognitive integration, arguing that most current Web applications are not deeply integrated and are better seen as a scaffold for memory and cognition. Some highly personalised applications accessed on wearable computing devices, however, may already have the capacity for deep integration. Finally, we draw out some of the epistemic implications of our cognitive analysis. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In Consciousness and Fundamental Reality, Philip Goff argues that the case against physicalist views of consciousness turns on ‘Phenomenal Transparency’, roughly the thesis that phenomenal concepts reveal the essential nature of phenomenal properties. This paper considers the argument that Goff offers for Phenomenal Transparency. The key premise is that our introspective judgments about current conscious experience are ‘Super Justified’, in that these judgments enjoy an epistemic status comparable to that of simple mathematical judgments, and a better epistemic status than (...) run of the mill perceptual judgments. After presenting the key ideas in the ‘Super Justification Argument’, I distinguish two Super Justification theses, which vary according to the kind of introspective judgments that they take to be Super Justified. I argue that Goff’s case requires ‘Strong Super Justification’, according to which a wide range of introspective judgments about conscious experience are Super Justified. Unfortunately, it turns out that Strong Super Justification is implausible and not well-supported by examples. In contrast, a weaker Super Justification thesis does not require anything like Phenomenal Transparency and, indeed, can be explained by physicalistic accounts of phenomenal concepts. (shrink)

I start with a brief assessment of the implications of Sterelny’s anti-individualist, anti-internalist apprentice learning model for a more historical and interdisciplinary cognitive science. In a selective response I then focus on two core features of his constructive account: collaboration and skill. While affirming the centrality of joint action and decision making, I raise some concerns about the fragility of the conditions under which collaborative cognition brings benefits. I then assess Sterelny’s view of skill acquisition and performance, which runs counter (...) to dominant theories that stress the automaticity of skill. I suggest that it may still overestimate the need for and ability of experts to decompose and represent the elements of their own practical knowledge. (shrink)

Sutton's response to three reviews, by Catherine Wilson, Theo Meyering, and Michael Mascuch. Topics include historical cognitive science; the historical link between animal spirits and neural nets; conceptual change; control and time in memory; and Descartes the neurophilosopher.

Mistakes can be made in both personal and official accounts of past events: lies can be told. Stories about the past have many functions besides truth-telling: but we still care deeply that our sense of what happened should be accurate. The possibility of error in memory and in history implies a commonsense realism about the past. Truth in memory is a problem because, coupled with our desires to find out what really happened, we recognize that our individual and collective access (...) to past events may be indirect. This chapter sketches some approaches, from across the disciplines, to such problems about authority over the past. I open up recent lines of research on autobiographical memory which should be more accessible in the humanities and social sciences. Psychological work on constructive remembering should not be seen as sceptically challenging the very possibility of everyday authority over our own past, but as identifying specific forms of fallibility. I argue that the study of historical and social processes is an integral part of the cognitive sciences of memory, not a humanistic curiosity. (shrink)

Questions about knowledge in expert sport are not only of applied significance: they also take us to the heart of foundational and heavily-disputed issues in the cognitive sciences. To a first (rough and far from uncontroversial) approximation, we can think of expert ‘knowledge’ as whatever it is that grounds or is applied in (more or less) effective decision-making, especially when in a competitive situation a performer follows one course of action out of a range of possibilities. In these research areas, (...) studies of motor expertise have for many years actively contributed to broader debates in philosophy and psychology (Abernethy, Burgess-Limerick, & Parks, 1994; Williams, Davids, & Williams, 1999). When we navigate the world flexibly and more or less successfully, how much is this due to a capacity to represent it? In considering alternative options, or planning future actions, we seem to transcend our present environment in some way: what is the balance or relation here between highly-tuned bodily dispositions and background knowledge of the world and its patterns? What changes in these regards as we gain experience and adapt to more complex and challenging environments? Is know-how fundamentally different in kind from ordinary factual knowledge of the world, or knowledge-that? And if expertise in a domain does involve or depend on a knowledge base that is somehow more organized or deeper than that of novices, how is this knowledge selectively and appropriately deployed, often under severe time constraints? (shrink)

The acceptance of causal closure has had a profoundly limiting effect on the philosophical treatment of sui generis mental causation in recent decades. Philosophical treatments of special divine action have been likewise hampered by a widespread commitment to closure. If fundamental reality is as closure tells us it is, then nonphysical minds—human and divine— are either causally impotent or redundant. In this paper, I reject this limitation as baseless. Specifically, I will show how Hempel’s dilemma poses a far greater challenge (...) when applied to a causal closure principle than it did to the task of defining physicalism. Reponses to the dilemma can be used to disambiguate closure, but not without significant cost. In light of Hempel’s dilemma, there is no conception of closure that can do all of the following: rule out sui generis mental causation, have a reasonable chance of being true, and avoid problematic circularity. At the end of the day, I maintain that closure, properly understood, is, or ought to be, just one methodological stance among many. If this is correct, it is a stance that a theist can freely reject. (shrink)

As a topic in the philosophy of psychology, dreaming is a fascinating, diverse, and severely underdeveloped area of study. The topic excites intense public interest in its own right, while also challenging our confidence that we know what the words “conscious” and “consciousness” mean. So dreaming should be at the forefront of our interdisciplinary investigations: theories of mind which fail to address the topic are incomplete. This chapter illustrates the tight links between conceptual and empirical issues by highlighting surprisingly deep (...) disagreements among leading dream scientists over what might seem basic aspects of their topic. (shrink)

Traces of many past events are often layered or superposed, in brain, body, and world alike. This often poses challenges for individuals and groups, both in accessing specific past events and in regulating or managing coexisting emotions or attitudes. We sometimes struggle, for example, to find appropriate modes of engagement with places with complex and difficult pasts. More generally, there can appear to be a tension between what we know about the highly constructive nature of remembering, whether it is drawing (...) on neural or worldly resources or both, and the ways that we need and use memory to make claims on the past, and to maintain some appropriate causal connections to past events. I assess the current state of work on situated affect and distributed memory, and the recent criticisms of the ‘dogma of harmony’ in these fields. I then deploy these frameworks to examine some affective dimensions of place memory, sketching a strongly distributed conception of places as sometimes partly constituting the processes and activities of feeling and remembering. These approaches also offer useful perspectives on the problems of how to engage – politically and aesthetically – with difficult pasts and historically burdened heritage. In assessing artistic interventions in troubled places, we can seek responsibly to do justice to the past while fully embracing the dynamic and contested constructedness of our present emotions, memories, and activities. (shrink)

In this opening chapter, we review the literature on information quality. Our major aim is to introduce the issues, and trace some of the history of the debates, with a view to situating the chapters in this volume – whose authors come from different disciplines – to help make them accessible to readers with different backgrounds and expertise. We begin in this section by tracing some influential analyses of IQ in computer science. This is a useful basis for examining some (...) examples of developing work on IQ in section two. We look at some cases for applying IQ in section three, and conclude with some discussion points in section four. (shrink)

Ideas about soul and body – about thinking or remembering, mind and life, brain and self – remain both diverse and controversial in our neurocentric age. The history of these ideas is significant both in its own right and to aid our understanding of the complex sources and nature of our concepts of mind, cognition, and psychology, which are all terms with puzzling, difficult histories. These topics are not the domain of specialists alone, and studies of emotion, perception, or reasoning (...) have never been isolated theoretical endeavours. As Francis Bacon described human philosophy or ‘the knowledge of ourselves’, within which he located the study of body, soul, and mind, it ‘deserveth the more accurate handling, by how much it toucheth us more nearly’ (1605/ 2000: 93). The history of ideas in these domains is particularly challenging given the practical dimensions and implications of theories of mind. Because theories of human nature and debates about body and mind do ‘touch us’ so ‘nearly’, they attract and can thus reveal, in specific historical contexts, interconnected discourses or associations which may be quite unlike our own. So there are no neat boundaries around a historical category of ‘seventeenth-century British philosophy of the soul’. The central topic of this chapter can be thought of either as pneumatology, the doctrine or science of spirits and souls, or as continuous with the ‘psychologia’ or psychology of Aristotelian traditions (Park and Kessler 1988; Hatfield 1995: 184-6). In neither case, however, should we expect any deep unity to be provided by history, geography, discipline, or subject-matter. (shrink)

A woman is listening to Sinatra before work. As she later describes it, ‘suddenly from nowhere I could hear my mother singing along to it … I was there again home again, hearing my mother … God knows why I should choose to remember that … then, to actually hear her and I had this image in my head … of being at home … with her singing away … like being transported back you know I got one of those (...) … like shivery feelings really suddenly’ (Anderson 2004, 9-10). An older couple, discussing their honeymoon forty years ago, each say that they can’t remember the show they saw, until through iterative, puzzled cross-cuing they finally get there – ‘Desert Song, that’s it’ (Harris et al 2011, 292). An elderly English veteran of a prisoner of war camp in Japan, finishing up morning tea with a young Japanese social scientist interested in reconciliation, suddenly calls out loudly - in Japanese - ‘stand to attention’. He stands to attention in front of her: like many of the men she interviews, he physically re-enacts fragments of that long-past world of the camp, bringing that absent past into this new present context with a visceral shock (Murakami 2001, 2012; Middleton & Brown 2005, 133-136). (shrink)

Rather than conserving or ignoring historically burdened heritage, RAAAF intervene. Their responses are striking, sometimes dramatic or destructive. Prompted by Rietveld’s discussion of the Luftschloss project, I compare some other places with difficult pasts which engage our embodied and sensory responses, without such active redirection or disruption. Ross Gibson’s concept of a ‘memoryscope’ helps us identify distinct but complementary ways of focussing the forces of the past. Emotions and imaginings are transmitted over time in many forms. The past is not (...) easily washed, blasted or sliced away. By considering other settings and modes of encounter, we can recognise and applaud the novelty of RAAAF’s interventions while urging further attention to the variable dynamics and rhythms of remembering and of sociomaterial residues. (shrink)

Published in Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson, and Alessio Cavallaro (eds), _Prefiguring Cyberculture: an intellectual history_ (MIT Press and Power Publications, December 2002). Please do send comments: email me. Back to my main publications page . Back to my home page.

Persons think. Bodies, time-slices of persons, and brains might also think. They have the necessary neural equipment. Thus, there seems to be more than one thinker in your chair. Critics assert that this is too many thinkers and that we should reject ontologies that allow more than one thinker in your chair. I argue that cases of multiple thinkers are innocuous and that there is not too much thinking. Rather, the thinking shared between, for example, persons and their bodies is (...) exactly what we should expect at the intersection of part sharing and the supervenience of the mental on the physical. I end by responding to the overcrowding objection, the personhood objection, the personal-pronoun reference problem and the epistemic objection. (shrink)

This is a concordance of page numbers in the following editions of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: English editions prior to the Routledge Classics 2002; Routledge Classics edition, with the new pagination; the French edition from Gallimard, prior to 2005; the 2e edition from Gallimard, 2005, with new pagination.

Experiences of embodied remembering are familiar and diverse. We settle bodily into familiar chairs or find our way easily round familiar rooms. We inhabit our own kitchens or cars or workspaces effectively and comfortably, and feel disrupted when our habitual and accustomed objects or technologies change or break or are not available. Hearing a particular song can viscerally bring back either one conversation long ago, or just the urge to dance. Some people explicitly use their bodies to record, store, or (...) cue memories. Others can move skilfully, without stopping to think, in complex and changing environments thanks to the cumulative expertise accrued in their history of fighting fires, or dancing, or playing hockey. The forms of memory involved in these cases may be distinct, operating at different timescales and levels, and by way of different mechanisms and media, but they often cooperate in the many contexts of our practices of remembering. (shrink)

A philosophical analysis of different kinds of memory used in the film Memento.

In his recent The Parmenidean Ascent, Michael Della Rocca develops a regress-theoretic case, reminiscent of F.H. Bradley’s famous argument in Appearance and Reality, against the intelligibility of relations and in favor of a monistic conception of reality. I argue that Della Rocca illicitly supposes that “internal” relations – in one sense of that word – lead to a “chain” regress, a regress of relations relating relations and relata. In contrast, I contend that if “internal” or grounded relations lead to a (...) regress at all, it is a kind of “fission” regress within the relata themselves, and that a chain regress for relations only arises, if at all, for so-called “external” relations, relations not grounded in their relata. In this way, I contend that Della Rocca pursues a regress for so-called “internal” or grounded relations that only arises, if at all, for so-called “external” relations, relations not grounded in their relata. I compare Della Rocca’s case against relations with Bradley’s reasoning in Appearance and Reality, and suggest in this context that Bradley may, perhaps, have the upper hand. (shrink)

Erik Wielenberg recently invoked the parent-child analogy in an argument against Christian theism. The argument relies on the claim that a loving parent would never allow her child to feel abandoned in the midst of what feels like gratuitous suffering. In this paper, I offer three clear counterexamples to Wielenberg’s central premise. At the same time, a successful counterexample does not a robust theology of suffering make. To that end, and with a careful eye towards anti-theodical concerns, I defend the (...) need for a more proactive Christian philosophical examination of the role of suffering in a meaningful life. (shrink)

This rich book, the best I’ve read in consciousness studies, offers more at each encounter. It was a brilliant idea to evaluate Hurlburt’s Descriptive Experience Sampling method through concrete sceptical enquiry by Schwitzgebel, whose role as open-minded but hard-nosed interlocutor makes the debate an intriguing, even gripping read. The radically different views about introspective reports held by the two authors are put to the test in the concrete context of ‘an examination, in unprecedented detail, of random moments of one person’s (...) experience ’.1 In addition to the ongoing central pursuit of the general question ‘Can we believe people’s reports about their inner experience?’, a raft of more specific issues are addressed as they arise in the sampling interviews. The book’s excellent organization, using in-text boxes linked by detailed crossreferencing into indexed threads, reinforces the thrilling sense that our access to the inner life of one person, ‘Melanie’, is bringing real progress on a number of fronts at once. Eric’s robust scepticism remains, but is tempered somewhat by being forced to confront the real constraints and opportunities of gathering information from a live subject. By the end of the project, he accepts that Russ’s ‘beep-andinterview methods’ deserve a central role in introspective science (p. (shrink)

To better understand the nature of joint expertise and its underlying processes, we need not only analyses of the general conditions for skilled group action, but also descriptive accounts of the features and dimensions that vary across distinct performances and contexts, such as sport and the arts. And in addition to positioning our accounts against current models of individual skill, we need concepts and lessons from work on collaborative processes in other cognitive domains. This paper examines ecological or situational components (...) of expert joint action in practice, then offers a selective survey of some key cognitive and affective resources that shape and transform group performance. (shrink)

Sven Bernecker’s contribution to the ongoing revival in the philosophy of memory offers a consistent vision and analysis of propositional remembering, and covers a range of topics in analytic metaphysics and epistemology. Bernecker defends a methodological externalism, by which memory ‘must be analyzed from a third-person point of view’ (34): so even though conceptual analysis remains the primary method, the ‘linguistic intuitions’ that guide it ‘are not a priori but empirical working hypotheses’ (31). Given the central role of such intuitions (...) in Bernecker’s treatment of many briefly described thought experiments throughout the book, it is strange that he does not defend their use more explicitly in this early section on method, instead leaving it to a later footnote (147, n. 11) to say that ‘trying to defend the use of intuitions in the philosophy of memory would . . . take us too far afield’. Bernecker’s subtitle signals a restricted target audience: this is a book for those analytic philosophers who will enjoy long exegeses on Twin Earth, slow switching or quasi-memory. Psychological results on memory are cited, but only piecemeal, and interactive dialogue with scientific theory is not Bernecker’s aim. (shrink)

This paper discusses and evaluates a recent argument for the conclusion that an attractive variety of Russellian monism ought to be regarded as a form of physicalism. According to this line of thought, if the Russellian’s “inscrutable” properties are held to ground not only experience, but also the physical structure of the world—and in this sense are not “experience-specific”—they thereby have an unproblematic place in physicalist metaphysics. I argue, in contrast, that there can be a sense in which the Russellian’s (...) inscrutables are experience-specific in a way that a physicalist probably ought to find objectionable, even if they play some role other than grounding experience. This will be the case, I argue, if certain worlds are taken to be possible, as they sometimes have: worlds of “bare structure” and worlds with what might be called “swapped inscrutables”. In this way, I claim that accepting certain possibilities has consequences for how one should understand the nature of the Russellian’s inscrutables and the place they have in physicalist metaphysics. (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)

In his contribution to the first issue of Memory Studies, Jeffrey Olick notes that despite “the mutual affirmations of psychologists who want more emphasis on the social and sociologists who want more emphasis on the cognitive”, in fact “actual crossdisciplinary research … has been much rarer than affirmations about its necessity and desirability” (2008: 27). The peculiar, contingent disciplinary divisions which structure our academic institutions create and enable many powerful intellectual cultures: but memory researchers are unusually aware that uneasy faultlines (...) and glaring gulfs lie in the uncertain zones between them. The processes of memory are simultaneously natural and cultural. But our difficulties in imagining even fragments of a genuinely integrated framework for understanding diverse memory-related phenomena do not arise from a simple ‘two-cultures’ problem: it’s not as if there are substantially unified visions of memory within either ‘the sciences’ or ‘the humanities’. (shrink)

Jaegwon Kim argued that nonreductive physicalism faces the “exclusion problem” for higher-level causation, mental causation in particular. Roughly, the charge is that given the presumptive ubiquity of physical causation, there cannot be irreducible mental causes for physical effects. Since there are mental causes, Kim concluded that nonreductive physicalism should be rejected in favor of a more reductionist alternative according to which mental causes are just physical causes differently described. But why should mental causes be “excluded” in this way? Unfortunately, Kim (...) had less to say about this than one might expect. After reviewing some of Kim’s proposals, I suggest that the exclusion problem should be premised on nothing more or less than Occamist, simplicity-based considerations. I apply this conception of the exclusion problem to some prominent responses to Kim’s critique of nonreductive physicalism and argue that this conception mandates reconsidering the success of these responses. (shrink)

In Morris I presented in outline a new interpretation of the famous ‘substance argument’ in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. The account I presented there gave a distinctive view of Wittgenstein’s main concerns in the argument, but did not explain in detail how the argument works: how its steps are to be found in the text, and how it concludes. I remain convinced that the interpretation I proposed correctly identifies the main concerns which lie behind the argument. I return to the argument (...) here in order to elaborate in fuller detail the relation between those concerns and the actual course of the text. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Beyond Individual-Centred 4E Cognition: Systems Biology and Sympoiesis” by Mads Julian Dengsø & Michael David Kirchhoff. Abstract: Dengsø and Kirchhoff offer a revised dynamic conception of the individual in place of the bounded cognitive agent of classical cognitive science. However, this may not be sufficiently robust to ground the enquiries into individual and cultural differences that remain vital in the proposed “deterritorialized cognitive science.” It also needs to make contact with rich traditions of 4E (...) research on socially distributed cognition, which are neglected in Dengsø and Kirchhoff’s critique. It is just because individualization is a fragile process, and because boundaries are hard-won achievements, that anti-individualists who highlight the multiplicity, heterogeneity, and dynamism of cognitive ecologies must reconfigure rather than eliminate or efface the individual. (shrink)

In 2022, at an interdisciplinary conference on Creation and the Imago Dei, Biola psychologist Liz Hall posed a powerful challenge to the philosophers and theologians in the room. In the face of the “already and not yet” nature of Christian theology, she put forth the need for a “theology of tension.” Over and over again, while reading Biblical Philosophy, I was reminded of this challenge. The features Johnson puts forth as emblematic of Hebraic Philosophy can help in this respect, in (...) two clear ways: First, retrospectively, Johnson’s categories are useful for diagnosing both the philosophical missteps targeted by critiques of theodicy and the features held in common by some of the more successful accounts. Second, going forward, the convictions and modes of argument central to Hebraic philosophy may help guide future philosophical responses to suffering. In general, I believe that the philosophical problems related to suffering are especially well-suited to responses that are pixelated, networked, mysterianist, creationist, transdemographic, and ritualist. Perhaps Hebraic philosophy can succeed where Hellenist philosophy has struggled: in addressing the tension that arises from the experience of suffering in a world governed by a loving, providential, sovereign God. While I am largely in favor of Johnson’s Hebraic philosophy, I will conclude by breaking from his view in one important respect. Johnson presents the Biblical view as substantially contrasting with the correspondence theory affirmed by many contemporary philosophers. I will end by pushing back on this claim. On Johnson’s own account, the Hebraic notion of truth is determined with reference to the divinely designed order. I propose that we understand the Hebraic notion of truth as degrees of correspondence to this divinely ordered, absolute reality. (shrink)

English instrument-maker, experimentalist, and natural philosopher who made key contributions in a wide range of areas including physiology, geology, and mechanics. Born on the Isle of Wight, Hooke showed early aptitude with the design of mechanical toys. At Westminster School he learnt mathematics and geometry, and at Christ Church, Oxford, he joined a remarkable group of natural philosophers working before the Restoration on physiological and physical topics (Frank 1980). Much of Hooke’s career was driven by financial uncertainty. As an employee, (...) working firstly with Robert Boyle and then as curator of experiments at the new Royal Society from 1662 to 1677, Hooke’s status as a professional in a society of gentlemen natural philosophers was problematic. He was continually concerned to establish his credibility, and his defences of ownership of his ideas were often vitriolic. (shrink)

According to phenomenal transparency, phenomenal concepts are transparent where a transparent concept is one that reveals the nature of that to which it refers. What is the connection between phenomenal transparency and our concept of a subject of experience? This paper focuses on a recent argument, due to Philip Goff, for thinking that phenomenal transparency entails transparency about subjecthood. The argument is premissed on the idea that subjecthood is related to specific phenomenal properties as a determinable of more specific determinates. (...) I argue that the argument fails, which opens the door for one to endorse phenomenal transparency while denying transparency about the concept of a subject of experience. I draw out the consequences of this for certain versions of the combination problem for panpsychist metaphysics and moreover argue that rejecting the transparency of subjecthood does not undermine anti-physicalist arguments premissed on considerations relating to phenomenal transparency. (shrink)