New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory by Kourken Michaelian Dorothea Debus Denis Perrin

Author:Kourken Michaelian,Dorothea Debus,Denis Perrin
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

Part IV

Memory in Groups

9 Shared Remembering and Distributed Affect

Varieties of Psychological Interdependence

John Sutton

One significant feature of human life is our psychological interdependence. To greater or lesser extents, and across diverse cultural contexts, our cognitive and affective states are related to those of others around us. We act alongside and share experiences with partners, family members, friends, workmates, and other people with whom we are connected in our daily lives. And as a result, what each of us feels and remembers, what matters to each of us about the present and the past, and the way we imagine and plan for the future, can be influenced by what those others feel, remember, and care about. This occurs in the moment, when my emotions or moods, my decisions or thoughts, are modulated by the actions or reactions, judgments, or evaluations of someone close to me. But it also happens over time, and in many cases over years, decades, or lifetimes. Such interdependence does not mean that we think, remember, or feel the same way about things. In many cases, it matters greatly to me when the emotions or memories of someone I care about differ from my own. Our psychological lives can in certain circumstances be interdependent and mutually influencing, to different degrees and in different ways integrated with each other, whether or not the precise content or style of our thoughts, memories, and feelings happens to match.

This chapter integrates four recent trends in philosophy of memory and philosophy of cognitive science, all addressing such phenomena of psychological interdependence. First, the ways that remembering is typically integrated or entwined with other cognitive and affective processes, with imagining and feeling, are acknowledged and highlighted (Sutton, 2009; Keightley & Pickering, 2012; Goldie, 2012). Second, social aspects of memory are seen as potentially beneficial: other people are not only sources of error or misinformation, but can in certain circumstances support and collaboratively structure the form and content of recall (Campbell, 2008; Sutton, 2008). Third, memory is a test case for claims that cognition can be extended or (better) distributed across an array of heterogeneous cognitive ecologies, spanning neural, bodily, social, and environmental resources (Sutton et al., 2010; Tollefsen, Dale, & Paxton, 2013), and relatedly for ideas about collective intentionality (Michaelian & Sutton, 2017). Fourth, in a more recent literature on which I focus, emotions too are seen as potentially distributed across body and world as well as brain (Colombetti & Krueger, 2015).

I aim to identify tight and underappreciated links between these four points, especially between the social nature of remembering and the distribution of affective phenomena. Because memory is often in use when it is not explicitly in question, theorists whose primary attention is on another domain may not see just how heavily it is implicated. Just as plausible accounts of decision-making in group agency place demands on mechanisms of group memory to keep track of and use history effectively (Sutton, 2008), so a range of interacting forms of remembering are involved in the phenomena of ‘distributed affectivity’ (Slaby, 2016).

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