Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Juan F. Álvarez (Université Grenoble Alpes) on his recent paper " Remembering and relearning: against exclusionism " ( Philosophical Studies , 2024). Juan F. Álvarez Distinguishing remembering from other related cognitive processes, such as imagining and relearning, occupies a central place in the philosophy of memory. While the remembering-imagining distinction is a topic of heated debate, philosophers tend to agree that no instance of relearning qualifies as a case of remembering. In this paper, I argue that this view, which I call “exclusionism”, requires closer examination because it does not follow from leading naturalistic theories of remembering. The theories in question are simulationism ( Michaelian 2016 ), distributed causalism ( Sutton and O’Brien 2023 ), and trace minimalism ( Werning 2020 ).  Relearning occurs when a subject acquires information about an event through experience, forgets about the event, reacquires information about the sa...

Today's blogpost is by María Berta López Ríos, Chris McCarroll, and Paloma Muñoz Gómez on their recently published paper Memory, Mourning, and the Chilean Constitution (RHV), published in a special issue of on memory and trauma . “I confess that I am in mourning”. So writes the novelist Ariel Dorfman. This is an interesting statement, however. For it is not the loss of a loved one that Dorfman grieves. The loss he is mourning is political. He is in mourning because of the result of a political referendum held in Chile in 2022. The grief Dorfman, and many others, experienced is a form of political grief. This may seem strange, but the phenomenon may be more common than we think. María Berta López Ríos We recently wrote a paper exploring this kind of experience of political grief, which arose out of our shared interest in the philosophy of emotions and the political situation in Chile. Our paper focuses on the expressions of mourning (like Dorfman’s) that followed the Chilean ref...

This post is Marina Trakas , a philosopher and cognitive scientist interested in the ethical and epistemological aspects of memories of our personal past. Marina Trakas In a recent empirical study published in the American Psychologist , researchers from the University of Texas at Austin  (Yan et al. 2024) investigated a novel and relatively unexplored factor possibly contributing to the gender gap in science, particularly in citation practices: memory mechanisms. They found that during a free recall task, wherein professors were asked to remember the names of experts and rising stars in their field, male professors (but not their female counterparts) underrepresented women researchers compared to a set of baselines.  One possible explanation for this finding could be that male professors either did not remember female names or recalled fewer of them due to a lack of memory traces of these names. If they never encoded this information, they cannot remember it, given that ...

This post is by Changsheng Lai (Shanghai Jiao Tong University).   Changsheng Lai You believe that you locked the door before you left your house, but do you really remember that? Your belief about the past episode might be true, but in what sense is the past episode genuinely remembered rather than being just accurately imagined or veridical confabulated? A popular view, which I refer to as ‘mnemic reliabilism’, suggests that the process of remembering is distinguished by its reliability condition. That is, successful remembering must be produced by a reliable memory process.  Prominent champions of this view include the simulationist Kourken Michaelian ( Michaelian 2016 ) and the causalist Markus Werning ( Werning 2020 ). Besides, you might also find mnemic reliabilism attractive if you are sympathetic to both the orthodox view that ‘remembering entails knowing’ and the idea that ‘knowledge requires reliability’. In my recent paper entitled ‘ Remembering requires no reliabili...

This post is by Anja Berninger (University of Göttingen) and Íngrid Vendrell Ferran (University of Marburg). Today their post is on the edited volume Philosophical Perspectives on Memory and Imagination (Routledge 2022 ). Íngrid Vendrell Ferran Having been neglected for many years, the subjects of memory and imagination have started to gain more attention in recent philosophical debates. While there has been some interaction between philosophers working in these different fields (for publications that make significant headway towards establishing a more integrative perspective, see, for instance, Perrin and Michaelian 2017 ; MacPherson and Dorsch 2018 ; Michaelian, Debus, and Perrin 2018 , and Michaelian, Perrin, and Sant’Anna 2020 ), we still lack a properly integrative approach to these issues.  With this volume our aim is to fill this lacuna. Our objective is to both broaden and deepen current debates on memory and imagination within the philosophy of mind. This volume explor...

This is part of a series of posts on the new journal, Memory, Mind & Media . Today's post is by Stephan Lewandowsky (University of Bristol) and Peter Pomerantsev (Johns Hopkins University). Their forthcoming article ‘Technology and democracy: a paradox wrapped in a contradiction inside an irony’ will be published shortly as part of the journal inaugural collection . Stephan Lewandowsky Numerous indicators suggest that democracy is in retreat globally. Even countries that had been considered stable democracies have recently witnessed events that are incompatible with democratic governance and the rule of law, such as the armed assault on the U.S. Capitol in 2021 and the unlawful suspension of the British parliament in 2019.  Although the symptoms and causes of democratic backsliding are complex and difficult to disentangle, the Internet and social media are frequently blamed in this context. For example, social media has been identified as a tool of autocrats , and so...

This post is part of a series on the new journal Memory, Mind & Media . Today, Qi Wang talks about her research on the triangular self. Her paper, ‘ The triangular self in the social media era ’, is now available open access. Qi Wang is Professor of Human Development and Psychology at Cornell University. Her research examines how cultural forces, including the Internet technology, impact autobiographical memory and the sense of self. She is the author of The Autobiographical Self in Time and Culture (OUP 2013) and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition . Qi Wang In the era of social media, we can share online our daily experiences as our lives unfold, at any time and as frequently as we’d like, with diverse audiences physically afar. This way of remembering and sharing personal experiences is unprecedented in human history. It also uniquely contributes to how we view ourselves in a digitally mediated world. I propose a triangular theory of self...

In this post, part of a series on the new journal Memory, Mind & Media , Katie Laker interviews Robyn Fivush, whose article, co-authored with Ariel Grysman, is entitled: ' Narrative and gender as mutually constituted meaning-making systems ’ and is available open access. Robyn Fivush KL: Firstly, thank you for being part of the Memory, Mind & Media inaugural collection. Why was MMM a good fit for your paper? RF: The two core constructs that we explore in our paper, narrative and gender, are inherently interdisciplinary and culturally mediated. No single discipline can fully define or even describe either of these constructs; they require a broad synthesis across multiple ways of knowing. And both are fully culturally mediated; both narrative and gender derive from socially and culturally saturated lenses that find expression in multiple media formats, from books to memes.  MMM is committed to fostering conversations at the intersection of cognitive, social and cultural app...

This is part of one week series of posts on a new journal, Memory, Mind & Media . Today's post is by Andrew Hoskins (University of Glasgow) and Amanda Barnier (Macquarie University), Founding Co-Editors-in-Chief of the journal. Andrew Hoskins   In September 2018,  Dr Christine Blasey Ford and Judge Brett Kavanaugh  appeared before the United States Judiciary Committee as part of Kavanaugh’s confirmation as a new US Supreme Court Justice. During the confirmation process, Blasey Ford  alleged  that in the summer of 1982 when she and Kavanaugh were in high school, he sexually assaulted her at a party. Blasey Ford recalled the assault in detail, describing the events as “seared” into her memory. But when given his opportunity before the Committee, Kavanaugh unequivocally and angrily  denied this accusation . We, Andrew and Amanda, were in the same place at the same time – in Glasgow – when Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh gave their testimony. Together, we watched...

Today's post is by Kourken Michaelian (Centre for Philosophy of Memory, Université Grenoble Alpes). Kourken Michaelian With her 2016 article on misremembering, Sarah Robins drew the attention of philosophers of memory to the need to provide an account not only of successful remembering but also of unsuccessful remembering—an account of memory errors such as confabulation, to which William Hirstein had previously devoted a book but which had been neglected in subsequent discussions in the field. The debate triggered by Robins’ article continues to unfold, with Robins herself defending an approach to memory errors inspired by the causal theory of memory in articles in 2019 and 2020 , Sven Bernecker defending a similar causalist approach in an article in 2017 , and myself defending an approach based on the simulation theory of memory in articles in 2016 and 2020 . There are other approaches that merit discussion; André Sant’Anna, for example, argues in a forthcoming article that...

This post is by Phil Gerrans and Jeanette Kennett . It is a reply to the post we published on Tuesday on Metaethics and Mental Time Travel . In Metaethics and Mental Time Travel , Fileva and Tresan (F&T) fairly and accurately reconstructed (improved?) and intricately dissected our paper. We cannot follow every twist and turn in a short blog post so concentrate on the key issue. They partially agree with us that semantic knowledge detached from diachronic self-awareness is insufficient for moral agency but disagree (i) whether that awareness needs to be "richly experiential" and (ii) the nature of diachronic deficits in the cases we discuss (see their discussion of these cases which is deeper than ours). As they say, Representations with past- or future-oriented, autobiographical content, crucially, awareness of one’s past actions or future options as consistent or inconsistent with one’s principles do seem necessary : but MTT involves experiential repres...

We are Iskra Fileva and Jonathan Tresan . Both of us teach philosophy, at the University of Colorado, Boulder and at the University of Rochester, respectively. We recently wrote a paper in response to " Neurosentimentalism and Moral Agency ," by Philip Gerrans and Jeanette Kennett published in Mind in 2010. We summarize our paper " Metaethics and Mental Time Travel " here. When we make moral judgments, we often experientially project ourselves into the past or the possible futures, a capacity dubbed “mental time travel” (MTT). For instance, in judging whether her mom was wrong to keep her away from her dad after the parents divorced, Sally may try to recall what it was like to be her father’s daughter. Was it a good experience or a bad one? Was the mother rightly protective or just trying to spite the dad? Sally’s evaluation will likely be informed not just by propositional memories (e.g., “My father was born in June”) but by richly detailed and vivid fi...

This is the first in a mini series of posts exploring issues regarding technological enhancement in learning and education, featuring two papers that have appeared in the “ Cheating Education ” special issue of Educational Theory.  This post is provided by Kathy Puddifoot , Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Durham and Cian O’Donnell , Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Bristol. They introduce their paper " Human Memory and the Limits of Technology in Education ". Have you ever had the intuition that there are risks associated with students or teachers supplanting traditional methods of learning with the use of technologies that store and provide easy access to information, such as cloud storage, note-taking applications, open access sources like Wikipedia, or social media resources? It can be difficult to articulate exactly what is problematic about the use of such technologies. They provide a way of storing accurate represent...

Tim Fawns is a Fellow in Clinical Education and Deputy Programme Director of the MSc Clinical Education at Edinburgh Medical School at the University of Edinburgh. He received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2017, and his primary research interests are memory, digital technology and education. In this post, he discusses themes from his recent paper " Blended memory: A framework for understanding distributed autobiographical remembering with photography " in Memory Studies. Recording live music on mobile phones, posting photos of breakfast on social media, taking the same photo six times when a friend with a better camera has already taken it... these are some of the many idiosyncratic photography practices I have encountered during my research into memory and photography, alongside traditional examples of family and holiday pictures. From reading literature from cultural studies, media studies, and human computer interaction, followed by lots of informa...

We’re continuing our series of post s on “Philosophical Perspectives on Confabulation” - our special issue in the journal Topoi this week. In today’s post,  Sarah Robins , Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas, introduces her paper “ Mnemonic Confabulation ”. The motivation for this paper was the following question: How are discussions of confabulation in the philosophy of memory related to discussions of confabulation in empirical and clinical work? At first pass, it’s easy to suppose that they’re closely related. After all, both focus on confabulatory remembering. For philosophers of memory, confabulation is one of many memory errors (alongside misremembering, forgetting, relearning, etc.) that needs to be distinguished from successful remembering.  In clinical work, interest in confabulation began with Korsakoff (1885) and Wernicke’s (1906) observations of bizarre false memory reports in patients with amnesia and dementia. Despite the s...