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5036Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to ConnectionismCambridge University Press. 1998.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 inte…Read more
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8Spirits and Clocks: Machine and Organism in Descartes (review)British Journal for the History of Science 36 (2): 233-235. 2003.
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1742Remembering as Public Practice: Wittgenstein, memory, and distributed cognitive ecologiesIn V. A. Munz, D. Moyal-Sharrock & A. Coliva (eds.), Mind, Language, and Action: proceedings of the 36th Wittgenstein symposium, . pp. 409-444. 2014.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 hon…Read more
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240Descartes was born in La Haye (now Descartes) in Touraine and educated at the Jesuit college of La Fleche` in Anjou. Descartes’modern reputation as a rationalistic armchair philosopher, whose mind–body dualism is the source of damaging divisions between psychology and the life sciences, is almost entirely undeserved. Some 90% of his surviving correspondence is on mathematics and scientific matters, from acoustics and hydrostatics to chemistry and the practical problems of constructing scientific i…Read more
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202Review of Lorraine Daston & Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (review)Times Literary Supplement 5001. 1999.Curious about the nature of light, Robert Boyle spent a series of late nights taking detailed observations of shining veal shanks, stinking fish, pieces of rotten wood which glowed in the dark, and a ‘noctiluca’ distilled from human urine. Once, report Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, with "only a foot-boy" to assist him, Boyle put a luminous diamond to the nocturnal test, "plunging it into oil and acid, spitting on it, and ‘taking it into bed with me, and holding it a good while upon a warm …Read more
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106Batting, habit, and memory: The embodied mind and the nature of skillSport in Society 10 (5): 763-786. 2007.in Jeremy McKenna (ed), At the Boundaries of Cricket, to be published in 2007 as a special issue of the journal Sport in Society and as a book in the series Sport in the Global Society (Taylor and Francis).
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1377Memory and CognitionIn Susannah Radstone & Barry Schwarz (eds.), Memory: theories, histories, debates, Fordham University Press. pp. 209-226. 2010.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 cul…Read more
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356Reduction and levels of explanation in connectionismIn P. Slezak, T. Caelli & R. Clark (eds.), Perspectives on Cognitive Science, Volume 1: Theories, Experiments, and Foundations, Ablex Publishing. pp. 347-368. 1995.Recent work in the methodology of connectionist explanation has I'ocrrsccl on the notion of levels of explanation. Specific issucs in conncctionisrn hcrc intersect with rvider areas of debate in the philosophy of psychology and thc philosophy of science generally. The issues I raise in this chapter, then, are not unique to cognitive science; but they arise in new and important contexts when connectionism is taken seriously as a model of cognition. The general questions are the relation between l…Read more
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1446To Think or Not To Think: The apparent paradox of expert skill in music performanceEducational Philosophy and Theory (6): 1-18. 2013.Expert skill in music performance involves an apparent paradox. On stage, expert musicians are required accurately to retrieve information that has been encoded over hours of practice. Yet they must also remain open to the demands of the ever-changing situational contingencies with which they are faced during performance. To further explore this apparent paradox and the way in which it is negotiated by expert musicians, this article profiles theories presented by Roger Chaffin, Hubert Dreyfus an…Read more
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14Elizabeth A. Wilson, Neural Geographies: feminism and the microstructure of cognition Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 19 (4): 299-301. 1999.Writing within and against the set critical practices of psychoanalytic-deconstructive-Foucauldian-feminist cultural theory, Elizabeth Wilson demonstrates, in this provocative and original book, the productivity and the pleasure of direct, complicitous engagement with the contemporary cognitive sciences. Wilson forges an eclectic method in reaction to the 'zealous but disavowed moralism' of those high cultural Theorists whose 'disciplining compulsion' concocts a monolithic picture of science in …Read more
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361Influences on memoryMemory Studies 4 (4): 355-359. 2011.The study of remembering is both compelling and challenging, in part, because of the multiplicity and the complexity of influences on memory. Whatever their interests, memory researchers are always aware of the many different factors that can drive the processes they care about. A search for the phrase ‘influences on memory’ confirms this daunting and exhilarating array of influences, of many different kinds, operating at many different timescales, and presumably often interacting in ways that w…Read more
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231Uncanny Innards: review of Sawday, The Body Emblazoned (review)Metascience 9 179-182. 1996.In a "parenthesis of fascinated horror" before "the complete discovery and subjection of the body to science", Renaissance anatomists and poets shared peculiar emotions of dread and desire towards the bodies they dissected and described. Jonathan Sawday's ambitious project is to evoke the common taboos, resistances, and fears which the human body provoked in its various early modern investigators, while telling "stories of terrible cruelty, which are tinged by a form of dark eroticism". He is ju…Read more
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156Cognition in Skilled Action: Meshed Control and the Varieties of Skill ExperienceMind and Language 31 (1): 37-66. 2016.We present a synthetic theory of skilled action which proposes that cognitive processes make an important contribution to almost all skilled action, contrary to influential views that many skills are performed largely automatically. Cognitive control is focused on strategic aspects of performance, and plays a greater role as difficulty increases. We offer an analysis of various forms of skill experience and show that the theory provides a better explanation for the full set of these experiences …Read more
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87Cognitive conceptions of language and the development of autobiographical memoryLanguage and Communication 22 (3): 375-390. 2002.The early development of autobiographical memory is a useful case study both for examining general relations between language and memory, and for investigating the promise and the difficulty of interdisciplinary research in the cognitive sciences of memory. An otherwise promising social-interactionist view of autobiographical memory development relies in part on an overly linguistic conception of mental representation. This paper applies an alternative, ‘supra-communicative’ view of the relation…Read more
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869Breadth and Depth of Knowledge in Expert versus Novice AthletesIn Damion Farrow & Joe Baker (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Sport Expertise, Routledge. 2015.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 rese…Read more
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2092Soul and BodyIn Peter R. Anstey (ed.), The Oxford handbook of British philosophy in the seventeenth century, Oxford University Press. pp. 285-307. 2013.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 nev…Read more
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1443Philosophy of mind and cognitive science since 1980In Graham Oppy & Nick Trakakis (eds.), History of Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand, Springer. 2014.If Australasian philosophers constitute the kind of group to which a collective identity or broadly shared self-image can plausibly be ascribed, the celebrated history of Australian materialism rightly lies close to its heart. Jack Smart’s chapter in this volume, along with an outstanding series of briefer essays in A Companion to Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand (Forrest 2010; Gold 2010; Koksvik 2010; Lycan 2010; Matthews 2010; Nagasawa 2010; Opie 2010; Stoljar 2010a), effectively descri…Read more
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40Philosophy and Memory Traces, the book to which this is the preface, 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 are reconstructed rather than reproduced. Both models depart from static archival metaphors by employing distributed representa…Read more
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224Review of Janice Haaken, Pillar of Salt: gender, memory, and the perils of looking back (review)Metapsychology 4 (22). 2000.I hope that this wonderful book, written with a passionate and sympathetic intelligence, reaches a wide audience. It's not an easy read, for Janice Haaken deliberately spins a dense web of reference, pursuing paths across the contemporary psycho-political landscape. But her scholarship is marvellously diverse and well-directed, and her writing easily shifts between sad or playful fantasy, and insistently engaged political or empirical analysis.
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452How did you feel when the Crocodile Hunter died?’: voicing and silencing in conversationMemory 18 (2): 170-184. 2010.Conversations about the past can involve voicing and silencing; processes of validation and invalidation that shape recall. In this experiment we examined the products and processes of remembering a significant autobiographical event in conversation with others. Following the death of Australian celebrity Steve Irwin, in an adapted version of the collaborative recall paradigm, 69 participants described and rated their memories for hearing of his death. Participants then completed a free recall p…Read more
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391Carelessness and Inattention: mind-wandering and the physiology of fantasy from Locke to HumeIn Charles T. Wolfe & Ofer Gal (eds.), The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science, Springer. pp. 243--263. 2010.1. 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…Read more
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477Review of Andy Clark, Being There: putting brain, body, and world together again (review)Metascience 7 90-95. 1998.A slow revolution in cognitive science is banishing this century's technological conception of mind as disembodied pure thought, namely a material symbol manipulation, and replacing it with next century's conception: mind as the organisation of bodily interaction, intelligent robotics.
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367Integrating the philosophy and psychology of memory: Two case studiesIn M. Marraffa, M. Caro & F. Ferretti (eds.), Cartographies of the Mind: Philosophy and Psychology in Intersection, Springer. pp. 81-92. 2007.Memory is studied across a bewildering range of disciplines and subdisciplines in the neural, cognitive, and social sciences, and the term covers a wide range of related phenomena. In an integrative spirit, this chapter examines two case studies in memory research in which empirically-informed philosophy and philosophically informed sciences of the mind can be mutually informative, such that the interaction between psychology and philosophy can open up new research problems—and set new challenge…Read more
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435MemoryIn Donald M. Borchert (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Macmillan Reference. pp. 122-128. 2005.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 his…Read more
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1437Abductive inference and delusional beliefCognitive Neuropsychiatry 15 (1): 261-287. 2010.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…Read more
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2152Distributed cognition: Domains and dimensionsPragmatics and Cognition 14 (2): 235-247. 2006.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 renegotiati…Read more
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1866Embodied rememberingIn Lawrence A. Shapiro (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition, Routledge. 2014.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…Read more
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73The Collaborative Emergence of Group Cognition: Commentary on Paul E. Smaldino, “The Cultural Evolution of Emergent Group-Level Traits”Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (3): 277-78. 2014.We extend Smaldino’s approach to collaboration and social organization in cultural evolution to include cognition. By showing how recent work on emergent group-level cognition can be incorporated within Smaldino’s framework, we extend that framework’s scope to encompass collaborative memory, decision-making, and intelligent action. We argue that beneficial effects arise only in certain forms of cognitive interdependence, in surprisingly fragile conditions.
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4216The psychology of memory, extended cognition, and socially distributed rememberingPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9 (4): 521-560. 2010.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 …Read more