John Sutton

The editors of this bulky volume tell us that an issue of the Stanford Humanities Review ‘constituted the seed of the project that culminated in this book’ (vii). They don’t say that it was the Spring 1995 issue of that pioneering open-access e-journal, nor do they tell us how many or which of the 19 papers in this book derive from it. But since that issue is still online (as at August 28, 2006), at http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/toc.html, any reader can see that 12 of its 15 papers have been reprinted almost unaltered here, a decade later, while in addition almost all of the editors’ 1995 introduction appears again in their expanded text.

‘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

In telling the story of Thomas Willis and the collective investigations of body and brain in 17th-century England with tremendous energy and enthusiasm, journalist Carl Zimmer has written one of the best recent books of popular history of science. The full range of readers will be rewarded by Zimmer’s synthetic scholarship and his evident pleasure in the language of the primary texts. While he owes much to the work of Robert Frank and Robert Martensen in particular, Zimmer has negotiated a vast secondary literature on the major figures of early modern natural philosophy. His decision not to discuss scholarly controversy directly, but rather ‘to give accounts of these people that were consistent with the current consensus’ (p.304) is understandable given the mass market at which he has successfully aimed: yet such a voice would bring a welcome freshness to specialists’ debates.

We often remember in the company of others. In particular, we routinely collaborate with friends, family, or colleagues to remember shared experiences. But surprisingly, in the experimental collaborative recall paradigm, collaborative groups remember less than their potential, an effect termed collaborative inhibition. Rajaram and Pereira-Pasarin (2010) argued that the effects of collaboration on recall are determined by “pre-collaborative” factors. We studied the role of 2 pre-collaborative factors—shared encoding and group relationship—in determining the costs and benefits of collaborative recall. In Experiment 1, we compared groups of strangers who encoded alone versus together, before collaborating to recall. In Experiment 2, we compared groups of friends who encoded alone versus together, before collaborating to recall. We found that shared encoding abolished collaborative inhibition in both Experiments 1 and 2. But prior relationship did not influence collaborative inhibition over and above the effects of shared encoding. Regardless of encoding condition, collaborative group recall contained fewer intrusions than nominal group recall, and these benefits continued in subsequent individual recall. Our findings demonstrate that pre-collaborative factors—specifically shared encoding—have flow-on benefits for group and individual recall amount, but not recall accuracy. We discuss these findings in terms of self- and cross-cuing in collaborative recall.

This special issue, which includes papers first presented at two workshops on ‘Memory, Mind, and Media’ in Sydney on November 29–30 and December 2–3, 2004, showcases some of the best interdisciplinary work in philosophy and psychology by memory researchers in Australasia (and by one expatriate Australian, Robert Wilson of the University of Alberta). The papers address memory in many contexts: in dance and under hypnosis, in social groups and with siblings, in early childhood and in the laboratory. Memory is taken as a test case for evaluating the optimistic vision of a new kind of cognitive science defended by Andy Clark. Clark (2001:154) argues: Much of what matters about human intelligence is hidden not in the brain, nor in the technology, but in the complex and iterated interactions and collaborations between the two ... The study of these interaction spaces is not easy, and depends both on new multidisciplinary alliances and new forms of modelling and analysis. The pay-off, however, could be spectacular: nothing less than a new kind of cognitive scientific collaboration involving neuroscience, physiology, and social, cultural, and technological studies in about equal measure. So the central motivation is to investigate critically how well the case of memory would fit the extended mind’ thesis put forward by Clark and Chalmers (Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 1997, 2006)—according to which mental states and processes can spread across the..

Early modern critics of materialism (and of associated doctrines like determinism and mechanism) sometimes employed a transcendental argument form. If materialism were true, then some valuable feature of reality could not exist; but that feature does exist; therefore materialism is false. Depending on current context and concerns, the valuable 'X' in question might be God, the soul, hell, objective morality, free will, conscience, truth, knowledge, social order, or justice and the law: all, in the critics' eyes, obvious and unchallengeable realities which materialism would, impossibly, extinguish.1 As David Hawkes notes in his delightfully provocative essay, it is because Hell is so manifestly real, in both the play and its world, that Faustus manifestly refutes himself in telling Mephistopheles that it is a fable. The success of such transcendental arguments relies on the truth of both their premises: Hell really must exist, and Faustus's materialism must really be incompatible with its existence. Hawkes celebrates early modern moralists who focussed on the alleged worldly and carnal roots and consequences of 'philosophical materialism', who attacked its proponents as villainous, self-interested, and depraved

Recent theory suggests that action prediction relies of a motor emulation mechanism that works by mapping observed actions onto the observer action system so that predictions can be generated using that same predictive mechanisms that underlie action control. This suggests that action prediction may be more accurate when there is a more direct mapping between the stimulus and the observer. We tested this hypothesis by comparing prediction accuracy for two stimulus types. A mannequin stimulus which contained information about the effectors used to produce the action and a point stimulus, which contained identical dynamic information but no effector information. Prediction was more accurate for the mannequin stimulus. However, this effect was dependent on the observer having previous experience performing the observed action. This suggests that experienced and na¨ıve observers might generate predictions in qualitatively difference ways, which may relate to the presence of an internal representation of the action laid down through action performance.

According to Gold & Stoljar, one cannot consistently be both reductionist about psychoneural relations and invoke concepts developed in the psychological sciences. I deny the utility of their distinction between biological and cognitive neuroscience, suggesting that they construe biological neuroscience too rigidly and cognitive neuroscience too liberally. Then, I reject their characterization of reductionism. Reductions need not go down past neurobiology straight to physics, and cases of partial, local reduction are not neatly distinguishable from cases of mere implementation. Modifying the argument from unification as reduction, I defend a position weaker than the radical but stronger than the trivial neuron doctrine.

Everyday joint remembering, from family remembering around the dinner table to team remembering in the operating theatre, relies on the successful interweaving of multiple cognitive, bodily, social and material resources, anchored in specific cultural ecosystems. Such systems for joint remembering in social interactions are composed of processes unfolding over multiple but complementary timescales, which we distinguish for analytic purposes so as better to study their interanimation in practice: (i) faster, lower-level coordination processes of behavioral matching and interactional synchrony occurring at timescale t1; (ii) mid-range collaborative processes which re-evoke past experiences in groups, unfolding at timescale t2; (iii) cooperative processes involved in the transmission of memories over longer periods occurring at timescale t3; and (iv) cultural processes and practices operating within distributed socio-cognitive networks over evolutionary and historical timeframes, unfolding at timescale t4. In this paper we survey studies of how the processes operating across these overlapping and complementary timescales constitute joint remembering in social interactions. We describe coordination, collaboration, cooperation, and culture as complementary aspects of interacting to remember, which we consider as a complex phenomenon unfolding over multiple timescales (t1, t2, t3, t4).

If the so-called 'science wars' are futile shouting-matches between extremists, some of the more bewildering skirmishes have been contested in the realm of colour science and culture. Ethnographers, postmodernists, and Wittgensteinians stress the specificity of local colour naming strategies, or the peculiarity of objects and emotions with which colours are associated, and may confess lingering attraction to Whorf's idea that cultures carve up an intrinsically unstructured colour space into quite arbitrary linguistic categories. Self-proclaimedly hard-headed biological and evolutionary psychologists, in contrast, argue that the pan-human physiology of colour perception determines our colour categorization, and constrains whatever minimal linguistic variability there is. Don Dedrick's wonderful study in the philosophy of cognitive science offers not only a careful survey of the relevant evidence in this stand-off, but also a persuasive set of tools for thinking the issues through quite differently, and for avoiding the dichotomous terms in which the debates have previously been couched. The book should be essential reading for colour scientists, and for philosophers interested in links between cognition and culture; and it offers useful advanced introductions to detailed technical literatures in psychophysics, colour linguistics, and cognitive anthropol.

Francis Bacon was the youngest son of Nicholas Bacon, lord keeper of the great seal under Elizabeth I. He left Cambridge in 1575, studied law, and entered Parliament in 1581. Though roughly contemporary with Kepler, Galileo, and Harvey, Bacon’s grand schemes for the advancement of knowledge were not driven by their discoveries: he resisted the Copernican hypothesis, and did not give mathematics a central place in his vision of natural philosophy. His active public life, under both Elizabeth and James I, was taken up with political business and legal reform. Bacon achieved high office as Lord Chancellor in 1618, until disgraced by corruption charges. His final years saw a furious spate of writing on natural philosophy, politics, and history.

This translation of a classic and original work of intellectual history is beautifully done. Rossi’s book Clavis Universalis was first published in Italian in 1960, but Clucas translates the second, revised edition of 1983. The book is about Renaissance and 17th-century encyclopedism, hieroglyphics and cryptography, the techniques of artificial memory, the history of rhetoric, changes in views about logic and method in the scientific revolution, and new ideas about how language and images might reflect or capture reality. Frances Yates’s brilliant The Art of Memory, published in 1966, has so far had much more influence in the English-speaking world. Despite warm citations and many points of contact with Yates’s work, Rossi is less interested in uncovering hidden occult traditions, and more focussed on the way major 17th-century thinkers’ work must be understood against the rich background of schemes for universal grammar and local memory. He shows that scholars working on Bacon, Descartes, and Leibniz miss key references to this intellectual heritage. Half of the book [152] introduces relevant mnemonic, rhetorical, linguistic, medical, and occult writings. Rossi includes illuminating discussions not only of Ramon Lull, Petrus Ramus, Cornelius Agrippa, Giordano Bruno, and all, but also of fascinating minor writers like Guglielmo Gratorolo who systematized advice on medical aids to memory in the mid-16th century, and the wonderful Johannes Spangerbergius, who classified various forms of amnesia in 1570. He then argues that polemic against the arts of memory in both Bacon and Descartes coexisted with intense interest on their part in the supplementing of weak powers of natural memory by various artificial aids and objects outside the boundaries of skull and skin. Rossi tells the strange stories of the great 17th-century encyclopedists and universal language schemers—Alsted, Comenius, Wilkins, Dalgarno—making important connections between Wilkins’s scheme and worries about methods for botanical classification in the early Royal Society. The final chapter is a tour de force on ‘the sources of Leibniz’s universal character’, placing him (as Clucas neatly puts it) ‘at the “end” of a Renaissance intellectual tradition rather than reading him “forwards” as an innovative precursor of modern formal logic’. Historians of science, linguistics, and philosophy have built on many aspects of Rossi’s work since 1983, and Clucas contributes an outstanding introduction which summarizes key strands of recent scholarship.

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 order to keep their 'sanitizing critical practice' untainted by its sinister reductionism. Her unsettling accounts of texts by, for example, Karl Popper, Judith Butler, Derrida, Turing, Ebbinghaus and Freud will send many readers back to the sources. It is no surprise that such a broad and ambitious project leaves many threads loose, and no criticism at all that it succeeds more in hinting at the promise of a new connectionist politics than in offering up such a hybrid fully-formed.