-
464Review 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.
-
426How 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
-
353Integrating the philosophy and psychology of memory: Two case studiesIn M. Marraffa, M. De 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
-
502MemoryIn Donald Borchert (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Macmillan. pp. 122-128. 2006.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
-
1377Abductive 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
-
2403Distributed 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
-
1825Embodied 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
-
96The 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.
-
4145The 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
-
174Author’s responseMetascience 9 (2): 226-237. 2000.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.
-
406Review of Michel jouvet, the paradox of sleep: The story of dreaming; and Patricia Cox Miller, dreams in late antiquity (review)Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 10 355-358. 2001.This review describes central difficulties in the interdisciplinary study of dreaming, summarizes Jouvet's account of his role in the history of modern dream science, queries his positive speculations on the semantics of dreaming, and suggests work for historians of neuroscience.
-
2208Scaffolding Memory: themes, taxonomies, puzzlesIn Lucas Bietti & Charlie Stone (eds.), Contextualizing Human Memory: An interdisciplinary approach to understanding how individuals and groups remember the past, Routledge. 2015.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 …Read more
-
1224Yoga From the Mat Up: How words alight on bodiesEducational Philosophy and Theory (6): 1-19. 2013.Yoga is a unique form of expert movement that promotes an increasingly subtle interpenetration of thought and movement. The mindful nature of its practice, even at expert levels, challenges the idea that thought and mind are inevitably disruptive to absorbed coping. Building on parallel phenomenological and ethnographic studies of skilful performance and embodied apprenticeship, we argue for the importance in yoga of mental access to embodied movement during skill execution by way of a case stud…Read more
-
200Observer perspective and acentred memory: some puzzles about point of view in personal memoryPhilosophical Studies 148 (1): 27-37. 2010.Sometimes I remember my past experiences from an ‘observer’ perspective, seeing myself in the remembered scene. This paper analyses the distinction in personal memory between such external observer visuospatial perspectives and ‘field’ perspectives, in which I experience the remembered actions and events as from my original point of view. It argues that Richard Wollheim’s related distinction between centred and acentred memory fails to capture the key phenomena, and criticizes Wollheim’s reasons…Read more
-
203Review of Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory: a history of ideas about the mind. (review)Times Literary Supplement 5152. 2001.According to a 17th-century European fantasy, certain sponges were used in the South Seas to record and transmit sound. A message spoken into one of these sponges would be exactly replayed when a recipient squeezed it appropriately, even across great distances in time and space. It's hard for us to remember just how magical it is, in a natural world made up solely of warring elements, that any information can be enduringly stored, transported without distortion, and precisely reproduced. Our liv…Read more
-
711Memory: A philosophical study * by Sven BerneckerAnalysis 72 (1): 181-184. 2012.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…Read more
-
1226Religion and the failures of determinismIn S. Gaukroger (ed.), The Uses of Antiquity: the scientific revolution and the classical tradition, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 25-51. 1991.'Io trace a path from Pico della Mirandola's Renaissance man to the Jacobean malcontents of Marston or Webster is to document not an inflation of hopes for dominion over the natural world, but rather a loss of confidence in the possibility of control over even human affairs. 'For I am going into a wilderness, /Where I shall find nor path, nor friendly clew/To be my guide'.2 The bleak consequences of this lack of direction, leaving traces through into the Restoration period in England, are partic…Read more
-
912Autobiographical Forgetting, Social Forgetting and Situated ForgettingIn Sergio Della Sala (ed.), Forgetting, Psychology Press. pp. 253-284. 2010.We have a striking ability to alter our psychological access to past experiences. Consider the following case. Andrew “Nicky” Barr, OBE, MC, DFC, (1915 – 2006) was one of Australia’s most decorated World War II fighter pilots. He was the top ace of the Western Desert’s 3 Squadron, the pre-eminent fighter squadron in the Middle East, flying P-40 Kittyhawks over Africa. From October 1941, when Nicky Barr’s war began, he flew 22 missions and shot down eight enemy planes in his first 35 operational …Read more