•  1094
    B eginning with the problem of integrating diverse disciplinary perspectives on moral cognition, we argue that the various disciplines have an interest in developing a common conceptual framework for moral cognition research. We discuss issues arising in the other chapters in this volume that might serve as focal points for future investigation and as the basis for the eventual development of such a framework. These include the role of theory in binding together diverse phenomena and the role of…Read more
  •  885
    Cognitive Ecology as a Framework for Shakespearean Studies
    with Evelyn Tribble
    Shakespeare Studies 39 94-103. 2011.
    ‘‘COGNITIVE ECOLOGY’’ is a fruitful model for Shakespearian studies, early modern literary and cultural history, and theatrical history more widely. Cognitive ecologies are the multidimensional contexts in which we remember, feel, think, sense, communicate, imagine, and act, often collaboratively, on the fly, and in rich ongoing interaction with our environments. Along with the anthropologist Edwin Hutchins,1 we use the term ‘‘cognitive ecology’’ to integrate a number of recent approaches to cult…Read more
  •  391
    Some natural philosophers in the 17th century believed that they could control their own innards, specifically the animal spirits coursing incessantly through brain and nerves, in order to discipline or harness passion, cognition and action under rational guidance. This chapter addresses the mechanisms thought necessary after Eden for controlling the physiology of passion. The tragedy of human embedding in the body, with its cognitive and moral limitations, was paired with a sense of our confine…Read more
  •  44
    review of Stefano Franchi and Güven Güzeldere, eds., Mechanical Bodies, Computational Minds: Artificial Intelligence from Automata to Cyborgs.
  •  626
    The myths, constructs and integrity of memory (review)
    Times Literary Supplement 5722. 2012.
    Selling “existences” for $25 a shot, hypnotists in 1950s America took their soul-searching clients back before birth to access memories from their previous lives. This brief “nationwide preoccupation” with past-life regression is one of eleven episodes richly documented in Alison Winter’s history of memory in the twentieth century. It followed reports from Morey Bernstein, a Colorado businessman, that when he hypnotized a local housewife, she remembered vivid details of her life as “Bridey Murph…Read more
  •  61
    Adaptive misbeliefs and false memories
    with Ryan T. McKay and Daniel C. Dennett
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (6): 535-536. 2009.
    McKay & Dennett (M&D) suggest that some positive illusions are adaptive. But there is a bidirectional link between memory and positive illusions: Biased autobiographical memories filter incoming information, and self-enhancing information is preferentially attended and used to update memory. Extending M&D's approach, I ask if certain false memories might be adaptive, defending a broad view of the psychosocial functions of remembering.
  •  216
    Review of Don Dedrick, naming the Rainbow: Colour language, colour science, and culture (review)
    Philosophy in Review/ Comptes Rendus Philosophiques 106-109. 2001.
    By spotlighting the irreducible role of cognitive processes between biology and culture, this synthesis and critique of the universalist tradition in colour science offers a genuine starting-point for all future 'serious inquiry into the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic aspects of colour classification'.
  •  823
    Spongy Brains and Material Memories
    In Mary Floyd-Wilson & Garrett Sullivan (eds.), Embodiment and Environment in Early Modern England, Palgrave. 2007.
    Embodied human minds operate in and spread across a vast and uneven world of things—artifacts, technologies, and institutions which they have collectively constructed and maintained through cultural and individual history. This chapter seeks to add a historical dimension to the enthusiastically future-oriented study of “natural-born cyborgs” in the philosophy of cognitive science,3 and a cognitive dimension to recent work on material memories and symbol systems in early modern England, bringing …Read more
  •  267
    Memory: Philosophical issues
    In L. Nadel (ed.), Encyclopedia of cognitive science: Vol 2, Macmillan. pp. 1109-1113. 2002.
    Memory is a set of cognitive capacities by which humans and other animals retain information and reconstruct past experiences, usually for present purposes. Philosophical investigation into memory is in part continuous with the development of cognitive scientific theories, but includes related inquiries into metaphysics and personal identity.
  •  207
    Review of Dennis Des Chene, Spirits and Clocks: machine and organism in Descartes (review)
    British Journal for the History of Science 36 233-235. 2003.
    This rangy and precise book deserves to be read even by those historians who think they are bored with Descartes. While offering surprising and detailed readings of bewildering texts like theDescription of the Human Body, Des Chene constructs a powerful, sad narrative of the Cartesian disenchantment of the body. Along the way he also delivers provocative views on topics as various as teleology, the role of illustrations in the history of mechanism, theories of the sexual differentiation of the f…Read more
  •  1232
    We Remember, We Forget: Collaborative Remembering in Older Couples
    with Celia B. Harris, Paul Keil, Amanda Barnier, and Doris McIlwain
    Discourse Processes 48 (4): 267-303. 2011.
    Transactive memory theory describes the processes by which benefits for memory can occur when remembering is shared in dyads or groups. In contrast, cognitive psychology experiments demonstrate that social influences on memory disrupt and inhibit individual recall. However, most research in cognitive psychology has focused on groups of strangers recalling relatively meaningless stimuli. In the current study, we examined social influences on memory in groups with a shared history, who were recall…Read more
  •  346
    Memory
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2017.
    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
  •  3324
    This paper addresses relations between memory and imagery in expert sport in relation to visual or visuospatial perspective. Imagining, remembering, and moving potentially interact via related forms of episodic simulation, whether future- or past-directed. Sometimes I see myself engaged in action: many experts report switching between such external visual perspectives and an internal, 'own-eyes', or field perspective on their past or possible performance. Perspective in retrieval and in imagery …Read more
  •  121
    Descartes' Natural Philosophy (edited book)
    with Stephen Gaukroger and John Andrew Schuster
    Routledge. 2000.
    The most comprehensive collection of essays on Descartes' scientific writings ever published, this volume offers a detailed reassessment of Descartes' scientific work and its bearing on his philosophy. The 35 essays, written by some of the world's leading scholars, cover topics as diverse as optics, cosmology and medicine, and will be of vital interest to all historians of philosophy or science.
  •  247
    A case study in historical cognitive science, this paper addresses two claims made by radical proponents of new dynamical approaches. It queries their historical narrative, which sees embodied, situated cognition as correcting an individualist, atemporal framework originating in Descartes. In fact, new Descartes scholarship shows that 17th-century animal spirits neurophysiology realized a recognizably distributed model of memory; explicit representations are patterns of spirit flow, and memory t…Read more
  •  474
    A philosophical analysis of different kinds of memory used in the film Memento.
  •  210
    Joint remembering relies on the successful interweaving of multiple cognitive, linguistic, 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 with the terms ‘coordination’, ‘collaboration’, ‘cooperation’, and ‘culture’, so as better to study their interanimation in practice. As an illustra…Read more
  •  719
    Between Individual and Collective Memory: Coordination, Interaction, Distribution
    Social Research: An International Quarterly 75 23-48. 2008.
    Human memory in the wild often involves multiple forms of remembering at once, as habitual, affective, personal, factual, shared, and institutional memories operate at once within and across individuals and small groups. The interdisciplinary study of the ways in which history animates dynamical systems at many different timescales requires a multidimensional framework in which to analyse a broad range of social memory phenomena. Certain features of personal memory - its development, its constru…Read more
  •  463
    Critical review of Chaffin, Imreh, and Crawford, Practicing Perfection: memory and piano performance.
    with Andrew Geeves, Wayne Christensen, and Doris McIlwain
    Empirical Musicology Review 3 (3): 163-172. 2008.
    How do concert pianists commit to memory the structure of a piece of music like Bach’s Italian Concerto, learning it well enough to remember it in the highly charged setting of a crowded performance venue, yet remaining open to the freshness of expression of the moment? Playing to this audience, in this state, now, requires openness to specificity, to interpretation, a working dynamicism that mere rote learning will not provide. Chaffin, Imreh and Crawford’s innovative and detailed research sugg…Read more
  •  46
    1. Introduction: memory and interdisciplinarity (footnote 1) Memory is studied at a bewildering number of levels, in a daunting range of disciplines, and with a vast array of methods. Is there any sense at all in which memory theorists - from neurobiologists to narrative theorists, from the developmental to the postcolonial, from the computational to the cross-cultural - are studying the same phenomena? This exploratory review paper sketches the bare outline of a positive framework for understan…Read more
  •  420
    Lloyd Jones’s *The Book of Fame*, a novel about the stunningly successful 1905 British tour of the New Zealand rugby team, represents both skilled group action and the difficulty of capturing it in words. The novel’s form is as fluid and deceptive, as adaptable and integrated, as the sweetly shaped play of the team that became known during this tour for the first time as the All Blacks. It treats sport on its own terms as a rich world, a set of bodily skills, and an honest profession in itself. …Read more
  •  931
    Distributed Cognition and Memory Research: History and Current Directions
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4 (1): 1-24. 2013.
    According to the hypotheses of distributed and extended cognition, remembering does not always occur entirely inside the brain but is often distributed across heterogeneous systems combining neural, bodily, social, and technological resources. These ideas have been intensely debated in philosophy, but the philosophical debate has often remained at some distance from relevant empirical research, while empirical memory research, in particular, has been somewhat slow to incorporate distributed/exte…Read more
  •  1086
    Porous memory and the cognitive life of things
    In D. Tofts, A. Jonson & A. Cavallaro (eds.), Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History, Mit Press. pp. 130--141. 2002.
    Published in Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson, and Alessio Cavallaro (eds), _Prefiguring Cyberculture: an intellectual history_ (MIT Press and Power Publications, December 2002). Please do send comments: email me. Back to my main publications page . Back to my home page
  •  210
    Review of Joseph Tabbi's, Cognitive Fictions (review)
    Metapsychology 7 (8). 2003.
    In the closing chapter of his recent bestseller The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker attributes what he dislikes in modern literature to the influence of poor empiricist psychology. The modernist ‘denial of human nature’ resulted, Pinker informs us sadly, in the replacement of ‘omniscient narration, structured plots, the orderly introduction of characters, and general readability’ by ‘a stream of consciousness, events presented out of order, baffling characters and causal sequences, subjective and dis…Read more
  •  670
    Moving and Thinking Together in Dance
    In Robin Grove, Kate Stevens & Shirley McKechnie (eds.), Thinking in Four Dimensions: creativity and cognition in contemporary dance, Melbourne Up. pp. 51-56. 2005.
    The collaborative projects described in this e-book have already produced thrilling new danceworks, new technologies, and innovative experimental methods. As the papers collected here show, a further happy outcome is the emergence of intriguing and hybrid kinds of writing. Aesthetic theory, cognitive psychology, and dance criticism merge, as authors are appropriately driven more by the heterogeneous nature of their topics than by any fixed disciplinary affiliation. We can spy here the beginnings…Read more
  •  172
    Robert Hooke
    In Encyclopedia of the life sciences, Macmillan. pp. 202-203. 2001.
    English instrument-maker, experimentalist, and natural philosopher who made key contributions in a wide range of areas including physiology, geology, and mechanics. Born on the Isle of Wight, Hooke showed early aptitude with the design of mechanical toys. At Westminster School he learnt mathematics and geometry, and at Christ Church, Oxford, he joined a remarkable group of natural philosophers working before the Restoration on physiological and physical topics (Frank 1980). Much of Hooke’s caree…Read more
  •  60
    Cue generation and memory construction in direct and generative autobiographical memory retrieval
    with Celia B. Harris and Akira R. O’Connor
    Consciousness and Cognition 33 204-216. 2015.
    Theories of autobiographical memory emphasise effortful, generative search processes in memory retrieval. However recent research suggests that memories are often retrieved directly, without effortful search. We investigated whether direct and generative retrieval differed in the characteristics of memories recalled, or only in terms of retrieval latency. Participants recalled autobiographical memories in response to cue words. For each memory, they reported whether it was retrieved directly or …Read more
  •  3255
    Introduction: Memory, embodied cognition, and the extended mind
    Philosophical Psychology 19 (3): 281-289. 2006.
    I introduce the seven papers in this special issue, by Andy Clark, Je´roˆme Dokic, Richard Menary, Jenann Ismael, Sue Campbell, Doris McIlwain, and Mark Rowlands. This paper explains the motivation for an alliance between the sciences of memory and the extended mind hypothesis. It examines in turn the role of worldly, social, and internalized forms of scaffolding to memory and cognition, and also highlights themes relating to affect, agency, and individual differences.
  •  272
    In a remarkable and utterly original work of philosophical history, Richard Allen revivifies David Hartley's Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations (1749). Though it includes a detailed and richly annotated chronology, this is not a straight intellectual biography, attentive as it might be to the intricacies of Hartley's Cambridge contacts, or the mundane rituals of his medical practice, or the internal development of the doctrine of association of ideas. Instead Allen br…Read more