Collective memory, group minds, and the extended mind thesis

Abstract

While memory is conceptualized predominantly as an individual capacity in the cognitive and biological sciences, the social sciences have most commonly construed memory as a collective phenomenon. Collective memory has been put to diverse uses, ranging from accounts of nationalism in history and political science to views of ritualization and commemoration in anthropology and sociology. These appeals to collective memory share the idea that memory "goes beyond the individual" but often run together quite different claims in spelling out that idea. This paper reviews a sampling of recent work on collective memory in the light of emerging externalist views within the cognitive sciences, and through some reflection on broader traditions of thought in the biological and social sciences that have appealed to the idea that groups have minds. The paper concludes with some thoughts about the relationship between these kinds of cognitive metaphors in the social sciences and our notion of agency.

Exograms and Interdisciplinarity: History, the Extended Mind, and the Civilizing Process

“…7-8) have, however, now discussed the complementarity argument: quoting my statement above of the complementarity principle, they note that they "agree with this completely," but deny that it supports EM (2008, p. 14S). Since their discussion relies on an earlier draft of this current chapter, which has also been put to work in that earlier form by others, including defenders of EM like Menary (2006Menary ( , 2007, Rowlands (2009), andWilson (2005), I've thought it best to leave this first attempt at a systematic statement and defense of complementarity intact, postponing a full reply to Adams and Aizawa's deflationary reading to another occasion.…”

“…Not all research in the field treats intracranial processes as the only cognitive explananda; and not all research which does focus on intracranial processes does so to the exclusion of transcranial cognitive processes. For initial discussions of these issues in the case of memory see Wilson 2005;Tollefsen 2006;Barnier et al 2008;Sutton 2009. 6.…”

A conceptual and empirical framework for the social distribution of cognition: The case of memory

“…While mainstream philosophy of mind has largely neglected social aspects of remembering, studies of ''collective memory'' and ''cultural memory'' abound in a burgeoning interdisciplinary field spanning sociology, anthropology, history, political theory, and media theory (Bloch, 1998;Kansteiner, 2002;Klein, 2000;Olick, 1999;Wertsch, 2002). We think that such social memory studies are potentially relevant for cognitive science and philosophy, and believe that both psychologists and humanities scholars can contribute directly to better understandings of the relations between broader studies of national or cultural memory and the typical individual or small-group focus of cognitive psychology with its empirical methods (Sutton, 2004, Suttonin press-b;Wilson, 2005a). Since the phenomena in question in social memory studies do not recognize disciplinary boundaries, it is particularly important to seek both conceptual clarity on key terms and effective shareable methods (see also Hirst & Manier, in press).…”

Knowledge and cognitive integration

“…The hypothesis of distributed cognition, which has been developed in parallel to the hypothesis of extended cognition (Hutchins 1995, Theiner et al 2010, Sutton et al 2008, Wilson 2005, Heylighen et al 2007), differs to the latter position only in that this time the cognitive system extends to include epistemic artifacts as well as other agents. And interestingly, most proponents of the view (Sutton et al 2008, Theiner et al 2010, Wegner 1985 Dale 2011) point out again that it is the existence of non-linear cooperative interactions between the contributing members and their artifacts that is the criterion by which we can judge whether we have an integrated distributed cognitive system.…”