Distributed autobiographical memories, distributed self‐narratives

Abstract

Richard Heersmink argues that self‐narratives are distributed across embodied organisms and their environment, given that their building blocks, autobiographical memories, are distributed. This argument faces two problems. First, it commits a fallacy of composition. Second, it relies on Marya Schechtman's narrative self‐constitution view, which is incompatible with the distributed cognition framework. To solve these problems, this article develops an alternative account of self‐narratives. On this account, we actively connect distributed autobiographical memories through distributed conversational and textual self‐narrative practices. This account enhances our understanding of the memory–narrative nexus and has implications for philosophical conceptions of self.

Collective memory and social representations of history in Americas, Europe and Palestine

“…Autobiographical memory (e.g., Conway, 2005;Nelson & Fivush, 2020) is the system responsible for storing episodic memories related to the self; it is constructed throughout a person's life and forms part of his or her biography and identity (e.g., Fabry, 2023;Sutton, 2022). In autobiographical memory, effects such as the critical period of recall (also called critical age or reminiscence bump) or positivity bias have been found (Hitchcock et al, 2019; see also Salgado & Kingo, 2019).…”