CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Mahr, Johannes Benedikt |
|---|---|
| Title | Remembering in Communication - A novel account of the architecture and function of human episodic memory |
| Summary | Remembering is a fundamental component of human life and cognition. Humans spend a sizable portion of their lives with thinking and talking about their past experiences. The past and our memories of it seem to be particularly important to us. In this thesis, I develop an account of what ‘remembering’ is, why we think about remembering the way we do, why humans remember at all, and why it plays such an important role in human culture and social life. In Chapter 1, I introduce the intuitive notion of remembering which has dominated philosophical discourse in the last few decades. I then move on to explain how the intuitions underlying this notion are cognitively produced by focusing on the mechanisms and evolution of human episodic memory. First, in Chapter 2, I give an account of the cognitive architecture of episodic simulation – the cognitive system producing the contents of episodic memory. I argue that episodic memory is just one specific output of the wider ability of episodic simulation (i.e. the capacity to produce mental imagery about events outside our sensory scope). Second, in Chapter 3, I focus on episodic memory specifically. Episodic memory goes beyond the outputs of episodic simulation because it includes a representation of its own causal history. When we represent an event in episodic memory, we do not just represent the event itself but also how we came to know about it, namely, through our own experience. Third, in Chapter 4, l give an account of the evolved function of the episodic memory system. That is, I explain why episodic memory has a metarepresentational structure including information about its origin in first-hand experience. I argue that this metarepresentational structure functions to allow us to determine when we can lay claim to epistemic authority about the past in communication. Finally, in Chapter 5, I ask why this ability would have been useful in the representation of particular past events. That is, I aim to answer the question why the ability to determine whether one has epistemic authority is particularly important for representations of and claims about the past. Here, I argue that for humans the past is special because it is often the only way we can determine present social realities. For humans, certain events (like promises, transfers of ownership, etc.) are conceived of as causes of social entities like commitments, entitlements, obligations, and accountabilities. The representation of token causes for such specific social effects is crucial because they commonly do not leave concomitant, traceable changes in the physical environment. Social effects like commitments, entitlements and obligations often consist only in mental representations and depend on interpersonal agreement to be effective. The only way the existence of such social effects can be negotiated is by recourse to their specific cause in the past. This does not only explain why history has such high importance to us as individuals and members of social groups, but also why humans have culturally developed a large range of technologies for making specific events with consequential social effects public, documented, and traceable, as well as why claims about the past are a continuous source of conflict. |
| Supervisor | Csibra, Gergely; Sperber, Dan |
| Department | Cognitive Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/mahr_johannes.pdf |
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