Cognitive conceptions of language and the development of autobiographical memory.
John Sutton
Page 2
Source: http://www.phil.mq.edu.au/staff/jsutton/CognitiveConceptionsofLanguage.htm
2. Interdisciplinarity in the sciences of memory
Apart from its intrinsic interest, the developmental study of AM is a vital hinge between neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, and social psychology. If, amidst the daunting array of current sciences of memory, we are ever to construct an integrated framework, this is as promising a place to start as any. The goal would not be the unification of all memory sciences by classical reduction, but the elucidation of local points of contact between different (sub)disciplines, in the search for interfield theories (Darden and Maull, 1977), or in pinpointing genuinely interdependent phenomena at different levels of explanation (Kitcher 1992, pp.6-7; Sutton, 2002).
A number of philosophers of psychology have taken other areas of the sciences of memory as case studies in interdisciplinary theory-construction. Kenneth Schaffner (1993) and John Bickle (1995, 1998) illustrate their new, liberalized conceptions of reduction with treatments of Kandel’s neurobiological account of associative learning in the sea-slug Aplysia . Lindley Darden, Carl Craver, and William Bechtel address the ways neuropsychologists and neurobiologists think of levels, mechanisms, and decomposition in the study of spatial memory and in the localization of memory systems (Craver and Darden 2001, Craver forthcoming, Bechtel 2001). Valerie Hardcastle constructs a detailed narrative of the integration of interdisciplinary traditions, methods, and theories in the development of the distinction between implicit and explicit memory systems (1996, chapter 6). But whereas these writers address the relations between the neural and the cognitive sciences of memory, there has been little work on cognitive psychology’s relations with the personality, developmental, or social psychology of memory. Developmental studies in particular are ripe for such investigation, because of their key role in the forging of a broad consensus across cognitive psychology in the 1990s about the constructive nature of remembering, and the importance of the context of retrieval.
A number of difficult questions about interdisciplinarity can be fruitfully raised in the specific case of the study of memory. Even if cognitive science is still "a mere babe in the woods of science" (von Eckardt 1999, p.221), the cognitive sciences of memory nevertheless harness a vast institutional, technological, and textual apparatus more typical of Kuhnian normal science than of an entirely pre-paradigmatic era. We can ask, for example, to what extent memory is typical in its susceptibility to interdisciplinary analysis. The methodological problems of investigating early AM might be compared on the one hand with those which beset research into children’s dreaming (Foulkes 1999), and on the other with the more successful interdisciplinary exchange which has characterized research on colour categorization (Dedrick 1998). But the potential pitfalls of interdisciplinary theory-construction are equally likely to emerge. In particular, we must recall the caution expressed by Patricia Kitcher (1992, pp.172-4, 180-3) about the error of seeing the mere coherence and harmony of theories from different domains as conclusive evidence for the truth of both. With this timely warning in mind, though, we can proceed by restricting our ambitions to initial conceptual geography, rather than overhyped claims for immediate success.
3. The significance of autobiographical memory
It's in the autobiographical form of episodic memory that we achieve a form of "mental time travel", in which we're oriented to events as occurring at particular past times, events which we sometimes knit into autobiographical narratives (Tulving 1983, 1993, 1999; Suddendorf and Corballis 1997). But what exactly is this capacity, and how does it arise?
Children start talking about the past "almost as soon as they begin talking", but the form of their references to past events develops rapidly over some years (Nelson and Fivush 2000:286). At early stages, adults provide much of both the structure and the content of young children's references to the past, providing 'scaffolding' for the children's memories. Initially children use generic event memories implicitly, like scripts, as a basis on which to understand routines and generate expectations: they know what typically happens in certain repeated sequences of actions or events. But this is not yet a capacity to remember particular past events. It takes some time for children to acquire the ability spontaneously to refer to specific past episodes with rich phenomenal content. In section 6 below I discuss the social-interactionist account of how these changes unfold, comparing it with differing views on the role of joint reminiscing. But first it’s worth spelling out the psychological significance of the development of more mature AM capacities in a little more detail.
Children gradually develop perspectival temporal frameworks in which to locate memories of idiosyncratic events. Memory sharing practices, often initiated by adults, encourage the idea of different perspectives on the same once-occupied time (McCormack and Hoerl 1999, especially pp.173-4). In developing this temporal perspective-switching, children start to take memories as objects for negotiation, shared attention, and discussion. Realization of the existence of discrepancies between versions of the past goes along with the development of some kind of self-schema, as children begin to collect stories into some kind of personal history. The ability to view one's life retrospectively is sophisticated, and (initially at least) follows adult guidance in simpler conversations about the past.
Richer definitions of AM, as developed in different ways, for example, by John Campbell, Christoph Hoerl, and Josef Perner, drive strong pictures of the philosophical significance of AM in self-conscious thinking. If true AM is memory of what one saw and did, when and where, conceived as having a particular past time at which it took place, then it requires the subject to have a conception of the causal connectedness of both physical objects and the self. Children need to grasp that both world and self have a history, on such views, for genuine autobiographical remembering to get off the ground. For Campbell (1997), this suggests that temporal asymmetry is built in to AM, in that we are inevitably realists about the past, conceiving of past events as being all, in principle, integratable on a single linear temporal sequence. Various principles of plot construction thus ground our ordinary AM practices: we assume, for example, that the remembered I has traced "a continuous spatio-temporal route through all the narratives of memory, a route continuous with the present and future location of the remembering subject" (Campbell 1997, p.110).
We can, in mature AM, assign causal significance to specific events, so that our temporal orientation is by particular times rather than simply by rhythms or phases. For Hoerl (1999, pp.240-7), this feature of our concept of time grounds our awareness of the singularity of events and especially of actions. We are thus "sensitive to the irrevocability of certain acts", so that we, unlike other animals and (perhaps) some severely amnesic patients, incorporate a sense of the uniqueness and potential significance of particular choices and actions into our plans and our conceptions of how to live.
These specific views about the significance of AM may be somewhat over-intellectualist. The psychological status of the putative principles of plot construction needs clarification, and the sophistication of this cluster of allegedly interconnected features of self-conscious thinking divides us from other animals to an extent which seems in some tension with naturalism. I sketch this provocative line of thought here merely to suggest what is at stake in defining AM and investigating its development. Weaker accounts of the requirements for AM will also have implications for the way we think of the unity and continuity of personal identity . Developmental evidence may play an important part here, in suggesting ways of thinking about early temporal representation, and about the origin of personal narratives, which allow different roles to the early narrative environment in understanding the relation between memory and language. To find a path through to this possibility, we need to step back, and undertake a taxonomy of the tangled field of philosophical views on the relation between language and thought.
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