Chapter 13 - Remembering

Summary

This chapter presents an overview of situated work on memory and remembering. It covers relevant movements in cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, the social sciences and social philosophy, and distributed cognition. One respect in which a thoroughly situated approach to memory can push the existing ecological focus on real-life or everyday memory phenomena further is in presenting constructive processes in remembering, and, more generally, memory's openness to various forms of influence as more mundane or natural than inevitably dangerous. The chapter merges these ideas about interpersonal memory dynamics with the postconnectionist picture of human beings as essentially incomplete machines, apt to incorporate what has become apt for incorporation. Some of the liveliest recent applications of situated cognition to the case of memory show that systems of exograms are not necessarily meant to be permanent or limitlessly transmissible, or turn out to be less stable in practice than in intention.