|
How social norms mess up our memories| title | How social norms mess up our memories |
|---|
| start_date | 2023/11/02 |
|---|
| schedule | 16h15-17h45 |
|---|
| online | no |
|---|
| location_info | on Zoom |
|---|
| summary | Social norms have a huge influence on our behaviors, choices, thoughts, and beliefs. For example, these unwritten rules and expectations direct our gaze towards our interlocutors’ faces, shape how we think about our bodies, drive our career and romantic choices, and guide us in forming and updating our political and religious beliefs. Their influence on our everyday lives is pervasive. In this talk, I investigate an important but underexplored way in which social norms shape our mental lives: their influence on memory. In particular, I aim to explain three real-life cases in which our memory fails: forgetting another person’s idea, attributing another person’s idea to oneself during memory recall –i.e., misremembering–, and failing to recognize a memory of another person’s idea as a memory. I have two main claims. First claim: if the project is to explain these memory failures in real life, appealing to cognitive explanations in the philosophy and cognitive science of memory is not sufficient. These explanations are valuable at a general level. Still, they do not tell us why and how one forgets or misremembers particular memories, or fails to recognize them as memories. Since particulars are what we care about when we undergo or are at the receiving end of memory failures in real life, a good explanation should account for this dynamic. Second claim: appealing to the social elements of these cases is the right way to go. In particular, I claim that social norms and the psychological machinery they recruit explain why, in specific but common real-life cases, one forgets or misremembers some particular memories –but not others–, or fails to recognize these memories –but not others– for what they are. To argue for this claim, for each of my cases I formulate hypotheses about how the psychological machinery of social norms influences memory retrieval, thus causing, at least in part, the memory failures in question. This socio-normative explanation is not at odds with extant explanations of memory failures in philosophy and cognitive science. Still, it is an example of how, depending on the projects we want to undertake, we might need to adapt and revise these explanations in order to achieve different philosophical goals. |
|---|
| responsibles | Righetti, Werning, Kourken, Andonovski |
|---|
Workflow history| from state (1) | to state | comment | date |
|---|
| submitted | published | | 2023/10/20 15:40 UTC |
| |
|