John Sutton
URL: http://www.johnsutton.net/
I was born (in 1965) and schooled in Scotland, where my parents had moved from Ireland. My first degree was in Classics, at New College, Oxford - I'd wanted to study English, but no-one from my school had ever got in, and Classics was a 4-year degree with three free summers for cricket, drama, and more. On graduating, in Thatcher's Britain, I took a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Sydney (I'd spent part of a gap year living on the beach in Cronulla), and Sydney has been home since. I live in Summer Hill, at the edge of the inner west: my partner (and collaborator) Doris McIlwain died of cancer in April 2015.
I’ve had stints as visiting fellow at UCLA (1995), Edinburgh (1999), UC San Diego (2003), Warwick (2008), and King's College London (2016), and in 2017 I am Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy in London. I started as a lecturer in Philosophy at Macquarie Uni in Sydney in mid-1992, and submitted my PhD in Jan 1993. I resigned from Macquarie in 1994, to take up postdocs at UCLA and then Sydney Uni, but returned in mid-1998. In 2008, I moved from Philosophy to MACCS, the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science.
My research is insistently interdisciplinary. I started as a humanities researcher (English, Classics, history), shifted into philosophy, and now work in cognitive science, integrating conceptual, ethnographic, and experimental methods. The hope is to be driven by topic not tradition. This takes time and energy and the good fortune to find wonderful, tolerant collaborators and interlocutors: I’m wildly lucky in my networks of research collaborators and past and present students.
Much of my research is on memory. My earlier work addressed the history of theories of memory. My PhD, supervised by Stephen Gaukroger, became *Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to connectionism* (Cambridge UP, 1998), which reconsidered early modern and contemporary theories of memory, and the history of the 'animal spirits' in light of new connectionism. It was an experiment in historical cognitive science, hoping that the interdisciplinary study of memory could exemplify the simultaneous attention to brain, body, and culture towards which psychological sciences can aspire.
For the first 10-15 years of my academic career I didn’t publish lots else: then, we could throw ourselves into teaching, and go more slowly in developing interests. I continued to try to bring cognition and culture together, more thoroughly integrating my historical interests with the ideas of philosopher Andy Clark and anthropologist Ed Hutchins on extended mind and distributed cognition. These frameworks have driven my projects since, the idea being that remembering and other psychological processes are sometimes spread or ‘distributed’ across brain, body, and world (both social and material). The mind is thus not just the brain, and ‘I’ am not in my head. I argue, in particular, for a '2nd-wave' account of extended cognition based on the complementarity of internal and external resources.
An invitation to speak in a series on memory in science at the LSE in 2000 brought me back to memory, and since then I’ve tried to apply these distributed/ extended cognition frameworks to four main research areas. In a longstanding, fruitful collaboration with cognitive psychologists Amanda Barnier, Celia Harris, and team, we study shared remembering and collective cognition in small groups. With personality psychologist/ emotion theorist Doris McIlwain and team, we study expert movement and embodied skills, bringing our ‘applying intelligence to the reflexes’ framework to specific case studies in sport (especially cricket), yoga, dance, music, and theatre. With Shakespeare scholar and literary/ cultural historian Lyn Tribble at Otago, we study cognitive history and ecologies of skill in early modern England, now extending into a larger group project on Conversions, based at McGill. Finally, Chris McCarroll and I are obsessed with questions about perspective or point of view in autobiographical remembering, and how visual perspectives relate to emotional, embodied, or narrative perspectives on our past. These projects and collaborations are funded by various bodies and organizations to whom I’m extremely grateful. Most work is up here and at http://johnsutton.net/. Please email me ([email protected]) if you have suggestions or queries.
Address: Department of Cognitive Science,
Macquarie University,
Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia
I was born (in 1965) and schooled in Scotland, where my parents had moved from Ireland. My first degree was in Classics, at New College, Oxford - I'd wanted to study English, but no-one from my school had ever got in, and Classics was a 4-year degree with three free summers for cricket, drama, and more. On graduating, in Thatcher's Britain, I took a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Sydney (I'd spent part of a gap year living on the beach in Cronulla), and Sydney has been home since. I live in Summer Hill, at the edge of the inner west: my partner (and collaborator) Doris McIlwain died of cancer in April 2015.
I’ve had stints as visiting fellow at UCLA (1995), Edinburgh (1999), UC San Diego (2003), Warwick (2008), and King's College London (2016), and in 2017 I am Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy in London. I started as a lecturer in Philosophy at Macquarie Uni in Sydney in mid-1992, and submitted my PhD in Jan 1993. I resigned from Macquarie in 1994, to take up postdocs at UCLA and then Sydney Uni, but returned in mid-1998. In 2008, I moved from Philosophy to MACCS, the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science.
My research is insistently interdisciplinary. I started as a humanities researcher (English, Classics, history), shifted into philosophy, and now work in cognitive science, integrating conceptual, ethnographic, and experimental methods. The hope is to be driven by topic not tradition. This takes time and energy and the good fortune to find wonderful, tolerant collaborators and interlocutors: I’m wildly lucky in my networks of research collaborators and past and present students.
Much of my research is on memory. My earlier work addressed the history of theories of memory. My PhD, supervised by Stephen Gaukroger, became *Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to connectionism* (Cambridge UP, 1998), which reconsidered early modern and contemporary theories of memory, and the history of the 'animal spirits' in light of new connectionism. It was an experiment in historical cognitive science, hoping that the interdisciplinary study of memory could exemplify the simultaneous attention to brain, body, and culture towards which psychological sciences can aspire.
For the first 10-15 years of my academic career I didn’t publish lots else: then, we could throw ourselves into teaching, and go more slowly in developing interests. I continued to try to bring cognition and culture together, more thoroughly integrating my historical interests with the ideas of philosopher Andy Clark and anthropologist Ed Hutchins on extended mind and distributed cognition. These frameworks have driven my projects since, the idea being that remembering and other psychological processes are sometimes spread or ‘distributed’ across brain, body, and world (both social and material). The mind is thus not just the brain, and ‘I’ am not in my head. I argue, in particular, for a '2nd-wave' account of extended cognition based on the complementarity of internal and external resources.
An invitation to speak in a series on memory in science at the LSE in 2000 brought me back to memory, and since then I’ve tried to apply these distributed/ extended cognition frameworks to four main research areas. In a longstanding, fruitful collaboration with cognitive psychologists Amanda Barnier, Celia Harris, and team, we study shared remembering and collective cognition in small groups. With personality psychologist/ emotion theorist Doris McIlwain and team, we study expert movement and embodied skills, bringing our ‘applying intelligence to the reflexes’ framework to specific case studies in sport (especially cricket), yoga, dance, music, and theatre. With Shakespeare scholar and literary/ cultural historian Lyn Tribble at Otago, we study cognitive history and ecologies of skill in early modern England, now extending into a larger group project on Conversions, based at McGill. Finally, Chris McCarroll and I are obsessed with questions about perspective or point of view in autobiographical remembering, and how visual perspectives relate to emotional, embodied, or narrative perspectives on our past. These projects and collaborations are funded by various bodies and organizations to whom I’m extremely grateful. Most work is up here and at http://johnsutton.net/. Please email me ([email protected]) if you have suggestions or queries.
Address: Department of Cognitive Science,
Macquarie University,
Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia
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The book’s historical argument is anchored by a reinterpretation of Descartes’ dynamic physiology of memory and strange philosophy of the body. English critics of Descartes’ view of memories as motions complained that mechanistic neurophilosophy could not guarantee order in memory, and instead sought techniques for controlling the brain. In a new account of 18th-century philosophers’ fears of confusion in remembering, the author demonstrates the role of bizarre body fluids in moral physiology, as philosophers from Locke to Reid and Coleridge struggled to control their own innards and impose cognitive discipline on ‘the phantasmal chaos of association’. Finally, in a defence of connectionism against Jerry Fodor and against phenomenological and Wittgensteinian critics of passive mental representations, the author shows how problems of the self are implicated in contemporary sciences of mind. The book is an experiment in historical cognitive science, based on a belief that the interdisciplinary study of memory can exemplify the simultaneous attention to brain, body, and culture towards which psychological sciences must aim.
CONTENTS (Download at http://www.johnsutton.net/PhilosophyandMemoryTraces.htm)
1 Introduction: traces, brains, and history
Appendix: memory and connectionism
Part I Animal spirits and memory traces
Introduction to Part I: Animal Spirits and Memory Traces
2 Wriggle-work: the quick and nimble animal spirits
3 Memory and 'the Cartesian philosophy of the brain'
Appendix 1: nerves, spirits, and traces in Descartes
Appendix 2: Malebranche on memory
Part II Inner discipline
Introduction to Part II: Inner Discipline
4 Spirit sciences, memory motions
5 Cognition, chaos, and control in English responses to Descartes' theory of memory
6 Local and distributed representations
7 John Locke and the neurophilosophy of self
Appendix: memory and self in Essay II.27
8 The puzzle of survival
9 Spirits, body, and self
10 The puzzle of elimination
Part III 'The phantasmal chaos of association'
Introduction to Part III: 'The phantasmal chaos of association'
11 Fodor, connectionism, and cognitive discipline
12 Associationism and neo-associationism
13 Hartley's distributed model of memory
14 Attacks on neurophilosophy: Reid and Coleridge
Part IV Connectionism and the philosophy of memory
Introduction to Part IV: connectionism and the philosophy of memory
15 Representations, realism, and history
16 Attacks on traces
17 Order, confusion, remembering
References
Index
psychological research on collaborative recall and social memory to the philosophical
debate on extended and distributed cognition. We start by examining the case for
extended cognition based on the complementarity of inner and outer resources, by which
neural, bodily, social, and environmental resources with disparate but complementary
properties are integrated into hybrid cognitive systems, transforming or augmenting the
nature of remembering or decision-making. Adams and Aizawa, noting this distinctive
complementarity argument, say that they agree with it completely: but they describe it as
“a non-revolutionary approach” which leaves “the cognitive psychology of memory as
the study of processes that take place, essentially without exception, within nervous
systems.” In response, we carve out, on distinct conceptual and empirical grounds, a rich
middle ground between internalist forms of cognitivism and radical anti-cognitivism.
Drawing both on extended cognition literature and on Sterelny’s account of the
“scaffolded mind” (this issue), we develop a multidimensional framework for
understanding varying relations between agents and external resources, both technological
and social. On this basis we argue that, independent of any more “revolutionary”
metaphysical claims about the partial constitution of cognitive processes by external
resources, a thesis of scaffolded or distributed cognition can substantially influence or
transform explanatory practice in cognitive science. Critics also cite various empirical
results as evidence against the idea that remembering can extend beyond skull and skin.
We respond with a more principled, representative survey of the scientific psychology of
memory, focussing in particular on robust recent empirical traditions for the study of
collaborative recall and transactive social memory. We describe our own empirical
research on socially distributed remembering, aimed at identifying conditions for
mnemonic emergence in collaborative groups. Philosophical debates about extended,
embedded, and distributed cognition can thus make richer, mutually beneficial contact
with independentlymotivated research programs in the cognitive psychology of memory.
this framework will require a more dramatic integration of levels, fields, and methods than has yet been achieved. The challenge arises from the fact that memory often takes us out of the current situation: in remembering episodes or experiences in my personal
past, for example, I am mentally transported away from the social and physical setting in which I am currently embedded. Our ability
to make psychological contact with events and experiences in the past was one motivation, in classical cognitive science and cognitive psychology, for postulating inner mental representations to hold information across the temporal gap. Theorists of situated cognition thus have to show how such an apparently representation-hungry and decoupled high-level cognitive process may nonetheless be fruitfully understood as embodied, contextualized, and distributed.