Remembering as Public Practice: Wittgenstein, memory, and distributed cognitive ecologies

Remembering as Public Practice: Wittgenstein, memory, and distributed cognitive ecologies
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Remembering as Public Practice: Wittgenstein, memory, and distributed cognitive ecologies
John Sutton
Remembering as Public Practice:
Wittgenstein, memory, and distributed
cognitive ecologies
||
John Sutton: University of Sydney,
[email protected]
1 Prelude: three cases of remembering
A woman is listening to Sinatra before work. As she later describes it, ‘suddenly
from nowhere I could hear my mother singing along to it … I was there again
home again, hearing my mother … God knows why I should choose to remember
that … then, to actually hear her and I had this image in my head … of being at
home … with her singing away … like being transported back you know I got
one of those … like shivery feelings really suddenly’ (Anderson 2004, 9-10). An
older couple, discussing their honeymoon forty years ago, each say that they
can’t remember the show they saw, until through iterative, puzzled cross-cuing
they finally get there – ‘Desert Song, that’s it’ (Harris et al 2011, 292). An elderly
English veteran of a prisoner of war camp in Japan, finishing up morning tea
with a young Japanese social scientist interested in reconciliation, suddenly
calls out loudly – in Japanese – ‘stand to attention’. He stands to attention in
front of her: like many of the men she interviews, he physically re-enacts frag-
ments of that long-past world of the camp, bringing that absent past into this
new present context with a visceral shock (Murakami 2001, 2012; Middleton &
Brown 2005, 133-136).
These three cases exemplify, in distinctive ways, remembering as public
practice. In each case, there are past personal experiences at stake, affectively-
charged and highly significant, embedded one way or another in these people’s
rich narrative histories, the weave of their lives. In each case, particular constel-
lations of circumstances shape and colour current activity: each person in-
volved experiences emotions and remembers events by way of specific sensory,
bodily, and interpersonal interactions, both past and present. One woman is
alone with her music and her memories, while the social interactions in the
other two cases are dramatically different. In each case, dynamic neural and
bodily processes are involved, over many timescales. But remembering is some-
thing these people are doing now, in complex culturally- and technologically-

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410 | John Sutton

mediated settings. It is happening, we might say, in these specific cognitive
ecologies. Distributed cognitive ecologies are ‘the multidimensional contexts in
which we remember, feel, think, sense, communicate, imagine, and act, often
collaboratively, on the fly, and in rich ongoing interaction with our environ-
ments’ (Tribble & Sutton 2011, 94). In each of these cases, what occurs is a dis-
tinctively-balanced response – embodied, emotional, cognitive, social, and
cultural all at once – to the webs of interdependent processes and activities
spread across the various elements of these particular sociocognitive ecosys-
tems (Hutchins 2010). In this paper, aiming to throw light on a range of issues in
the contemporary interdisciplinary study of memory, I compare this distributed
cognitive ecologies framework with Wittgenstein’s remarks on remembering,
especially as interpreted in a prominent recent tradition of Wittgensteinian
enactivism.

2 Wittgenstein and the cognitive sciences:
isolation, conflict, or integration?
If, as suggested by these three cases, remembering in everyday life is deeply
embedded in complex, circumstance-dependent webs of significance and social
practice, how is it to be studied? What theories and methods can help us under-
stand memory? In particular, how do (and how should) philosophical and sci-
entific approaches to remembering relate to each other? Perhaps they can
peacefully coexist, addressing separate conceptual and empirical issues, main-
taining a respectful isolation. Alternatively, there might be some kind of en-
gagement or active relation between them.
Ridiculing the neurophilosophical associationism of William James and
other ‘scientific’ psychologists, Wittgenstein complained at the metaphysical
machinations to which, he thought, the confused new discipline was prone:

How needed is the work of philosophy is shown by James’ psychology. Psychology, he
says, is a science, but he discusses almost no scientific questions. His movements are
merely (so many) attempts to extricate himself from the cobwebs of metaphysics in which
he is caught. He cannot yet walk, or fly at all he only wriggles. Not that that isn’t interest-
ing. Only it is not a scientific activity. (MS 165, 150-1, quoted in Hilmy 1987, 196-7).

But why, I want to ask Wittgenstein, must scientists not wriggle (Sutton 1998,
25-26)? Someone who thinks that William James discusses no scientific ques-
tions has an unusually pure vision of what science is and ought to be. Many
sciences, including those in the social, human, and cognitive realms, now

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Remembering as Public Practice | 411

study, probe, model, and theorize fuzzy, fluid, volatile, and complex features of
reality.
Some of Wittgenstein’s followers, both in the 1970s and 1980s and today,
share his wish to isolate and insulate a purer realm of genuine scientific ac-
counts of general, observable empirical phenomena both from the messy, par-
ticular, context-specific cultural and human realms, and from what he saw as
the metaphysically-tainted and prejudice-driven speculation which results
when science is illegitimately extended into and projected onto those realms.
Seeing themselves as marginalized radicals bravely resisting the imperialistic
encroachment of a ubiquitous, domineering reductionist and scientistic world-
view, they have sometimes taken Wittgenstein’s anti-psychological polemic too
thoroughly on board. Recent Wittgensteinian scholars rightly aim, however, to
move decisively beyond such divisive attitudes. In integrative spirit, this paper
assesses their success in doing so, and seeks to nudge the Wittgensteinian enac-
tivists further towards the distributed cognitive ecologies framework.
So in this context I set aside more extreme isolationist views of the relation
between philosophy and science, pointing to careful critiques of radically quie-
tist readings of Wittgenstein by Hutto (2013) and Moyal-Sharrock (2013a). But
philosophical engagement with the cognitive sciences can take dramatically
different forms. One possibility is that philosophy should engage with the sci-
ences because it is incompatible with at least some scientific projects and con-
cepts. For Hacker, for example, philosophy can sometimes

set straight the conceptual confusions and incoherences of scientific theories. For phi-
losophy is neither the Queen of the sciences nor their conceptual scullery-maid, but rather
a tribunal before which scientific theory may be arraigned when it trespasses beyond the
bounds of sense. (Hacker 2006, 236 quoted in Moyal-Sharrock 2013a, 378).

An alternative form of engagement would see philosophy and the sciences –
and their various diverse allies and sub-disciplines – productively engaging
with each other, to the extent of seeking integration of concepts, theories, and
even methods on certain specific questions. On this optimistic picture, which I
defend, ‘philosophy becomes a full-fledged member of a cooperative discipli-
nary matrix, taking information from the empirical disciplines and contributing
to them’ (Christensen & Sutton 2012, 326).
The difference between engagement as conflict and correction of concep-
tual confusion, and engagement as cooperation and integration, will not always
be sharp: the choice of approach depends on the specific issues at stake. It may
be perfectly sensible to try in some contexts an active collaboration, while in
other contexts or on other topics seeking instead a new arrangement of scien-

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412 | John Sutton

tific descriptions which might ‘give a new direction to scientific investigation’,
in ‘saying “Look at it like this”’ in a way ‘that may have advantages and conse-
quences of various kinds’ (Wittgenstein RPP 1.950). This is also a matter of em-
phasis and style: readers have had dramatically distinct judgements on whether
Bennett and Hacker’s constructive program for understanding perception and
memory, for example, appropriately balances the weight of their many com-
plaints about the ‘conceptual confusions’ of science (2001, 499 and passim).
I argue that even in novel and subtle recent reinterpretations of Wittgen-
stein in the context of enactivist philosophy, the kinds of engagement with sci-
ence on show are too heavily weighted towards a critical mode. When cognitive
science is discussed primarily to correct its conceptual confusions, those
younger philosophers of mind who are committed to more constructive inter-
disciplinary engagement end up too easily neglecting Wittgenstein’s work.
Wittgenstein’s later philosophy offers wonderful, rich resources for making
central conceptual contributions to live topics and debates of intense cross-
disciplinary interest, across many diverse areas from colour and pain to atten-
tion and sensation, language and emotion, mathematics and imagination as
well as memory. But this has been obscured by the dominance of polemic in the
field, leading in some quarters to unfortunate indifference to and ignorance of
Wittgenstein. I argue for an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remarks on memory
and remembering which supports a strongly integrative, cooperative version of
the engagement model. Philosophy and the sciences of memory – the social
sciences as well as the cognitive sciences – can operate together in complemen-
tary projects within common frameworks.
In 1991, David Stern took the following passage as inspiration for a thor-
ough reconsideration of Wittgenstein’s remarks on memory:

Memory can be compared with a storehouse only so far as it fulfils the same purpose.
Where it doesn’t, we couldn’t say whether the things stored up may not constantly change
their nature and so couldn’t be stored at all. (Wittgenstein 1935-6, p.17, quoted by Stern
1991, 204)

Stern argued that, read one way, the later Wittgenstein’s scattered remarks on
memory seem to deny the very possibility of scientific study of learning and
remembering. But, he thought, if interpreted more accurately Wittgenstein’s
ideas could be fruitfully used for the restricted purpose of rejecting classical
symbol-systems views in cognitive science, such as Jerry Fodor’s Language of
Thought hypothesis (Fodor 1975). In integrative spirit, pointing the way towards
a contextualised science of memory, Stern suggested that Wittgenstein ‘fore-

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Remembering as Public Practice | 413

shadows some of the most promising contemporary work’ in connectionist cog-
nitive science (1991, 203).
I had started work in 1990 on a PhD thesis addressing the history, philoso-
phy, and sciences of memory, and I read Stern’s paper with pleasure and relief.
Connectionism had shown that by the mid- to late 1980s the Language of
Thought was not ‘the only game in town’ in cognitive theory. In particular it had
offered the beginnings of a mechanistic alternative to the idea of atomic, inde-
pendently-stored, localist representations (Clark 1989). Connectionism thus
seemed, to me as to Stern, ‘a striking fulfilment’ of Wittgenstein’s prediction
‘that people some day will come to the definite opinion that there is no copy in
either the physiological or nervous systems which corresponds to a particular
thought, or a particular idea, or memory’ (LWP 1.504; Stern 1991, 208). While I
disagreed with Stern on some points of detail, his paper seemed to me not only
unusually polite and integrative in style, in a literature which at that time often
dealt in somewhat brusque and humourless critique, but also to offer an excit-
ing sense of a new era of collaboration between the new cognitive sciences and
this rich and subtle philosophical tradition (compare Mills 1993). This seemed
like a move towards engagement rather than conflict or isolation.
So I borrowed Stern’s tactics in the final chapter of my thesis (Sutton 1993),
to set out in detail the central elements of the widespread extreme reading of
Wittgenstein on memory, and contrast it with a subtler moderate reading which
could sharpen the developing post-connectionist philosophy of mind and mem-
ory. I offered a historical analysis of Wittgenstein’s targets, suggesting that his
more extreme remarks derived from a tendency to collapse all psychological
sciences of memory into either Cartesianism or unacceptable behaviouristic
versions of associationism, so that the urge to avoid these erroneous views
turned into the urge to avoid psychology (compare ter Hark 1995 on Wittgen-
stein’s responses to ideas about memory in Gestalt psychology). This chapter on
Wittgenstein did not make it into Philosophy and Memory Traces, the much-
revised book derived from my thesis, which was focussed primarily on earlier
historical periods (Sutton 1998): both my interpretation of Wittgenstein and his
followers and the links back to my alternative account of the history of associa-
tionism remained unpublished. Here I revisit and update my arguments: though
I abstract away from the historical detail about Wittgenstein’s context and read-
ing, and from the scholarship on the gradual development of his own views
(Stern 1995), I do try out a new big-picture account of the history of cognitive
theory and the philosophy of cognitive science since the 1980s.
As it turned out, and for significant reasons, connectionism did not on its
own provide sufficient tools for thoroughgoing revision of the broader concep-
tions of agency, individuality, and mind employed in mainstream classical cog-

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414 | John Sutton

nitivism. Connectionism’s alternative accounts of cognitive neurodynamics,
though already enough to confirm that remembering is a constructive, furiously
active process, had to be supplemented both by more direct critique of the indi-
vidualism of classical cognitivism, and by stronger, more integrative and prac-
tice-oriented views of the situated or distributed mind (Hutchins 1995; Clark
1997, 2001; Rowlands 1999; Sutton 1999). These views have developed into the
framework of distributed cognitive ecologies which I introduced briefly above,
and which I will argue offers both the most fruitful current integrative approach
to the interdisciplinary study of memory, and the most productive contempo-
rary framework with which to connect Wittgenstein’s remarks on remembering.
And as it turned out, the engagement model of the relation between phi-
losophy and the sciences did not get a firm grip in Wittgenstein studies. In the
same period, as cognitive theory and practice has opened up dramatically, a
number of other theoretical frameworks in which powerful attacks on both the
localism and the individualism of classical cognitivism had been developed
have shifted ground. Phenomenology and ecological psychology, for example,
now often operate productively as natural if often still critical allies of research
in situated, embodied, and distributed cognition, rather than continuing to
stake out distinct territories as glowering antagonists. But at least one important
strand of Wittgenstein scholarship has gone a different way. Danièle Moyal-
Sharrock has rightly sought to introduce a more productive dialectic to the de-
bate, arguing that ‘Wittgenstein’s reconceptions [of memory] can be seen at
work in [the] leading practitioners’ of ‘neuropsychology’ (2009, 213). But she has
recently allied her interpretation of Wittgenstein with one contemporary version
of ‘enactivist’ theory (Moyal-Sharrock 2013b). I will argue that this is not quite
the right move.
Although ‘enactivism’ is a very broad church, in this paper I follow Moyal-
Sharrock in discussing only the version developed by Daniel Hutto and col-
leagues as ‘radical enactive cognition’ (Hutto 2013, 2014; Hutto & Myin 2013;
Hutto, Kirchhoff, & Myin forthcoming; Moyal-Sharrock 2013b; Myin & Zahidi
2014). I focus here on these forms of Wittgensteinian enactivism because much
of what these philosophers say about remembering is interesting and reason-
able. Where they go astray is partly in their in their claims about what psy-
chologists and cognitive scientists do and believe, and partly in their choice of
criticisms, or their sense of which issues matter most.
In section 3, I argue that the issues about mental representation and con-
tent on which these enactivists focus are quite distinct from the issues about
individualism which lie at the heart of the major revisionary movements in con-
temporary cognitive theory in which both enactivism and the distributed cogni-
tive ecologies framework have arisen. After going back to work through the key

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Remembering as Public Practice | 415

critical themes of Wittgenstein’s remarks on memory in section 4, I then survey
the recent history and contemporary landscape of the sciences of memory. Here,
in clearing the ground for a direct evaluation of Wittgensteinian enactivism and
the distributed cognitive ecologies framework, I set both against truly opposing
views in classical cognitivism and reductionist neuroscience, but I complicate
the enactivists’ critical assessment of the broader psychology and cognitive
science of memory. Both because they focus so exclusively on problems about
representation, and because they mischaracterize some of the ‘mainstream’
views under attack, Wittgensteinian enactivists maintain an unnecessarily divi-
sive attitude towards the sciences of memory in general, and as a result tend to
overemphasise the revolutionary novelty of their critiques. I argue instead that
on many key theoretical points, both Wittgensteinian and enactivist accounts of
memory are compatible with large swathes of mainstream work in philosophy
and cognitive science. But once we focus more productively on questions about
individualism rather than exclusively on problems of content, Wittgensteinian
themes can indeed usefully redirect, temper, or illumine certain residual and
significant challenges in the interdisciplinary study of memory (section 6). As
yet, though, as I argue in the concluding section 7, Wittgensteinian enactivists
still set unnecessary limits to constructive theory-development.
This recent tradition of Wittgensteinian enactivism affords opportunities to
reclaim and enliven Wittgenstein’s legacy. But these accounts could better be
productively integrated with the specific approaches to mind and memory
which I introduced above as the study of ‘distributed cognitive ecologies’, and
to which I provide extensive references below so that those interested can easily
access work on memory in these burgeoning traditions. My aim is ecumenical.
The potential points of contact between enactivist Wittgenstein and cognitive-
ecological Wittgenstein have been under-emphasised, as theorists have focus-
sed on residual differences. In what follows, I do not neglect those points of
difference: but I do offer a new diagnosis of the landscape of problems, and of
which issues provide the barriers to integration and cooperative engagement
between philosophy and the sciences of remembering.

3 Two distinct Issues: representations and
individualism
I mentioned above the revolutionary fervour with which connectionist philoso-
phers and cognitive scientists alike hoped in the 1980s and 1990s not only to
overturn classical cognitivism but also to develop rich and novel post-Cartesian

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416 | John Sutton

alternative pictures of agency, embodiment, control, identity, and temporality.
Seeking ‘a revolutionary change in the intellectual culture of cognitive science’
(van Gelder & Port 1997, 139), theorists from a range of distinct disciplines and
backgrounds came together to build thoroughly decentralized pictures of cogni-
tion which take temporality, body, and world seriously. Sharing an opposition
to the ‘generically Cartesian picture of the nature of mind’ which they saw still
dominating classical cognitivism, they attacked not only Descartes’ dated dual-
ism and his apparent division of cognition from affect, but his deeper picture of
cognitive processes as cut off from the physical environment and the social
world, in ‘a realm whose essence owes nothing to the accidents of body and
surroundings’ (van Gelder 1995, 379; Clark 1997, xi).
This was the primary route from within the cognitive sciences towards the
radical forms of anti-individualism which have since come to prominence in
various forms as embodied, enactive, situated, extended, and distributed cogni-
tion (Robbins & Aydede 2009). The individualist claim which was seen as com-
mon to Descartes, Herbert Simon, and Jerry Fodor alike was that cognitive states
and processes are wholly internal. On Fodor’s methodological solipsism, for
example, both world and body can be practically discounted in cognitive sci-
ence. The former is merely a source of input to the true cognitive system in the
head, and the latter merely a courier system for sensory and motor messages
(Fodor 1980). In place of the resulting classical cognitivist assumption that ‘per-
ception, thought, and action must be temporally distinct and theoretically sepa-
rable’ (Wheeler 1995, 67), the new anti-individualists wanted us both to ‘think of
cognition as essentially a matter of change in time’ and to acknowledge the
spread or distribution of cognitive states and processes across the porous and
metaphysically insignificant boundaries of brain, body, and world (van Gelder
& Port 1997, 135; Clark 1997, 214; Wilson 1994). In van Gelder’s terms, cognitive
systems are ‘complexes of continuous, simultaneous, and mutually determining
change’:

the cognitive system is not just the encapsulated brain; rather, since the nervous system,
body, and environment are all constantly changing and simultaneously influencing each
other, the true cognitive system is a single unified system embracing all three ... interac-
tion between the inner and the outer is ... a matter of coupling, such that both sets of
processes continually influence each other’s direction of change. (1995: 373)

The unit of analysis for cognitive science would thus have to expand, poten-
tially including not only the individual brain and body, but other people and
groups, the physical environment, social interaction, cultural norms, artifacts
and technologies, thus bringing these new anti-individualist movements into
close contact with relatively independent anti-individualist traditions in cogni-

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Remembering as Public Practice | 417

tive anthropology, ecological psychology, educational and social theory, sci-
ence studies, robotics, developmental and cultural psychology, and phenome-
nological philosophy (Donald 1991; Hutchins 1995; Clark 1997; Lave 1998; La-
tour 1999; Robbins & Aydede 2009; Sutton 2010; Michaelian & Sutton 2013).
In this potted history of the early anti-individualist situated cognition
movements, I have not mentioned issues about either the existence or the na-
ture of mental representations, memory traces, or internal content. This is no
accident. It has perhaps taken some hindsight to see it, and I for one have not
always been clear on this point: but questions about mental representation are
independent of or orthogonal to questions about individualism. No view about
the existence or nature of mental representation entails or dictates any specific
position in debates on whether or not cognition is entirely internal; and both
individualism and anti-individualism are compatible with a wide range of views
on mental representation.
Connectionism was still a central part of the new frameworks developed by
most of these anti-individualists in the 1990s: it was to provide the neural wing
of the intended multidimensional analyses of heterogeneous but complemen-
tary resources. But connectionism didn’t deliver the whole package, because
even understood as spanning or dissolving the alleged gap between personal
and subpersonal processes, and as seeking a general framework for thinking of
mental life (Smolensky 1988) it was not quite pitched at the right level. Even
though anti-individualist connectionists were clear that the brain was not to
have any general explanatory priority in their explanatory frameworks (while its
unique contributions would still be acknowledged), connectionism alone was
silent about the bodily, social, and environmental resources which enter into
more or less rich and intensive couplings with the embodied brain, about the
nature of the interfaces, and about the forms and varieties of interactive rela-
tions between brains, bodies, and world.
So in both rejecting and offering detailed alternatives to the atomistic and
localist accounts of mental representation defended by Fodor and other classi-
cal cognitivists, connectionism remained primarily a new approach to issues
about mental representation rather than a broader vision of agency and self.
There were tempting and plausible lines of thought which argued from connec-
tionism to anti-individualism, for sure. If our neural processes were more vola-
tile, fleeting, distributed, or chaotic than the orderly transitions of structured
representations postulated in the Language of Thought hypothesis, then per-
haps whatever systematicity and stability our memory and thinking do achieve
is supported more by external cultural and enacted scaffolding than by any
recognizable, transparent order in the brain (Rumelhart et al 1986; Clark 1997;
Menary 2007; Sutton 2009a). So paths away from individualism were easier to

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418 | John Sutton

find once Fodor’s discrete semantic atoms had been rejected. But the rejection
of Fodor’s kind of representational and computational theory of mind did not
entail anti-individualism. On the one hand, classical computationalism itself
could (and on some views should) adopt an anti-individualist stance (Wilson
1994). On the other hand, there remained many who had entirely rejected clas-
sical cognitivism’s semantic atoms but still saw cognition as occurring in the
head (Churchland & Churchland 1997; O’Brien 1998).
The failure to understand that issues about mental representation simply
cross-cut or cross-classify issues about individualism, and the consequent con-
fusion between these two sets of issues, has been a pervasive feature of debate
in the philosophy of cognitive science in recent years. There is a looseness of fit
or a many-many relationship between views about mental representation and
views about individualism. Nothing about the truth or falsity of individualism,
or about precisely what kind of anti-individualist alternative is to be preferred,
is settled simply by adopting a particular view about mental representation.
Whether you stuck, in the debate about representation, with classical cognitiv-
ism; accepted connectionism in more moderate form, as a revised kind of com-
putational theory of mind; offered a more revisionary take on connectionism in
which the form and dynamics of systems of distributed representation was en-
tirely unlike that of the Language of Thought; or rejected connectionism en-
tirely, you still needed (and still need) distinct reasons to adopt any specific
view about individualism.
It is true that from the start of the situated cognition movement, some theo-
rists combined anti-individualist conclusions with a blanket rejection of mental
representations (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch 1991; van Gelder & Port 1995). But
no argument effectively brought these two issues together. In particular, it was
not and has not been shown how a refusal to countenance mental content or to
posit memory traces or other kinds of mental representation automatically
brings any reason to reject internalism about the mental. Neither, contrariwise,
does any specific positive view of mental representations decide the issue about
individualism. The two sets of issues, each encompassing a range of subtly
varying options, are independent.
If this claim that issues about representation and issues about individual-
ism are orthogonal is correct, it means that decisions about which set of issues
to focus on are pragmatic and context-dependent. Both issues are of great theo-
retical significance, and in an ideal world we would have settled answers to and
consensus on both. But in the real world’s messy marketplace of contested phi-
losophical and cognitive theories, we need to specify separately and explicitly
which set of issues is in question in any particular context, and to motivate and
defend views on each set of issues independently. The Wittgensteinian enactiv-

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Remembering as Public Practice | 419

ists are, as we will see in section 4 below, faithful to Wittgenstein in focussing
far more extensively and remorselessly on the critique of mental representa-
tions, and saying much less about the individualism issue. My primary concern
as a theorist of distributed cognitive ecologies, in contrast, is with individual-
ism. But – whatever Wittgenstein’s views on individualism – the enactivists
claim to be defending an anti-individualist position as well as their anti-
representationism (Hutto & Myin 2013; Hutto, Kirchhoff, & Myin forthcoming).
Once we have firmly distinguished these two sets of issues, I will then show in
section 5, we achieve greater analytical clarity in assessing the current state of
the sciences of memory in the light of Wittgensteinian critique.

4 Wittgenstein on Memory: critical themes
The core features of Wittgenstein’s attack on the scientific psychology of his day
are his rejection of traces and representations; his apparent denial of memory
processes or experiences, which goes alongside his privileging of the deed; a set
of views about explanation and causation; and a cautious or conservative view
about conceptual change in psychology. Contemporary enactivism explicitly
highlights the former two points: but I will suggest that the latter two points are
implicitly steering its direction.
When I recognize a man and remember his name, Wittgenstein suggests,
this does not mean that there has to be ‘a cause of this remembering in my
nervous system’: we are wrong to think that ‘a trace’ must have been left be-
hind, that ‘something or other’ must ‘be stored up there in any form’ (Zettel 610
= RPP 1.905). The apparent denial that experience changes the brain in any
ways that influence our psychology over time is couched in powerful rhetoric. It
is marvellous, notes Wittgenstein, that I can answer a question about what I did
this morning ‘without looking up historical traces of activity or the like’ (RPP
1.106). Whatever order exists in our thinking, talking, and writing need not
derive from the structure of any neural centre, but ‘might come into being out of
something quite amorphous, as it were causelessly’ (Z 608 = RPP 1.903). More
generally, we should avoid ‘thinking in physiological hypotheses’.
Passages like these have given rise to some more extreme interpretations.
For some readers, Wittgenstein is here rejecting the supervenience of the mental
on the physical (McGinn 1984, 112-116; Budd 1989, 30ff). Malcolm claims to be
following Wittgenstein in seeing memory traces as magical as well as comical,
providing theorists with ‘the thrill of the incomprehensible’ (1986, 184, 200).

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420 | John Sutton

Bursen claims that trace theories require the brain to have supernatural powers
(1978, xii).
But at other points Wittgenstein’s rhetoric is less extreme. In saying that
‘whatever the event does leave behind it in the organism, it isn’t the memory’
(RPP 1.220), Wittgenstein is not denying that something is left behind, but re-
minding us that nothing in the brain on its own is or determines either the oc-
current act of remembering, or the enduring dispositional ‘memory’ which the
person retains so long as she has the capacity to remember. So as Moyal-
Sharrock argues, Wittgenstein is rejecting only stronger views of psychophysi-
cal isomorphism, correspondence, or parallelism, but not ‘the merely physio-
logical correlation’ (2013b, 270). On her more moderate interpretation, Wittgen-
stein’s point is that while ‘neuronal changes in the brain may be necessary …
they are not sufficient for memory’ (2013b, 271; cf ter Hark 1995). Even though
the ‘jottings’ made by a man who has taken note of a text in order to repeat it
later do not ‘render’ or ‘translate’ that text ‘into another symbolism’, so that the
text is not ‘stored up in the jottings’, he still needs the jottings, and his perform-
ance changes if they are altered or destroyed (Z 612 = RPP 1.908). While the
remembered text itself is not stored up in either jottings or nervous system, such
passages leave open the possibility of experience-dependent changes in the
brain, as long as we do not model or imagine such processes by projected famil-
iar structured actions onto an imagined inner world, and as long as we remem-
ber that such neural processes may ‘constantly change their nature’. After all,
‘nothing is less static than the nervous system’ (Wilkes 1980, 115).
Wittgenstein’s attack hits its mark against a static or structural conception
of the memory trace, by which stable, semantically discrete individual memo-
ries are independently stored at distinct locations. Just as the brain is not ‘a
writing’, memory itself is not like a notebook, and remembering does not in-
volve ‘looking things up in a notebook in spirit’ (LWP 1.806; PG 131, pp.181-2).
Stern suggests that we could ‘regard the jottings and the memory they prompt
as analogous to the initial state of a connectionist network and the output it
leads to. While the memory has a linguistic form, the jottings do not; they are
not strings of symbols with an articulated structure’ (1991, 214).

There is reasonable disagreement about whether these same worries also
hit the mark against the radically revised notions of the internal memory trace
defended in some quarters of post-connectionist philosophy of mind, main-
stream cognitive psychology, and dynamical and systems neuroscience. There
are unresolved issues here about just how transformed a notion of the memory
trace can be while fulfilling the roles for which it was posited, or on the question
of whether there is anything psychological about the enduring disposition to

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respond in appropriate, memory-like ways in certain settings (Matthen 2010;
Sutton & Windhorst 2009; Vosgerau 2010). But these issues are orthogonal to
the concerns of this paper. While questions about the existence and nature of
traces, and about mental content, are important in other contexts, they are not
directly relevant for the study of remembering as public practice. In particular,
not only the bulk of contemporary research in the philosophy of memory, but
also all the interdisciplinary projects informed by the sciences of memory with
which I am concerned here can proceed with no commitment to brain traces
that correspond to particular memories. Whether or not we ultimately take the
much more radical step of restricting the vocabulary of cognitive neuroscience
and restricting to the kinds of ‘merely physiological correlation’ to which Moyal-
Sharrock refers, such a restriction is fine for the purposes of the partial, incom-
plete enquiries into remembering as public practice which are my topic here.
We can definitively reject the key errors which are rightly under Wittgensteinian
suspicion. For the purposes of this paper, we can agree to dispense with traces,
since this does not influence the other key issues at stake here. Whether there
are (inner) traces or not, the trace is not the memory.
Secondly, to shift from physical mechanisms of memory to putative mental
mechanisms, Wittgenstein mockingly notes that, in answering that question
about his past activities, he ‘wouldn’t even know that this was possible through
a special mental process, remembering, if I were not told so’ (RPP 1.106). Mem-
ory is often in use when not explicitly in question: we just talk or think about
the past directly, without pausing to engage a special memory system to do so.
In a number of remarks, Wittgenstein addresses the question ‘is memory an
experience?’ (RPP 1.110-119; PI 305-8; PI II.xiii, p.231). There is no two-step proc-
ess, first an inner experience of remembering and then its expression. Rather,
remembering is just something we do, across a range of activities or practices.
In a particularly intense passage, Wittgenstein compares the easy mistakes
we make about remembering, in seeking an inner experience behind our ex-
pressions of memory, with similar tendencies with regard to love and to phi-
losophy. We are ‘using a picture: we test love for its inner character, which the
immediate feeling does not discover’ (RPP 1.115). When someone makes a mem-
ory claim, Wittgenstein enjoins, we must resist the temptation to ask ‘what fact,
what process is he remembering?’. That is an error because what he is remem-
bering ‘has already been stipulated’: the only relevant questions are about the
purpose and the use of this language of memory (RPP 1.716).
Enactivists about memory rightly stress the practical nature of remembering
(Moyal-Sharrock 2013). Wittgenstein notes that ‘If I say, rightly, “I remember it”,
the most varied things may happen; perhaps even just that I say it’ (PG 42).
Remembering is in general, in most of its forms, an activity, something that we

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422 | John Sutton

do. Even though involuntary remembering is surprisingly pervasive in everyday
life (Berntsen 2009), what happens even in such cases is in principle public and
‘isn’t at all the mental process that one imagines’ (PG 42). This is perhaps the
closest Wittgenstein gets to an explicitly anti-individualist line of thought.
Thirdly, Wittgenstein wants us ‘not to explain, but to accept’ psychological
phenomena: though it is difficult to renounce ‘all theory’, we should leave psy-
chological phenomena ‘enigmatic’ (RPP 1.509, 1.723, 1.963, 1.1063). Even though
Hutto argues that Wittgensteinian philosophy does not leave us ‘utterly mute’,
he claims in Wittgensteinian spirit that ‘even if all of the relevant details [of how
cognition and intersubjectivity emerge in interaction] are provided, such still
remain, at best, a description and not an explanation’ (Hutto 2013). Wittgen-
stein applies his general view that causal and conceptual accounts of a phe-
nomenon are incompatible (PI II.xi, p.203) to the specific case of remembering.
The causal picture allegedly revealed by scientific psychology ‘stands in the
way of our seeing the use of the word [‘to remember’] as it is’ (PI 305). His de-
fence of ‘a causality between psychological phenomena, which is not mediated
physiologically’ (Z 611 = RPP 1.906) is developed, in Malcolm’s and Ginet’s dis-
cussions of memory, into wholehearted support for action at a temporal dis-
tance, with no intervening causal processes or ‘continuous specific causal con-
nections’ (Ginet 1975, 168; Malcolm 1977, 1986; McGinn 1984, 113 finds this
‘intolerable’).
Finally, Wittgenstein’s general reluctance to permit or sanction criticism of
practices or beliefs by those who do not share the relevant form of life is applied
to mind and memory. He refuses to admit new empirical facts as a legitimate
motivation for revising our understanding of our own psychological nature. If
psychoanalysis is successful in practice, for example, it is not because new facts
about the analysand have been discovered, but because persuasive or charming
‘explanations’ have been offered (LC, 23-27). To attempt any scientifically-
motivated revisions of common sense is not to give way to the pressures of em-
pirical discovery, but to switch language games: ‘what a Copernicus or a Darwin
really achieved was not the discovery of a true theory but of a fertile new point
of view’ (CV, 18). Wittgenstein’s followers object in similar spirit to the adopting
and adapting of ordinary psychological terms by practitioners of ‘so-called cog-
nitive science’ (Hacker 1990, 147). There are no discoveries to be made about
human psychology: nothing is hidden from the pre-philosophical user of ordi-
nary language. Not only is revisionary ‘neurophilosophy’ simply ‘daft’ (Harré
1988, 110; Sharpe 1987; Haldane 1988): any attempt to explain or investigate the
‘enigmatic’ mind by experimental methods is as hopeless, as bedevilled with
category mistakes, as is trying to ‘determine what matter and spirit are by
chemical means’ (RPP 1.1093). As Moyal-Sharrock sees it, ‘it is scientists, not

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philosophers that base their claims on evidence. What philosophers do is work
on more perspicuous conceptual presentations of how things are’ (2013c, 10).
Because of this conceptual conservatism, Wittgenstein answers his own
question ‘Why can’t we imagine a machine with memory?’ (MS 110, p.35, Feb
1931) with the flat response that ‘it is only of a living human being and what
resembles (behaves like) a living human being’ that psychological words can be
predicated (PI 281, cf PI 359-360). It is on conceptual or (better) ‘grammatical’
grounds that machines cannot be ascribed thoughts or memories. Strangely,
Wittgensteinian philosophers have not sought to explore more thoroughly the
rich range of ordinary psychological terms for memory and remembering, their
scope and uses, as have others in the course of developing a causal theory of
memory (Deutscher 1989), a phenomenological approach (Casey 1987), or cross-
linguistic investigations (Amberber 2007; Sutton 2007; Wierzbicka 2007).

5 Contemporary sciences of memory: history and
targets
This powerful, four-pronged Wittgensteinian critique, stated bluntly in my brief
summary, has had considerable influence, at least with regard to its critical
treatment of traces and representation.
Firstly, as Stern rightly argued, Wittgenstein’s remarks clearly hit the mark
against classical versions of the computational and representational theory of
mind. These theories take the serial digital computer as model for the human
mind, as in Newell and Simon’s Physical Symbol Systems hypothesis and Fo-
dor’s Language of Thought hypothesis. Among the key points of conflict are the
commitment, in such classical cognitivist theories, to local representation in the
mind-brain, to the discrete storage or archiving of separable or atomic contents;
and the consequent sharp separation in such approaches of memory (or ‘data’)
from ongoing processing. Our memories, on these views, have no intrinsic dy-
namics, and are insulated and isolated from the other ongoing influences of the
weave of our life. Classical models take it as a virtue that the identity and integ-
rity of memories is ‘unmodified by their neighbours … like beads on a string’,
rather than fusing, interfering, and blending as in a compost heap or a connec-
tionist system (Hampshire 1989, 121; Sutton 1998, 225-247). But as a theory of
memory in living systems like us, they therefore run counter to the fact that, as
Oliver Sacks put it, ‘it is characteristic of a creature, in contrast to a computer,
that nothing is ever precisely repeated or reproduced’ (1990, 49).

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424 | John Sutton

Secondly, Wittgenstein’s remarks also hit home against the neurocentric
excesses of some strands of popular science and neuroscience. The idea of
unique, discrete neural states which ‘store’ single psychological items may still
have a grip in some quarters of the popular imagination. Some critics still catas-
trophize the current state of the scientific field too. Jens Brockmeier, looking
forward to a period ‘after the archive’, sees archival accounts of memory storage
as still ubiquitous, and as taken by psychologists and in popular culture alike to
support ‘the idea of memory’s continuity, stability, coherence’ (2010, 10). For
Brockmeier, it is ‘astonishing’ that cognitive science has not yet realized that
the archive view of memory is ‘about to be dismantled’ (2010, 20; compare Dan-
ziger 2008). This is at best too quick. It is harder than this blunt judgement to
assess the ongoing grip on scientific thought of correspondence-style beliefs
about discrete memory traces. Mere references to memory traces do not demon-
strate that scientists accept strong views of psychophysical isomorphism be-
tween specific thoughts or memories and particular discrete brain states: as
dominant interpretations of superpositional connectionism show, there are
many ways of thinking of traces as radically dynamic and distributed which
precisely show that and how the things ‘stored up’ may ‘constantly change their
nature’. Likewise, the bare use of the terms ‘encoding’ and ‘retrieval’ does not
carry any commitment to the claim that particular ideas or memories are copied
in the nervous system. In those senses, the ‘search for the engram’ really is off
in cognitive psychology, not just because of the history of failures to find it since
Lashley (1950), but because of the pervasive influence of Bartlett’s radical con-
structivism (1932; Sutton 2004).
But when we turn from considering the complex range of views about men-
tal representation to addressing the distinct issue of individualism, we find
much clearer genuine targets. The Language of Thought hypothesis is itself at
odds with neurocentric reductionism on many points: but common to both is a
form of individualism or internalism about mind and memory, by which re-
membering only occurs ‘intracranially’, within the skull. This is clear for exam-
ple in the ‘ruthlessly reductionist’ rhetoric of certain interpretations of neuro-
science, by which body, context, situation, and activity can be simply screened
off while the real memory processes in the brain are studied (Bickle 2008). In
criticising this kind of view, enactivism and the distributed cognitive ecologies
framework are entirely at one. On the latter approach, the human brain is un-
usually open and incomplete: it thus does not constitute or exhaust our mental
life, which is rather distributed across brain, body, and world in heterogeneous
and dynamic cognitive ecologies (Haugeland 1998; Clark 2003; Hutchins 2011).
While in popular science the idea that memory ‘resides in’ the brain is still often
simply assumed, the advent of alternative theories of distributed memory (Clark

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& Chalmers 1998; Sutton 2010) has changed the theoretical landscape dramati-
cally (Menary 2010; Sutton, Harris, Keil, & Barnier 2010). When Moyal-Sharrock
delineates her target as ‘the predominant view … that human meaning and emo-
tion ultimately reside in, and can be reduced to, encoded traces in the brain’
(2013c, 1), anti-individualist views cannot be the subject of the critique. It is
harder, however, to assess just how broadly the individualist consensus still
holds.
Certainly, individualism is more widespread in the sciences of memory than
any full isomorphism thesis about specific mind-brain correspondences. Many
psychologists who are remorselessly constructivist and have no interest at all in
searching for unique neural engrams nevertheless retain the default assumption
that memory and mind are still internal, and see strong claims that cognition is
distributed or spread across brain, body, and world as highly suspect. But after
30 years of post-connectionist theory in which anti-individualist lines of
thought from a range of philosophical traditions have increasingly found them-
selves at the heart of cognitive scientific debate (Michaelian & Sutton 2013), it is
no longer legitimate to characterize all the sciences of memory as inevitably
dominated by forms of individualism.
The cognitive sciences of memory have for many years opened up to more
situated accounts of remembering as public practice occurring in rich contexts
and settings. If Ulric Neisser’s lament that ‘if X is an interesting or socially sig-
nificant aspect of memory, then psychologists have hardly ever studied X’ was
true in 1978 (Neisser 1978/ 2000, 4), things changed quickly and for a range of
independent reasons. The influences of Bartlett and Vygotsky intensified over
the 1980s and 1990s across a variety of traditions and sub-disciplines, with new
methods emerging in each area to adapt to the challenges posed when remem-
bering is not isolated from its environments and contexts. These shifts can be
traced, for example, in ecological and practical memory movements (Neisser
1997), in the expansion of applied memory research in real-world settings
(Rubin 1995; Saito 2000), in the extraordinary efflorescence of rigorous work on
the socio-cultural interactions at the heart of the development of autobiographi-
cal memory in young children (Fivush & Haden 2003; Nelson & Fivush 2004), in
the rebirth of the scientific study of autobiographical remembering after nearly
a century of neglect (Conway 1990), and in waves of psychological work on
social, shared, collaborative, and transactive memory (Hirst & Manier 2008;
Michaelian & Sutton 2013; Wegner 1986; Weldon 2001). These are now entirely
mainstream research traditions. Because they are far less vulnerable to Wittgen-
steinian critique, and open to integration with and influences from philosophi-
cal ideas, these are the theories and projects with which Wittgensteinians need
to engage. Otherwise they are both missing the target and losing the opportu-

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426 | John Sutton

nity of productive collaborations which might take our understanding of mem-
ory forward.
To summarise and simplify, the alternative themes on which there is sig-
nificant agreement with the Wittgensteinian views across these domains of
memory science include the following claims, which are all independent of any
particular ideas about traces and representation. Remembering is an active
process which occurs in time and over time. Our memory abilities in a sense
soak in from the sociocultural world in which we develop, rather than unfolding
in any biologically-determined maturational pattern: in specific (and culturally
variable) narrative environments, caregivers and children gradually establish
abilities for joint attention to past events, in ways which profoundly sculpt the
child’s later capacities for spontaneous recall (Sutton 2002; Reese 2013; Wang
2013). Remembering is a constructive process through and through: just as per-
ception and attention are selective and salience-driven, so our capacities to
recall, recollect, and re-evaluate past events are substantially context-
dependent, drawing on the fly on heterogeneous resources rather than extract-
ing fully-formed materials from a static store (Sutton 1998; Michaelian 2011;
Goldie 2012). Remembering has many functions besides tracking the truth,
which often take precedence over any demand for precision or completeness in
recall: we construct and maintain identity in part by thinking through and shar-
ing our accounts of past events, we try out and guide possible future actions
and decisions by working through relevant past experiences, and we promote or
reassess our social and intimate relationships through joint reconsideration of
significant or shared histories (Bluck et al 2005; Harris, Rasmussen, & Berntsen
2014). The neural resources which play unique but partial roles in supporting
complex and diverse acts of remembering are themselves highly dynamic and
distributed: as cultural neuroscientists, philosophers, and neuroanthropolo-
gists alike increasingly demonstrate, the human brain’s plasticity affords ex-
traordinary scope for us to inhabit wildly varying forms of life (Lende & Downey
2012; Menary 2013).
Contemporary sciences of memory, therefore, are neither scientistic nor re-
ductionist in the ways which have standardly and rightly worried philosophers
influenced by the later Wittgenstein. Corollaries of the positive characteriza-
tions I have just offered include the following mainstream views. No single,
static content is ‘encoded’ at the time of experience, or subsequently preserved
in isolation from ongoing influence. No single internal copy corresponds to or
encodes a particular past event. No memory trace determines either what is
recalled or the memory expression: rather, remembering is a constructive proc-
ess involving indefinitely many and various contextual factors. There is no

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scanning of stored records by some homuncular internal executive to check or
match against a present stimulus.
When Moyal-Sharrock claims that ‘as regards memory, Wittgenstein de-
bunks our preconceptions about it residing in the brain – in storage as it were’
(2013b, 269), she does not explain whose preconceptions are in question. There
is certainly no universal, transhistorical, cross-cultural such preconception, and
Moyal-Sharrock seems primarily to have a kind of reductionist neuroscientific
target in mind rather than any common sense view. After quoting Bennett and
Hacker on the point that a ‘neural configuration’ is not a memory, she goes on
to criticize ‘our’ view of the trace ‘as having an activating function … so that
every time we remember an event, besides representing it, the trace is also sup-
posed to select, decode and activate the memory’ (2013b, 271). The views under
attack here are not recognizable in the sciences of memory I have described.
Likewise, Myin and Zahidi attack what they call a ‘traditional view, ac-
cepted by mainstream cognitive scientists and philosophers’ that access to in-
formation concerning one’s past is sufficient ‘for recollecting events in one’s
past’ (2014, 8-9). But they do not distinguish experiential or personal memory
from merely factual or semantic memory, or acknowledge that on mainstream
views, mere information processing is not taken to be sufficient for experiential
or episodic memory. So when they give an example of a person who merely has
access to factual information about an event in her past, yet clearly does not
experientially remember that event, they misleadingly claim that this refutes
‘the standard view’ of memory tout court. They make sensible remarks about the
context-sensitive nature of experiential or personal memory, as past events
recalled are integrated or embedded in the person’s web of habits, personal
history, motivations, and anticipations. But in light of my review of contempo-
rary work, we can see that these are not such novel claims: in addition to paral-
lel discussions across memory theory of the embodied and world-involving
nature of remembering, and the importance of the resulting ‘feeling of “fitting”‘
(Myin & Zahidi 2014, 10), their specific claim that a genuinely remembered per-
sonal event must be available to be situated ‘in a diachronic sequence of
events’, with a ‘sense of what led up to it, or what further events followed it’
(2014, 9) is not a dramatic denial of mainstream accounts, but echoes central
themes of both philosophical and psychological views on memory and self
(Campbell 1997; Hoerl 1999; Conway 2005; Sutton 2009b).
Finally, Moyal-Sharrock rightly underlines Wittgenstein’s stress on ‘mem-
ory as a way of acting’, in that words or gestures can constitute remembering
(2009, 217-8; 2013b, 272-3). This takes us closer to anti-individualism, is indeed
less commonly noted in other strands of the science and philosophy of memory,
and needs further development and exploration. But again it is not entirely

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428 | John Sutton

alien to mainstream traditions. Perhaps the clearest evidence lies in the rich
work of Martin and Deutscher at the outset of the causal theory of memory, a
firmly mainstream approach which has often been taken as a target for vitriolic
attack by Wittgensteinian philosophers (Squires 1969; Malcolm 1977; Deutscher
1989). Martin and Deutscher’s original paper (1966, 161-2) began by outlining a
striking case in which remembering a particular event is constituted by certain
bodily movements. Consider, they asked us,

the case where some swimming is an example of remembering and not, as is usual, an ex-
ample of remembering how. Suppose that someone has never dog-paddled. He is not good
at visualization and has never learned any words which would describe swimming. His
method of representing the one time at which he saw a man dog-paddle is his actually do-
ing the dog-paddle stroke. We can imagine him trying to remember the curious action that
the man went through in the water. He cannot describe it, and cannot form any picture of
it. He cannot bring it back. He gets into the water, experimenting a little until suddenly he
gets it right and exclaims, “Aha, that’s it!”.

Here embodied action just is remembering. This bare insight certainly requires
further attention (Deutscher 1989): enactivists and phenomenologists can work
together with those who think in terms of distributed cognitive ecologies to
make sense of the public, embodied, and kinesthetic dimensions of personal
memory (Behnke 1997; Koch et al 2012; Sutton & Williamson 2014). But on this
as on all the key issues about how to conceive positively of remembering as
public practice, an accurate history of the recent philosophy and sciences of
memory confirms that not only is there no necessary conflict with Wittgenstein,
but there is no bar towards further and richer engagement.

6 Wittgensteinian Challenges for the New
Sciences of Memory
I have painted a rosy picture: once we focus on questions about individualism
and put aside the independent issues about traces and representations,
Wittgensteinian philosophy can interact productively with the contemporary
sciences of memory, both with certain strands of mainstream psychology and
with the more specific ideas of distributed cognitive ecologies which I defend. I
motivate such an integrative vision further below. Of course not everything is
conclusively resolved, and there remain challenges to this happily united inter-
disciplinary approach to remembering as public practice. But, I argue in this

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section, the distributed cognitive ecologies framework can meet these challeng-
es, ward off critiques, and set new agendas.
There are indeed subtle ways in which latent individualist assumptions can
easily creep back. For example, we can examine critically the pervasive meta-
phor of scaffolding used in many psychological and philosophical studies of
memory and development (Wood, Bruner, & Ross 1976; Clark 1997; Sutton 2002;
Caporael, Griesemer, & Wimsatt 2013). The notion of scaffolding may appropri-
ately mark the many dimensions and timescales of rich sociotechnical interac-
tion in learning and apprenticeship, and motivate research on the uptake of
cultural or otherwise context-specific features of the learning environment in
spontaneous later memory practice. But some references to the internalization
of the once-scaffolded capacities are in danger of over-emphasising the disman-
tling or ‘fading’ of adult or expert assistance (Collins, Brown, & Newman 1989;
Pea 2004). This can give rise to a kind of ‘deficit model’ of cognitive capacities.
A building which continues to rely or lean on scaffolding may seem incomplete
or deficient: but on the model of socially distributed cognitive ecologies human
memory remains thoroughly hybrid and ‘scaffolded’ even (or especially) in its
mature operation (Sutton forthcoming). This is one point at which cognitive and
developmental psychology really must be wary of a residual individualism, as if
a prior biological locus of genuine cognition could be divided from merely tem-
porary external supplements. Social interactionist work on memory in devel-
opmental psychology needs to be even more firmly integrated into the methods
and assumptions of cognitive research on remembering: we do not stop relying
on other people, and distributing our memory resources across heterogeneous
social, material, and technological systems, in our adult life.
Enactivists have criticized ideas about extended and distributed cognition
on precisely these grounds (Hutto & Myin 2013; Myin & Zahidi 2014). It is true
that the word ‘extended’ can easily be misread as assuming a more basic inner
cognitive system which only spreads later in development. For this reason, the
well-established pre-existing label ‘distributed cognition’ should be preferred
(Hutchins 2014): there is no need for the awkward enactivist coinage ‘extensive
mind’. It is true that Hutchins sets up distributed cognition as a more general
‘perspective’ or, as I would say, a framework rather than directly as a metaphys-
ical claim. Hutto, Kirchhoff, and Myin (forthcoming) think that this invalidates
my case, since distributed cognition ‘makes no claims about the nature of cogni-
tion’ and is merely a pragmatic stance. But this rests on a mistaken reading of
Hutchins, who does make many specific claims about the nature of cognition in
particular settings. The general distributed cognition perspective is a broader
framework which on its own does not make empirical predictions, but this is no
blanket retreat from ontological commitment: ‘it is possible to pose many em-

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430 | John Sutton

pirical hypotheses within this perspective’ (Hutchins 2014). As I have argued in
detail previously, theorists of distributed cognition do (rightly) focus on en-
couraging methodological and pragmatic change to scientific practice, and tend
to see metaphysical claims about the general nature of mind as having to arise
from scientific work (Sutton et al 2010). By developing multidimensional
frameworks, we can then understand many distinct particular cases in which
there are variations in the resources of distributed cognitive systems and the
nature of their interactions. Far from dispensing with empirical claims about the
nature of cognition, as Hutto and colleagues charge, the distributed cognition
framework thus clears the ground to turn metaphysical distinctions into tracta-
ble, context-specific empirical inquiries.
Having explained why it is more fruitful to retain the established label ‘dis-
tributed cognition’ rather than talking in terms of ‘extensive’ mind, I return to
show that theories of distributed cognition properly understood include no
commitment to the idea ‘that in standard cases of remembering, the mental
process of remembering is wholly internal’ (Myin & Zahidi 2014, 6). Likewise,
distributed cognition is explicitly set against what Hutto and Myin call the ‘De-
fault Internal Mind’ principle, the idea that ‘in their basic state, minds are unex-
tended and brain-bound’ (2013, 137): to the contrary, minds are distributed,
hybrid, and culturally-scaffolded by nature and from the start. Certainly, there
can be (contingent, partial) shielding from context, and cognitive processes are
not always equally distributed, or (better) not always distributed in the same
ways. By establishing multidimensional frameworks through which to study a
whole range of cases, we can empirically identify ways in which some people,
on some occasions, in some settings, more or less successfully insulate their
cognitive processes from current context: but this is a rarer and more culturally-
scaffolded achievement, not at all the ‘basic state’ of human minds (Sterelny
2010; Sutton et al 2010). As I noted above, the grip of the Default Internal Mind
principle is still apparent more widely across strands of the cognitive sciences of
memory which have otherwise shifted significantly away from classical cogni-
tivism: but on this point, enactivism and distributed cognitive ecologies are in
sync.
Further, distributed cognition also explicitly rejects the ‘Senior Partner
Principle’, the idea that the brain should be given any general explanatory pri-
ority (Hutto & Myin 2013, 137). The contribution of neural resources and proc-
esses may sometimes be of considerable interest in the study of memory in crea-
tures with brains, but it in no way overrides or rules out the study of the many
other dimensions of remembering, of the ‘mutual dependence among the ele-
ments of a cognitive ecosystem’ (Hutchins 2010), including affective, kinesthet-
ic, phenomenological, technological, social, and institutional resources which

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Remembering as Public Practice | 431

can be more or less coordinated and differentially integrated across distinctive
contexts and settings. Indeed, understanding of the diverse ways in which neu-
ral processes are transformed at different timescales in and by our embodied
engagements with disparate material and cultural resources is likely in turn to
generate a richer, contextualized picture of the dynamic operations of brains
themselves. So as Steven Brown puts it, the neuroscience of remembering is
‘identifying the neurological mediators of an activity that is fundamentally not
in itself a neurological matter’ (2008, 269; Sutton 2009b, 2011).
Building on this discussion of potential dangers of the scaffolding meta-
phor, we could easily move on to diagnose related – and often more explicit –
potential reappearances of individualist assumptions in false memory research
and some strands of work on social remembering. But I have written extensively
before about these topics, and the search for better theoretical and empirical
ways to think about and study what happens when we remember the past in the
company of other people has motivated one of our major research programs for
some years now (Barnier, Sutton, Harris, & Wilson 2008; Sutton 2008). In this
work, we reject the related ideas that constructive processes in memory must
bring distortion or error, and that the influence of other people on individual
memory inevitably results in contagion, misinformation, conformity, or inhibi-
tion. Our mixed-method empirical research in philosophically-informed cogni-
tive psychology addresses a range of cases of social or shared remembering,
taking quantitative methods out of the lab and integrating them with qualitative
analyses to study collaborative recall among siblings and families, sports teams
and work groups, and long-term couples (Sutton et al 2010; Harris et al 2011,
2014). These methods are now being used in studies of the social dimensions of
remembering for older adults with subjective memory complaints, or diagnosed
with mild cognitive impairment or early stage dementia. Real people suffering
from the early stages of dementia are not condemned to isolated interactions
with their notebooks alone like Clark and Chalmers’ Otto (1998): rather they are
typically embedded in vast and uneven networks of people (partners, families,
carers, friends, support staff), places, material objects, and memory technolo-
gies, in differently-balanced and dynamic responses to the challenges of recali-
brating established distributed or transactive memory systems. Such people and
processes can be studied (Wu et al 2008; Dahlbäck, Kristiansson & Stjernberg
2013; Schrauf & Müller 2013; Hydén 2014; Drayson & Clark forthcoming). In-
stead of addressing the details of these research programs again, here I con-
clude by asking how Wittgensteinian philosophy is to be assessed as a driver of
productive work on remembering as public practice, and the extent to which it
is or can be integrated with the kind of interdisciplinary sciences of memory I
have discussed.

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7 Limits on Enactivist Enquiry
As Wittgenstein claimed, the neural processes correlated with any order in our
memory practices that emerges in our practices may be ‘quite amorphous’, or
even ‘chaos’. What multifarious other processes, then, in the natural history of
the embedded organism, in the weave of our life, might variously support re-
membering and related activities? It is just because there is no inner copy or
rendering of the past that we rely so pervasively on ecological, cultural, and
institutional routines, norms, and symbols. How then are we to describe and
study these diverse practices, these complex interactions between embodied
creatures, the affectively-saturated dynamics of human sociality in physical and
technological settings which we ourselves have substantially constructed?
To answer these questions, those of us who defend the idea of distributed
cognitive ecologies can draw on mature research traditions for interaction stud-
ies in the humanities and social sciences as well as the cognitive sciences: cog-
nitive anthropology (Hutchins 2005; Lave 1998; Rogoff 1991) and cognitive ar-
chaeology (Malafouris 2013; Malafouris & Renfrew 2010), science studies
(Bowker 2006; Suchman 1987), cognitive history (Tribble 2011; Tribble & Keene
2011), conversation analysis and discourse analysis (Goodwin 1994; Middleton
& Brown 2005; Murakami 2012), ethnomethodology and studies of multimodal
communication (Enfield & Levinson 2006; Murphy 2012; Streeck, LeBaron, &
Goodwin 2012). The methods in play in these studies have their home in qualita-
tive traditions of empirical social science, more than laboratory-based cognitive
psychology: but as I have argued, these barriers are increasingly porous. It is
challenging and arduous work to apply these frameworks and their methods to
the case of memory. But alongside cases where social theorists do engage direct-
ly and constructively with the cognitive sciences of memory (Bloch 2012;
Connerton 1989; Erll & Nunning 2008; Wagoner 2012), interdisciplinary memory
studies can now seek to merge ideas about distributed cognitive ecologies with
these methods, concepts, and frameworks from the empirical social sciences
(Bietti 2012, 2014; Harris et al 2011, 2014; Monchamp 2014; Sutton & Tribble
2014). Of course the background commitments across these traditions differ and
do not always sit together neatly: but together they afford rich resources for
getting on and studying the multiple forms of remembering in the weave of
people’s lives in diverse cultural contexts.
Wittgensteinian philosophers, in contrast, have in general been strangely
reluctant to engage with (let alone contribute to) any such studies of actual
practices of remembering. Perhaps this is due in some cases to principled views
about the division of intellectual labour, about the separation of conceptual

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Remembering as Public Practice | 433

from empirical questions, or about the impossibility of objective analysis of
practices alien to one’s own form of life: there is certainly much more to say
here about Wittgenstein’s complex attitudes to conceptual change (Sutton
1993). But to conclude I venture a (compatible but) different diagnosis of the
typical lack of interest shown by Wittgensteinian and enactivist philosophers in
studies of particular practices of remembering. I introduce this final theme with
a contested story of a remembered event (with my version subject of course to
all the vagaries, schema-dependencies, and salience judgements which charac-
terize such reports): then I finish with some examples of the unnecessarily early
end to enquiry with which Wittgensteinians sometimes seem to be satisfied.
Moyal-Sharrock writes that she was asked ‘an odd question’ when she
spoke on Wittgenstein at the International Conference on Memory in 2011: she
says ‘the main question put to me was: what, if not engrams … would neuropsy-
chologists working on memory be left to work with?’ (2013, 15). I have a very
different recollection of this discussion. Though Moyal-Sharrock’s version is in
print, it would be less fruitful and less consistent for me to insist on the veracity
of my alternate recollection than to note that the mnemonic conflict under-
scores the different starting-points and schemas of the participants. Our differ-
ent narratives reflect not only the reconstructive nature of remembering but also
what we think about the various positions these distinct scholarly projects have
charted. Most generally, I do not recall any mention of engrams or memory
traces by the psychologists asking questions: the only references to engrams
and traces in this session came from the Wittgensteinian philosophers, who in
general adopted a critical tone in their discussions of scientific work on
memory. The memory psychologists who responded are committed Bartlettians,
and strongly deny any thesis of correspondence between brain traces and what
is remembered. Where Moyal-Sharrock interpreted and remembers her audience
stating concerns that Wittgensteinians wanted to take the brain away from
memory research, I recall a group of psychologists rather puzzled because their
diverse and mature research projects do not involve or rely in any way on a
search for the engram as a copy of a particular thought, idea, or memory.
Whatever happened at that event, it remains the case that cognitive psy-
chologists and scientists or memory have already for many years been studying
remembering as public practice, or public practices, on a vast range of particu-
lar topics from conversation to dementia, from keeping track of appointments to
recollecting shared trauma, across folk tales, memorials, and rituals, assessing
public processes of transmission, mediation, or transformation. Can Wittgensteinian
enactivists contribute to or even support such projects?
Remembering, argue Myin and Zahidi, is ‘a capacity to show behavior in
certain contexts in which the influence of previous interactions with the envi-

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434 | John Sutton

ronment can be discerned’ (2014, 16): it is an embodied, temporally distributed
process which is ‘always situated and contextualised’ (2014, 19). It is unimpor-
tant whether, in any specific context, I am interacting directly with some exter-
nal environmental element such as a configuration of stones, or I happen to be
imagining that worldly element: the boundaries of skin and skull are not theo-
retically significant (2014, 18-19). These constructive characterizations, which are
not intended to offer definitions, can be held in common for Wittgensteinian
enactivists and distributed cognition theorists alike. Only two words stand out
as controversial in what Myin and Zahidi say next:

External elements, like stones in the sand, or notes in a notebook, can in certain circum-
stances be essential for a process of remembering, just like an imagined stone or an
emerging thought could be. Both the real and the imaginary stone are nothing but ele-
ments in a process in which the occurrence or non‐occurrence of remembering depends
on a large number of additional factors. (Myin & Zahidi 2014, 19, my emphasis).

Why are the real and imaginary stones ‘nothing but’ elements in these complex
processes? Surely it is precisely at this point that a large array of new and inter-
esting questions come into view. Why can’t we also study all these ‘additional
factors’ which influence the context-dependent outcome? In order to under-
stand those additional factors, might we not legitimately want to find out more
about each particular set of ‘elements in a process’, and the ways they differ in
terms of their dynamics and activities from other such sets of elements?
In turn, Moyal-Sharrock argues that ‘memory is nothing but an ability
(which, of course, is – as are all our abilities – physiologically supported by the
brain) and that, in some contexts, remembering amounts to a way of acting’
(2013, 272, my emphasis). Certainly, in addition to the occurrent processes, prac-
tices, and activities of remembering, we also retain various distinctive abilities,
capacities, or dispositions to remember. But why is memory ‘nothing but’ an
ability (or, perhaps, a set of abilities)? This wish to rule out of court other, fur-
ther enquiries is peculiar, an unmotivated kind of anti-pluralism. Such ‘noth-
ing-but-ism’ is even more pronounced in Hutto and Myin’s statement of enactiv-
ism. In their view (2013, 8), ‘mentality-constituting interactions are grounded in,
shaped by, and explained by nothing more, or other, than the history of an
organism’s previous interactions’. What ‘determines which aspects of the world
are significant’, for organisms capable of learning, are ‘repeated processes of
organismic engagement with environmental offerings … and nothing else’. Still
in the same paragraph, at the outset of their book, they reiterate that ‘nothing
other than the history of active engaging structures or explains an organism’s
current interactive tendencies’ (2013, 8, my emphases throughout). Admittedly,
their book is explicitly pitched in a radically critical mode: but it is not enough

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Remembering as Public Practice | 435

to refer continually to the organismic history of worldly engagements and inter-
actions without providing some clue as to a positive research program. Why
discourage pluralist enquiries into all of the various elements, processes, and
resources which may contribute to and shape our activities of remembering,
whether they happen to be neural, bodily, technological, social, or environ-
mental?
If there are residual obstacles to establishing links between philosophy and
science which go beyond isolation or primarily critical engagement, I suggest
they lie in this tendency to call a halt to enquiry at a much earlier stage. Once
we identify a plausible description of certain forms of remembering, it would be
more productive to work out how to study the relevant practices more fully than
to restrict enquiry by announcing what memory is ‘nothing but’. We need to
understand the many quite different ways in which history operates, in which
the influences of previous interactions with the environment can be discerned,
and the many distinctive kinds of abilities and capacities which constitute hu-
man memory in real-time, dynamic, socially-embedded, affectively-charged
environments. There are always different, specific, context-sensitive balances of
resources in play in distinct cases of remembering across domains or cognitive
tasks, across cultures or groups, and across individuals in richly structured
cognitive ecologies. What are the diverse ways, at many distinct but interacting
timescales, that worldly organismic engagements and interactions ground our
cognitive capacities and drive their occurrent actualizations across practices
and settings? Such enquiries into the ways that history animates dynamical
systems like us are precisely the task of mixed-method collaborative interdisci-
plinary sciences of memory. There is no reason that enactivist Wittgensteinians
could not accept and promote such engagements. By hesitating or resisting to
do so, by insisting that nothing but the descriptions they already offer are le-
gitimate, they cut philosophy off not only from the cognitive sciences, but also
equally damagingly from the relevant social sciences of memory. As a result, at
present they tend to under-specify or fail to initiate sufficiently positive lines of
research. To arrest the decline in influence of Wittgenstein’s work in philosophy
of mind and cognition, and to engender new integrative relations between sci-
ence and philosophy, Wittgensteinian philosophers should engage with the
theory and practice of existing studies of distributed cognitive ecologies.

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436 | John Sutton

Acknowledgements
Many thanks first to those who taught me Wittgenstein, in Stirling, Oxford, and
Sydney: John Campbell, Antony Duff, Sandra Marshall, and Lloyd Reinhardt.
The earlier work on which this paper draws was assisted immensely by Keith
Campbell, Max Deutscher, Frank Jackson, Stephen Gaukroger, Doris McIlwain,
and John Yolton. I presented talks based on that work in 1991 and 1992 at the
University of Sydney, Macquarie University, and the Australian National Uni-
versity. Special thanks to Danièle Moyal-Sharrock for inviting me to Kirchberg
for the wonderful August 2013 symposium, providing the occasion to revisit
these topics, and to all those with whom I enjoyed ongoing and engaging dis-
cussions there, including David Bakhurst, Louise Barrett, Sven Bernecker,
Shaun Gallagher, Peter Henzi, Jennifer Hornsby, John Michael, Erik Myin, and
David Stern. For help of other forms that has contributed substantially, I thank
Amanda Barnier, Andy Clark, Celia Harris, Doris McIlwain, Nina McIlwain,
David Rubin, and Kellie Williamson. Detailed comments on earlier drafts of this
paper from Mirko Farina, Bill Hirst, Chris McCarroll, Danièle Moyal-Sharrock,
and Lyn Tribble have helped me greatly in shaping the argument and are much
appreciated.

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