Abstract
Bringing research on collective memory together with research on episodic future thought, Szpunar and Szpunar (Mem Stud 9(4):376–389, 2016) have recently developed the concept of collective future thought. Individual memory and individual future thought are increasingly seen as two forms of individual mental time travel, and it is natural to see collective memory and collective future thought as forms of collective mental time travel. But how seriously should the notion of collective mental time travel be taken? This article argues that, while collective mental time travel is disanalogous in important respects to individual mental time travel, the concept of collective mental time travel nevertheless provides a useful means of organizing existing findings, while also suggesting promising directions for future research.
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Notes
In order to clarify the relationship between our approach and that taken by Szpunar and Szpunar, we note that, whereas Szpunar and Szpunar focus on collective future thought, understood as the future-oriented counterpart of collective memory, we focus on collective mental time travel as a whole. This difference might at first seem to be purely verbal, but employing the concept of collective mental time travel in fact leads us to ask questions that are not suggested by the concept of collective future thought. Many of these concern the (potential) mentality of collective mental time travel, including matters—such as the possibility of group-level phenomenal consciousness—that tend not to be treated by researchers outside of philosophy. More generally, since Szpunar and Szpunar are based in psychology and social science, rather than philosophy, their focus is less conceptual than ours. Hence we take the question of the (potential) collectivity of collective mental time travel much more seriously than they do. The payoffs of this approach include the bringing into focus of the relevance of the literature on collective intentionality—which has not previously been discussed in this connection—and encouraging a clear distinction between collective future thought and individual thought about the collective future, a distinction which is somewhat obscured in Szpunar and Szpunar’s approach. In addition to its more conceptual focus, our paper brings in new resources from the interdisciplinary literature both on large-scale collective mental time travel and on small-scale collective mental time travel. Thus, while we build on Szpunar and Szpunar’s approach, our approach goes beyond theirs.
We also often find ourselves engaging in episodic counterfactual thought (Van Hoeck et al. 2013; De Brigard 2013; Schacter et al. 2015)—reliving past events not as they did in fact occur but as they might have occurred had something gone differently. For the sake of simplicity, we will for the most part abstract away from episodic counterfactual thought here, but a fuller treatment would consider collective counterfactual thought, in addition to collective memory and collective future thought.
In previous work (Michaelian and Sutton forthcoming), we were optimistic about the prospects for understanding collective memory in terms of Tollefsen and Dale’s alignment-based analysis of joint action, on which coordination among group members can be achieved through a spontaneous, bottom-up process of dynamic matching of behaviours (Tollefsen and Dale 2012; Tollefsen et al. 2013). This approach may avoid worries about the possibility of collective memory without intentions to remember. But it does not avoid worries about the role of conflict in collective remembering, to which we turn next.
It might be objected here that, since collective MTT is necessarily an outcome of communication, and since communication presupposes propositional contents, the representations involved in collective MTT must after all be propositional in character. But this objection depends on an overly restrictive view of the underpinnings of the representations at issue in collective MTT. While collective MTT is certainly in part an outcome of communication, it emerges from a much broader range of interactions among group members, including the negotiation of shared narratives of the past. Thus, while the representations at issue in collective MTT may emerge in part from purely propositional communication, they should not be taken to be entirely propositional in character.
If embodied and extended views of cognition are right, memory is also distributed across the body and features of the environment (Sutton 2006), but we set this aside here.
It may be a less straightforward matter to extend it to collective mind-wandering, which may sometimes lack observable effects on behaviour and so be difficult to attribute from the intentional stance. There are two points to note in response to this concern. First, as long as mind-wandering sometimes has observable effects on behaviour, we will sometimes be able to attribute it from the intentional stance. Second, if collective mind-wandering sometimes does not have observable effects on group behaviour, the same things presumably goes for individual mind-wandering and individual behaviour, in which case the worry turns out to be a special case of the well-known general worries about the Dennettian approach that we set aside below.
One might be worried here by an apparent asymmetry between in our treatment of the Dennettian approach and our treatment of the joint action and collective belief approaches discussed above, since we are prepared to set aside well-known worries about the intentional stance even while taking the fact that joint action and collective belief do not adequately capture the collectivity of CMTT to be reason to set those approaches aside. But the asymmetry is only apparent. When we choose to set joint action and collective belief aside, we do so not because we take them to be inadequate in any general sense but simply because we take them to be ill-suited to provide insight into the collectivity of CMTT. When we choose to set aside well-known worries about the intentional stance, we do so not because we take those worries to be unimportant but rather because we take the approach to have the potential—despite the fact that it is subject to important worries—to provide insight into CMTT.
One might wonder here whether, if each member of a transactive memory system must know not only what the others are responsible for knowing but also that each of them knows what the others are responsible for knowing, transactive memory will not be subject to the same sort of infinite regress to which certain accounts of shared knowledge fall prey. While this is an important question, space does not permit us to deal with it in detail here, and we simply note that the large body of empirical research employing the transactive memory framework demonstrates that transactive memory systems emerge in practice, even if it is not obvious, in theoretical terms, how a regress is avoided.
We have referred to interactions among individuals. In fact, Anastasio et al. assign an important role in collective consolidation to various external memory technologies. The interacting components of the relevant systems thus include not only human individuals but also the technological resources of which the latter make use. In other words, the systems at issue in large-scale collective memory are not purely social systems but rather hybrid sociotechnical systems. This does not necessarily represent a disanalogy between large-scale and small-scale collective memory, for (as we have argued elsewhere; Michaelian and Arango-Munoz forthcoming) the systems at issue in small-scale collective memory are themselves often hybrid sociotechnical systems.
If autonoesis is not essential to individual MTT, an explanation is required of what role autonoesis plays and what happens when it is absent. This is not the place to attempt to provide such an explanation, but see Michaelian 2016 for one relevant discussion.
This second response raises a terminological concern. If autonoesis is essential to individual MTT but plays no role in collective MTT, it might be suggested that the term “collective mental time travel” is misleading and should therefore be abandoned. We are sensitive to this worry and recognize that a term other than “collective mental time travel” might ultimately provide a better label for the relevant phenomenon. An appropriate substitute would, however, need to capture the relationship between remembering the past and imagining the future that is emphasized by the term that we have employed here.
In addition to questions about collectivity and mentality of the sort we have dealt with here, collective MTT, like individual MTT, raises questions by suggesting a symmetry between our thought about past events and future events. Traditional versions of direct realism, for example, treat the objects of episodic memory as being particular past events. The objects of episodic future thought, in contrast, are arguably not particular future events. Whether this poses a threat to the validity of the concept of MTT is a subject of ongoing debate (Debus 2014; Perrin 2016; Michaelian 2016a).
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Thanks to audiences at the University of Otago and the University of Grenoble. Thanks also to four anonymous reviewers for Synthese and to the editors of the special issue. Supported by Grant 16-UOO-016 to KM from the Marsden Fund, administered by the Royal Society of New Zealand.
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Michaelian, K., Sutton, J. Collective mental time travel: remembering the past and imagining the future together. Synthese 196, 4933–4960 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1449-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1449-1