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Reminiscing together: joint experiences, epistemic groups, and sense of self

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Abstract

In this essay, I consider a kind of social group that I call ‘epistemic’. It is constituted by its members’ possession of perceptually grounded common knowledge, which endows them with a particular kind of epistemic authority. This authority, I argue, is invoked in the activity of ‘joint reminiscing’—of remembering together a past jointly experienced event. Joint reminiscing, in turn, plays an important role in the constitution of social and personal identity. The notion of an epistemic group, then, is a concept that helps explain an important aspect of a subject’s understanding of who she is.

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Notes

  1. I sometimes talk about ‘groups’ and sometimes about ‘social groups’ in this text. In both cases, I mean groups whose constituents are people, or at any rate (in the case of what I call ‘intrinsic groups’) beings able to enjoy collective mental phenomena (see Leavens 2011 for an argument that non-human primates are capable of joint attention). A dyad of two people can constitute a group for my purposes.

  2. I shall say that joint experiences ‘ground’ or ‘make available’ common knowledge. I merely mean here that the subjects of these experiences enjoy the relevant common knowledge in virtue of their joint experiences. I adopt no particular view on how to substantiate this ‘in virtue’ relation.

  3. The idea that the epistemic constellation in episodes of joint visual attention is irreducibly triadic is developed in Campbell (2005, 2011).

  4. See the chapters in Eilan et al. (2005), Seemann (2011), and Metcalfe and Terrace (2013) for recent discussions.

  5. There is a recent discussion about the relation between joint attention and common knowledge (Campbell 2005; Peacocke 2005; Wilby 2010) that focuses on the problem posed by the infinite iterations it generates. This problem is not at the heart of the present argument.

  6. For alternative, intentionalist accounts see Peacocke (2005) and Schmitz (2014).

  7. You may, of course, think, that perception is never a static event (e.g., Noe 2004).

  8. Although I will keep calling (for stylistic reasons) joint processes ‘events’ in what follows, I don’t mean to thereby suggest that they are occurrences without temporal extension.

  9. Schmitz (2014) distinguishes between ‘merely mutual’ and ‘genuine joint’ attention. The former is the perceptual phenomenon that can lead to common knowledge about the jointly perceived environment. The latter involves ‘a prosocial motivation to share an object’. He claims that ‘any attempt to treat joint attention as a merely perceptual, purely cognitive phenomenon must fail’. I agree. But much depends on which aspect of this rich and complex phenomenon is at stake; whether, for instance, we are interested in the question of how the capacity for joint attention develops in human infants, or whether we want to know what the epistemic role of joint perceptual attention is in the acquisition of common knowledge. These are very different concerns, and you can, I think, legitimately (as e.g., Schiffer 1972, Campbell 2005, 2011, or Peacocke 2005 do) focus on their epistemic function without considering their intersubjective dimension. You are not thereby committed to the view that prosocial motivations are irrelevant for a complete account of joint attention.

  10. The essays collected in Fivush and Haden (2003) expand on the role of social memory in the constitution of an autobiographical sense of self from cultural and developmental viewpoints.

  11. I have been focusing here on cases in which the activity of joint reminiscing plays an important role in the formation of their subjects’ socially constituted sense of self. But, as a reviewer pointed out, there can be episodes of collectively recalling an event that was witnessed simultaneously, though not jointly (e.g., the collective recall of a car accident that each subject saw individually). In such cases, there is no social aspect to the original event, and it is for this reason that its collective retelling cannot shape the participants’ social identities in the way in which the two cases I discussed do. Since there is no constitutive connection between the mental lives of the perceivers of the original episode, this connection cannot be invoked to justify claims about it, and one’s own role in it, at a later time.

  12. Sutton (2012, p. 16) suggests that ‘...this embarrassment about social memory may be unnecessary if memory studies in the social sciences can be more firmly grounded in social ontology and social-cognitive psychology’. In particular, he recommends taking seriously Wegner’s (1986) notion of a ‘transactive memory system’ that enables groups to ‘interactively integrate information over time’. The present account is in the spirit, if not the letter, of this proposal.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Bentley University, 175 Forest Street, Waltham, MA, 02452, USA

    Axel Seemann

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Seemann, A. Reminiscing together: joint experiences, epistemic groups, and sense of self. Synthese 196, 4813–4828 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1156-3

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