Abstract
Education has recently been shaped by the cognitive science of memory. In turn, the science of memory has been infused by revolutionary ideas found in Wittgenstein’s works. However, the memory science presently applied to education draws mainly on traditional models that are quickly becoming outmoded; Wittgenstein’s insights have yet to be fruitfully applied, though they have helped to develop the science of memory. In this chapter, I examine three Wittgensteinian reforms in memory science as they pertain to education . First, Wittgenstein has inspired a particular strain of enactive models of memory and cognition, with important implications for theories of situated learning in education. Second, researchers have begun modeling memory as public practice , which deeply informs, inter alia, fraught theoretical discussions of assessment. Third, a number of memory researchers have rejected models based on a stored trace, a fundamental, Wittgensteinian revision with broad implications for characterizations of learning.
An early version of this chapter was presented at the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain’s annual conference in at Oxford, April 1–3, 2016. I am also indebted to a series of helpful and fruitful discussions I had, as the paper was developed, with two philosophically inclined education scholars: Aila O’Loughlin and Kailea Saplan.
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Notes
- 1.
Following convention, titles for Wittgenstein’s works are abbreviated (Z = Zettel, PG = Philosophical Grammar, LWPP = Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology , LPP = Lectures on Philosophical Psychology, BB = The Blue and Brown Books (Preliminary Notebooks), PI = Philosophical Investigations ), with section (§) or page number (p.), with full citation and initials in the References.
- 2.
This version is in the Blue and Brown Books (Preliminary Notebooks) (BB, p. 85), but there are similar stories told in the Investigations, as well as the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology .
- 3.
Another authority on memory science , Henry Roediger, writes: “The assumption that underlies such single measure experiments—that all memory measures correlate and measure some quantity such as ‘strength of memory’—is surely wrong” (Roediger 2007, p. 282).
- 4.
Even those who are proponents of situated learning techniques, such as project-based learning , tend to express the difficulties in applying traditional methods of assessment in these contexts as shortcomings, providing alternative assessment methods in a tone of concession (Blumenfeld et al. 1991, p. 383).
- 5.
It should not escape our notice that Freire himself, the founder of the critical pedagogy movement, casts his critique of mainstream education models in terms of humanizing and dehumanizing influences (Freire 2000). Although the aims of critical pedagogy are mostly orthogonal to the interests in this present paper, this point of contact is no accident: treating human learners as computers—something other than humans—is a de-humanizing process in a very literal way.
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O’Loughlin, I. (2017). Learning Without Storing: Wittgenstein’s Cognitive Science of Learning and Memory. In: Peters, M., Stickney, J. (eds) A Companion to Wittgenstein on Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3136-6_39
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