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Narrative niche construction: memory ecologies and distributed narrative identities

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Abstract

Memories of our personal past are the building blocks of our narrative identity. So, when we depend on objects and other people to remember and construct our personal past, our narrative identity is distributed across our embodied brains and an ecology of environmental resources. This paper uses a cognitive niche construction approach to conceptualise how we engineer our memory ecology and construct our distributed narrative identities. It does so by identifying three types of niche construction processes that govern how we interact with our memory ecology, namely creating, editing, and using resources in our memory ecology. It also conceptualises how identity-relevant information in objects and (family) stories is transmitted vertically, i.e., across generations of people. Identifying these processes allows us to better understand the cultural information trajectories that constitute our memory ecologies. In short, what I’ll argue is that our memory ecology scaffolds our narrative identity and that engineering our memory ecology is a form of narrative niche construction.

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Notes

  1. The extended mind thesis received various criticisms, e.g., by Rupert (2004, 2010) and Adams and Aizawa (2008). This paper is not the place to defend the extended mind thesis, but for responses to these criticisms, see Clark (2008), Menary (2010a) and Rowlands (2010).

  2. Additionally, I don’t deny that persons also have a minimal self or a subject of experience (Gallagher 2000). This is the entity that has experiences and initiates action and so it has subjecthood and agenthood. My view is that some of the experiences of the minimal self ultimately become memories that are integrated into the narrative constituting our identity. But for more discussion on the relation between the minimal and narrative self, see (Menary 2008; Zahavi 2010; Krueger 2011; Heersmink 2020).

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Acknowledgements

I like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

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  1. Politics, Media and Philosophy, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia

    Richard Heersmink

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Heersmink, R. Narrative niche construction: memory ecologies and distributed narrative identities. Biol Philos 35, 53 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09770-2

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