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One effect of this systematic, although not fully conscious, exclusion from collective memories of the positive contributions of Black Britons to Britain is the erosion of intellectual self-trust. However, they can only serve this purpose for those who are represented by them as members of the group. Since memories serve to strengthen social bonds, collective memories have the function of nurturing a sense of belonging to an in-group which they represent in a positive light. In these ways, even in the absence of a deliberate intention to mislead, shared memories will converge in the direction of the memories of those who have social power. Those things which are not explicitly recalled but are semantically related to retrieved memories will become as a result more inaccessible for speakers and for their listeners than other, equally un-retrieved but semantically unrelated, representations. The latter occurs when one recalls some things but not others (as one inevitably must). Mnemonic convergence is also facilitated by retrieval effects (the more often a memory is recalled the more accessible it becomes) and by socially-shared retrieval-induced forgetting (Stone et al.
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This phenomenon is not rare it is made worse when one individual is able to arrogate the role of 'official' narrator of the event. Given the connection between social power and perceived authority and expertise, collective memories bear the mark of the most powerful in society.Īmong the mechanisms that promote convergence are the gamut of phenomena known as the social contagion of memory where fabricated or partially false memories are implanted into unsuspecting listeners who may even have personally witnessed the event in question (Loftus 2005). Interestingly, mnemonic convergence is mediated by perceived authority and expertise so that the resulting shared memories will be closer to the initial memories of people who are thought to possess these qualities than to those of other members of the community. These are mechanisms that promote mnemonic convergence where different individual memories eventually merge into a common account of the past by means of the systematic forgetting of some memories and the implantation of new ones. Others, however, are less conscious but equally pernicious. Some of the processes that lead to the development of highly selective collective memories are deliberate distortions and deceptions.
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In my work I discuss the mechanisms that lead to the formation of these deeply misleading (because they result from biased selections) collective memories and analyse their ethical and epistemic consequences. Either way, they are depicted as a problem. Those memories which portray them tend to focus on (male) Black British people as either victims of crime (e.g. These memories mostly fail to represent Black Britons at all. They may include portrayals of heroism during wars, narratives of colonial invasions presented as adventurous expeditions, warm beer, green lawns, and the sound of leather on willow. In the UK these memories are often representations of white, male Britain. These are enduring memories (including of events that current members of society have not directly witnessed) which are constitutive parts of a group’s identity (Hirst and Manier 2008). Collective amnesia happens when collective memories are shaped by processes that strongly promote ignorance. More recently I have written and given talks about a special form of ignorance, that I have labelled ‘collective amnesia’, which is responsible for a pernicious kind of epistemic injustice. I have also given talks on the epistemology of implicit bias. A pre-proofs draft is already available here. I have written a paper on intellectual arrogance which I shall deliver at the Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and Mind Association in July. These include: vices, bias and ignorance. Instead, I want to develop accounts of those things whose epistemic status is negative. Epistemologists, unlike psychologists, have in the past focused on notions such as knowledge, truth, justification, belief or virtue that have positive epistemic status. Thanks to Ema for inviting me to contribute this snapshot of my current research for the readers of the blog. In this post she summarises some of her recent work on collective amnesia and epistemic injustice. Alessandra is a Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University working on epistemology and philosophy of language.