ABSTRACT
When I was first asked to act as discussant of the four preceding chapters that comprise this section of Part II, I tried to find a common theme or themes, a set of defining features that characterize all four contributions. And I couldn’t do it. I felt like Wittgenstein (1953), who tried to come up with a fixed set of features that cover all the things we would consider a game, such as basketball, tennis, chess, scrabble, poker, solitaire, and couldn’t do it. But as Wittgenstein pointed out, even if there is no fixed set of features that is common to all games, what organizes the separate instances into the game category is a set of family resemblances among the members. Just as Johnny might resemble his mother, and his mother might resemble her brother but in different ways so that Johnny and his uncle bear little resemblance to each other, so basketball shares something in common with tennis, tennis with chess, chess with scrabble, scrabble with poker, and poker with solitaire, and yet basketball and solitaire seem very different things (see also, Anderson, 1980; Rosch & Mervis, 1975). Using this logic, I decided that what holds these four contributions together is a set of family resemblances: Shallice’s contribution is related to Baddeley’s through their mutual interest in long-term memory, Baddeley’s contribution is related to Park and Hedden’s through their mutual interest in working memory; and Park and Hedden’s contribution is related to McDowd's through their mutual interest in aging. But then suddenly it dawned on me. Of course, there is a defining feature that characterizes these four contributions. The defining feature is Fergus Craik. All four chapters deal with work that is related in one way or another to the work of Fergus Craik, whom we are honoring in this volume. And I think this is testimony to the impressive breadth of Gus’s work and the impressive influence his work has had on the field.
