The Roots of Remembering

This chapter proposes a radically enactive account of remembering that casts it as creative, dynamic, and wide-reaching. It paints a picture of remembering that no longer conceives of it as involving passive recollections—always occurring wholly and solely inside heads. Integrating empirical findings from various sources, the chapter puts pressure on familiar cognitivist visions of remembering. Pivotally, it is argued that we achieve a stronger and more elegant account of remembering by abandoning the widely held assumption that it is rooted in the retrieval of stored information or content in order to represent past events. We demonstrate how a radically enactive account of the roots of remembering can successfully handle classic cases discussed in the extended memory literature while, at same time, accommodating experientially rich forms of episodic memory.