Epilogue

Abstract

This volume is entitled Constructions of Remembering and Metacognition. That title is intended to reflect our belief that progress in understanding the human mind does not consist of discovery, but is rather an act of invention. As demonstrated by so many of the essays in this volume, people’s awareness of their world is constructed, not apprehended: As Thomas Hobbes (1651/1904) explained more than three hundred years ago, we experience our reactions to the world, not the world itself. In consequence, our knowledge of the world is inevitably indirect, coloured, and contaminated by the inferential and attributive processes through which it is created. In addition to Hobbes, we owe this framework for understanding human psychology to a number of thinkers across the past few centuries, such as Immanual Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, 1781/1932), Jeremy Bentham (Theory of Fictions, Bentham & Ogden, 1814/1932), Hans Vaihinger (Philosophy of As If, 1911/1924), Alfred Adler (1927), and Sir Frederick Bartlett (1932). This constructive nature of mind applies just as much to the act of theorizing about mental functions as to any other activity. In our study of the human mind, we have only one tool: the human mind. Thus our job as cognitive psychologists is to be storytellers, crafting imaginative fictions about what mind might be like if we were ever able to examine it directly. Of course, some stories are better than others.