Fuzzy boundaries

Memory is not something we can see, touch or smell. What we observe and experience directly are human activities, our own and those of others. As we acquired our first language we learned to apply the appropriate labels to various kinds of experiences and events. We learned what counted as being surprised, being disappointed, lying, showing-off and, of course, remembering. In other words, we learned the categories currently used to make sense of human experience and human interaction in our cultural milieu. Common psychological categories all exist in everyday usage before they become a target for any philosopher's thought or any scientist's experiments.

The world would surely be pretty close to William James's ‘blooming buzzing confusion’ without the sense-making categories that enable us to identify any phenomenon as belonging to a certain kind. But where do these categories come from? For the individual, there is no mystery, because he or she is born into an environment in which they already exist. How they came to be there is a more difficult question. There are two extreme possibilities: One is that these categories are accurate representations of the way the various characteristics of human nature divide up. What argues against this view is, first, that there are huge differences between human cultures in the categories they use to represent human characteristics, and second, that these representations are subject to profound historical changes.