Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- PART I THE CRITICAL TEXTS OF ANTIQUITY
- Introduction
- PART II THE PRACTICE OF MEMORY DURING THE PERIOD OF TRANSITION FROM CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY TO THE CHRISTIAN MONASTIC CENTURIES
- Introduction
- PART III THE BEGINNINGS OF THE SCHOLASTIC UNDERSTANDING OF MEMORY
- Introduction
- 13 Abelard
- 14 Memory and its uses: the relationship between a theory of memory and twelfth-century historiography
- PART IV ARISTOTLE NEO-PLATONISED: THE REVIVAL OF ARISTOTLE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCHOLASTIC THEORIES OF MEMORY
- Introduction
- PART V LATER MEDIEVAL THEORIES OF MEMORY: THE VIA ANTIQUA AND THE VIA MODERNA.
- Introduction
- Conclusion: an all too brief account of modern theories of mind and remembering
- Bibliography
- Index
13 - Abelard
Knowing, remembering, language, and interpreting past texts. The new linguistic logic of memory. Mind, language and external reality.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- PART I THE CRITICAL TEXTS OF ANTIQUITY
- Introduction
- PART II THE PRACTICE OF MEMORY DURING THE PERIOD OF TRANSITION FROM CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY TO THE CHRISTIAN MONASTIC CENTURIES
- Introduction
- PART III THE BEGINNINGS OF THE SCHOLASTIC UNDERSTANDING OF MEMORY
- Introduction
- 13 Abelard
- 14 Memory and its uses: the relationship between a theory of memory and twelfth-century historiography
- PART IV ARISTOTLE NEO-PLATONISED: THE REVIVAL OF ARISTOTLE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCHOLASTIC THEORIES OF MEMORY
- Introduction
- PART V LATER MEDIEVAL THEORIES OF MEMORY: THE VIA ANTIQUA AND THE VIA MODERNA.
- Introduction
- Conclusion: an all too brief account of modern theories of mind and remembering
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Since some readers may be dismayed by the stress I have put on so animistic a concept as ‘attention’ it may be well to review its basis once more. If we allow several figures to appear at once, the number of possible input configurations is so very large that a wholly parallel mechanism, giving a different output for each of them, is inconceivable. To cope with this difficulty, even a mechanical recognition system must have some way to select portions of the incoming information for detailed analysis. This immediately implies the existence of two levels of analysis: the preattentive mechanisms, which form segregated objects and help to direct further processing, and the act of focal attention, which makes more sophisticated analyses of the chosen object. The observation that even a competent automaton would require processes of figure-formation and attention lets us understand why they have appeared, explicitly or implicitly, in so many psychological theories… The notion that perception is basically a constructive act rather than a receptive or simply analytic one is quite old. It goes back at least to Brentano's ‘Act Psychology’ and Bergson's ‘Creative Synthesis’ and was eloquently advanced by William James (1890)… the mechanisms of visual imagination are continuous with those of visual perception – a fact which strongly implies that all perceiving is a constructive process.
Ulric Neisser, Cognitive Psychology (New York, 1967), pp. 94–5.- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ancient and Medieval MemoriesStudies in the Reconstruction of the Past, pp. 233 - 273Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992