The main aim of this arTcle has been to give an account of the role of representaTons of the past that makes it intelligible why it has such a special status for humans. The past plays a parTcularly crucial role in human social life. For humans, events do not only have effects in their physical but also in their social environment. The representaTon of such effects im- pacts our future fitness to the extent that we can establish the validity of the ensuing social
effects with others. Commonly, the only way this can be achieved is by retrospecTvely point- ing to the event that produced the social effect in the first place. For this reason, the past becomes highly important to us and is also so frequently contested. It is this circumstance that makes the ability to remember the past in episodic memory parTcularly beneficial.
Episodic memory allows one to become a witness of the past and give tesTmony about it. TesTmony is a way to facilitate the transmission of informaTon about past events by conferring epistemic authority and increasing speaker commitment. Such facilitaTon is required in cases in which one’s audience requires addiTonal reassurance about whatever one is asserTng. Given the extraordinary importance of representaTons about the past in deciding what social realiTes apply in the present, we should expect claims about history to be a context in which listeners regularly require such addiTonal reassurance.
TesTmony will thereby be most important in the negoTaTon and transmission of our own and others’ commitments, enTtlements, and accountabiliTes. CommunicaTvely point- ing to the past allows us to jusTfy asserTons about the existence of social facts, and a large range of cultural pracTces has developed exactly to alleviate the reliance of social reality on individual memory and tesTmony.
This view has consequences for how the evoluTon of episodic memory (the cogniTve basis of tesTmony) must have looked like. Episodic memory might have developed only once humans were able to represent the social effects of the events in their environment. This ability, however, must have required the prior emergence of social norms determining these social cause-effect relaTonships. If no one represented or followed social norms, the past would lose its importance as a way of coordinaTng social realiTes. Once in place, our ability to tesTfy about past events could then have also be used to transmit generic beliefs to oth- ers and thereby make reputaTon disseminaTon more effecTve.
Acknowledgements
This work was partly supported by a grant from the European Research Council (PARTNERS, #742231). We are grateful to Hugo Mercier, Kourken Michaelian, Csaba Pléh, Barbara Pomiechowska, Dan Sperber, and Denis Tatone for their valuable comments on earlier ver- sions of this arTcle.
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