Saskia Janina Neumann

Memory for Orientation:

Trade-offs, Cueing, and Social Scaffolding

Abstract

How does memory work? I argue that memory functions less like a storage house of data and more like an orientation technology: a system that enables recognition, judgment, and action under uncertainty, with characteristic strengths and weaknesses that follow from this role. Werner Stegmaier provides a philosophical articulation of this idea, describing memory as a largely “self forgotten” infrastructure of orientation (Stegmaier, 2008; Stegmaier, 2019). The paper brings this orientational thesis into dialogue with contemporary memory research, showing how dominant frameworks specify its mechanisms and trade-offs: background stabilization, selective accessibility, reconstructive updating, cue-dependence, embodied substrates, and social/material scaffolding. A methodological focus on memory metaphors, especially the engram and inscription, highlights how theoretical vocabulary shapes what counts as stability, loss, access, and misfire. Overall, the paper develops an empirically informed account of memory as an orientational system whose economy and flexibility enable orientation, while necessarily producing omissions, distortions, and occasional breakdowns.

1) Introduction

A person steps into a familiar room in the dark and still knows where things are. A single sentence in a conversation becomes binding; something one can later be held to. A sign on a street corner “speaks” instantly, long before reflection begins. In each of these cases, memory is at work, yet it rarely shows up as a separate object. We do not normally consult memory like a storage device, but we simply orient ourselves – by recognizing, continuing, trusting, correcting, and moving on.

This paper starts from a basic research question: How does memory work? I defend the thesis that memory functions less like a storage house of data and more like an orientation technology: a system designed to keep action and judgment possible under uncertainty. On this view, memory’s characteristic strengths and weaknesses follow from its orientational role. Selectivity is not merely a limitation but a design feature; reconstruction is not an occasional defect but a consequence of making the past usable in the present; context-dependence is part of how retrieval is guided; and social and material scaffolds are key supports of orientational stability. Memory’s failures such as omissions, distortions, breakdowns are therefore not best treated as isolated malfunctions; they are often the predictable costs of a system optimized for orientation rather than exhaustive preservation.

Werner Stegmaier provides a clear philosophical articulation of this idea and serves as a guiding reference point for the argument. In his philosophy of orientation, memory is built into the way orientation works: it supports footholds, routines, and judgments largely in the background, maintaining what he calls an “imperceptible” and “self forgotten” structure by which orientation succeeds without needing to thematize memory as memory (Stegmaier, 2008, 308; Stegmaier, 2019, 84). Stegmaier’s account highlights the functional consequences of this infrastructure: memory must be selective and “economic,” forgetting is often unnoticed because it is part of what keeps footholds usable, remembering is associative and perspective-bound rather than archival, and memory is already operative in perceiving and identifying something as something (Stegmaier, 2008, 308, 334, 403; Stegmaier, 2019, 84–85). He also extends the orientational picture beyond the individual: signs anchor recognition, language provides “hold onto what was said” as a social foothold, and rituals and collective memory preserve orientational resources across time (Stegmaier, 2008, 403; Stegmaier, 2019, 68, 277).

The paper brings this orientational thesis into dialogue with contemporary memory research to show that many of today`s dominant frameworks implicitly converge on an orientation-like picture of memory – often through their own metaphors of access, cueing, control, integration, and scaffolding. The guiding aim is therefore constructive: to articulate memory as orientation technology in a way that is conceptually coherent and empirically informed, while clarifying the trade-offs that any such system must exhibit.

Accordingly, the argument proceeds in two steps. First, Stegmaier’s account is reconstructed as an entry point into an orientational understanding of memory: memory as an inconspicuous infrastructure that is selective, reconstructive, and already operative in basic recognition, while also distributed across signs, language, and social practices. Second, contemporary research frameworks are used to specify mechanisms and distinctions that sharpen this orientational picture: background stabilization (consolidation and offline reorganization), selective economy (systems, competition, accessibility), reconstruction and misfire (systematic distortions and source attribution), present-tense integration (working memory and control), embodied substrates (engram research), cue-dependence (context effects), and distributed supports (external scaffolding and collective memory). A distinctive methodological contribution concerns metaphors: especially in the cases of engrams and inscription, the paper argues that metaphor choice shapes what counts as stability, loss, access, and error and therefore how memory’s orientational function is conceptualized.

What emerges is a view of memory that does justice to both its everyday role and its scientific profile: memory is best understood not as a passive storehouse of what has happened, but as a selective, constructive, cue-dependent, and socially scaffolded technology that keeps orientation possible under uncertainty.

2) Memory as a condition of orientation

This paper’s guiding thesis is that memory functions less like a storage house and more like an orientation technology: a system that keeps recognition, judgment, and action possible under uncertainty. Stegmaier provides a clear philosophical articulation of this idea because his philosophy does not begin with memory as an isolated mental faculty. It begins with orientation. For Stegmaier, human life is fundamentally an ongoing process of finding one’s way under changing and uncertain conditions. Orientation means establishing footholds, relying on routines, interpreting signs, making distinctions, and adjusting oneself within situations that are never completely transparent or fully controllable.

Stegmaier applies this basic metaphor of orientation to memory. Memory is not first treated as a store of past contents and only later connected to action. Rather, it is interpreted as part of orientation itself from the beginning. This is an important orientational decision: one could also describe memory primarily as storage, representation, archive, or reproduction. Stegmaier instead asks what memory does for orientation. From this perspective, memory becomes an inconspicuous infrastructure of finding one’s way. It supports holds, routines, judgments, and recognitions largely in the background, without usually appearing as memory.

This is why Stegmaier describes memory as “self forgotten.” He (2019, 84) explicitly says that “self forgotten” describes how our memory works and that memories structure our orientation. He makes the same point when he writes that memories “imperceptibly” maintain a “self forgotten structure” (Stegmaier, 2008, 308). Memory, in this sense, does not primarily appear as an object that one consults. It works by making the world familiar enough, stable enough, and meaningful enough for orientation to continue. Its success is precisely that it normally does not have to become thematic.

This orientational starting point also explains why Stegmaier emphasizes the selectivity of memory. If memory is for orientation, it cannot aim at total preservation. A memory that retained everything equally would not help orientation but overwhelm it. Stegmaier (2019, 84) states: “You forget most of what you have seen, heard, and thought.” He even adds that “it is … a kind of disease to remember too much.” Memory is therefore “economic”: it “usually only retain[s] what might afterward be relevant for one’s successful orientation” (Stegmaier, 2019, 84). Forgetting belongs to the normal functioning of memory as orientation technology. It reduces complexity so that usable footholds remain.

This also clarifies Stegmaier’s distinction between noticeable and unnoticed forgetting. He writes that people usually notice only a certain kind of forgetting—“Nur an dieses merkliche Vergessen …” (Stegmaier, 2008, 308)—while most loss remains inconspicuous. This follows from the orientational account itself. Orientation depends on what remains usable, not on a complete record of everything that has disappeared. Much of memory’s work therefore consists in silent omission. What drops away without being noticed helps prevent the field of possible memories, signs, and associations from becoming unmanageable.

From here, Stegmaier can also claim that memory is not something added only after perception. If orientation means grasping something as something, then memory must already be involved in basic recognition. He (2019, 85) writes that short-term or working memory takes part in how we perceive and identify something as something. Identification is therefore not a secondary act that comes after a neutral perception. It is already an orientational achievement. Working memory stabilizes what appears long enough for it to be recognized, compared, and understood as determinate.

Stegmaier (2019, 85) says that what is particularly relevant goes into one’s long-term memory. He links this to episodic memory and also uses the vocabulary of engrams, naming engrams as what long-term memory transcribes in the brain (Stegmaier, 2008, 308; Stegmaier, 2019, 85). Thus, long-term memory matters because it stabilizes what may later function as a foothold for reorientation. It preserves continuity for future situations in which orientation must be recovered, adjusted, or redirected.

At the same time, Stegmaier does not treat memory as a faithful archive. Its orientational function depends on association, standpoint, and reconstruction. He characterizes memory as an associative store (Stegmaier, 2008, 308): orientation recombines clues, signs, and prior holds. Remembering is bound to the present standpoint and can fail (Stegmaier, 2008, 308). Misfires are therefore not accidental additions to memory; they belong to the risk structure of an orientational system. Because memory makes the past usable for present orientation, it can also reshape, simplify, or misattribute what is remembered.

This same structure also explains why memory is not only retrospective. In his chapter on fluctuance, Stegmaier says that thinking distances us from the immediate situation and thereby makes it possible to create alternatives to situations and keep them in memory (Stegmaier, 2008, 334). Memory is therefore not only a relation to what is past. It also keeps possible paths available. It allows orientation to remain flexible by holding alternatives open rather than forcing action to remain trapped in the immediacy of the present.

Stegmaier illustrates this bodily and spatially through Kant’s example of orientation in a familiar room in the dark. If one can touch even one familiar object whose position is known, one can find the others; if the room were rearranged so that left and right were reversed, orientation would fail (Stegmaier, 2008, 90). Stegmaier adds that this memory of order depends on repeated practice, that is, on practiced familiarity (Stegmaier, 2008, 140). Here, memory appears not as explicit recollection but as the embodied familiarity of an order one can rely on without reflection.

The same orientational logic extends to external supports. Stegmaier treats signs as especially important memory aids because they stabilize recognition across situations. He writes that signs “quickly and deeply etch themselves into one’s memory” and become “the most important elements of the memory … of our orientation” (Stegmaier, 2019, 68). He also counts “the memory of what one dealt with in the past” among what orientation relies on (Stegmaier, 2019, 76). Signs are therefore not merely things that are remembered. They help structure remembering itself by offering repeatable, recognizable cues in the environment.

Language provides a further social form of such stabilization. Stegmaier’s expression “Halt am Gesagten” names the orientational gain that comes from being able to hold on to what was said and to hold someone to it (Stegmaier, 2008, 403). Speech turns the fluidity of a situation into something sequential and repeatable. Yet this stability also involves reduction: speaking forces omission, and Stegmaier claims that we usually retain mostly what was said rather than the full conditions of how it was said (Stegmaier, 2008, 403). Language thus creates social footholds, but these footholds may also flatten the complexity of the original situation.

Because memory is selective, reconstructive, and dependent on footholds, disorientation remains a feasible possibility. Stegmaier explicitly states that “Disorientations are always possible due to … fragmentary memories” (Stegmaier, 2019, 90). The same memory structures that make orientation possible can also fail, become fragmentary, or no longer provide the needed foothold. Orientation is therefore never absolutely secure (Stegmaier, 2008, 308; Stegmaier, 2019, 84, 90).

Finally, Stegmaier extends memory’s orientational role beyond the individual. Collective memory and commemoration become social practices through which communities preserve orientational resources across time. He describes how certain things are preserved in peoples’ collective memories and writes that “Rituals for commemorating the dead allow them to live on in the memory of those surviving them” (Stegmaier, 2019, 277). Memory therefore orients not only individuals within situations but also communities across generations, by preserving what is treated as significant, binding, or worthy of continued acknowledgment.

The red thread of Stegmaier’s account is thus clear: once memory is interpreted through the guiding metaphor of orientation, its different features belong together. Its self-forgotten background function, its selectivity, its reconstructive character, its role in perception, its reliance on signs and speech, and its vulnerability to disorientation are not separate observations. They are consequences of one philosophical decision: to understand memory not as storage of the past, but as an orientational process that provides footholds for navigating the present and future. The next chapter asks how far contemporary memory research uses, specifies, or complicates this same orientational logic.

 

3) Memory as orientation technology: Mechanisms, trade-offs, and contemporary research

 

If memory is approached as a storage house, its central problems appear to be capacity and accuracy: how much information is kept, and how faithfully it can later be reproduced. In the history of memory, spatial and material metaphors have repeatedly been used to make memory intelligible: memory has been pictured as imprint, wax tablet, archive, book, storehouse, machine, photograph, or computer. Such metaphors foreground preservation: something is deposited, retained, and later recovered.

Modern experimental memory research did not simply begin with this metaphor, but it did initially make retention, repetition, loss, and recall central objects of measurement. Hermann Ebbinghaus’s Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology was decisive in this respect. His experiments with nonsense syllables made memory experimentally measurable through learning curves, forgetting curves, repetition, savings, and recall (Ebbinghaus 1913). Memory became something that could be quantified: how much is retained, how quickly it is lost, and how repetition affects later recall.

In the twentieth century, cognitive psychology often described memory through information-processing models. A particularly influential example is Atkinson and Shiffrin’s (1968) multi-store model, which distinguished sensory register, short-term store, and long-term store, while also emphasizing control processes such as rehearsal. This model did not simply reduce memory to passive storage, but its terminology of “stores” strongly shaped how memory was discussed: information enters a system, is held temporarily, may be transferred, and can later be retrieved. In this framework, questions of capacity, duration, transfer, and retrieval became central.

At the same time, the storage model was challenged by other traditions within memory research. Frederic Bartlett’s (1932) Remembering argued against the view that remembering is a literal reproduction of stored material. On the basis of experiments such as repeated reproduction of stories, Bartlett claimed that remembering is reconstructive: people reshape what they remember through schemas, expectations, and present concerns. This was an important alternative to a simple archive model. Memory was not only a matter of preserving traces; it was also a matter of organizing the past from a present standpoint.

Later developments further weakened the idea of one simple memory store. Tulving (1972) distinguished episodic memory, which concerns personally experienced events, from semantic memory, which concerns general knowledge. Tulving and Thomson’s (1973) encoding-specificity principle then showed that retrieval depends on the relation between the conditions of encoding and the cues available at retrieval. These approaches shifted attention from storage alone to processing, kinds of memory, cue-dependence, and retrieval conditions.

Contemporary memory research is therefore not governed by one single paradigm. The approaches differ in aims and methods. Still, many of them share a movement away from a simple storage-house picture. Memory is increasingly studied as selective, constructive, cue-dependent, embodied, and supported by environmental and social structures. It is not usually called an “orientation process” in the technical literature. That is the philosophical interpretation developed in this paper. But many central concepts of current memory research—access, cueing, control, integration, reactivation, updating, and scaffolding—already describe memory in terms of usability, situated retrieval, and action-guiding function.

This is why the dialogue with Stegmaier is fruitful. Stegmaier’s philosophy makes explicit, in the language of orientation, a functional dimension that contemporary research often addresses in more technical terms. Memory is not only a container of past contents; it is also part of how individuals and communities find their way under uncertain and changing conditions. If memory is approached as an orientation technology, different questions become central: how memory stabilizes footholds in the background, how it filters and prioritizes, how it makes the past usable for present judgment, and how it relies on cues and scaffolds across individual and social environments. This chapter develops that orientational thesis in dialogue with major frameworks in contemporary memory research. The aim is to show how current research specifies mechanisms and trade-offs of an orientational memory.

 

3.1 Background stabilization: Why memory can remain “self forgotten”

 

A key feature of orientation is, according to Stegmaier, that it normally works without becoming an object of attention: one relies on routines and footholds rather than continually inspecting them. Consolidation theory provides one way of explaining how such background stability can arise. In memory research, consolidation refers to the process by which newly acquired memories become more stable over time. A new memory is not simply fixed permanently at the moment of experience. It is initially fragile and may be strengthened, reorganized, or disrupted after the event.

The idea is usually traced back to Georg Elias Müller and Alfons Pilzecker, whose 1900 work introduced the idea that newly formed memory traces require time to become stabilized. Their account was developed in the context of interference experiments: later activity could disturb earlier learning if it occurred too soon after the original material. In later psychology and neuroscience, this became the basis for the broader consolidation hypothesis: lasting memories depend on time-dependent processes that stabilize and transform initially vulnerable traces (Lechner et al. 1999).

More recent consolidation research has complicated the older idea of simple “fixing.” Diekelmann and Born (2010) argue that sleep supports the consolidation of newly acquired memories and discuss mechanisms through which slow-wave sleep and REM sleep contribute to memory stabilization and reorganization. Sleep does not merely preserve memories unchanged. It can selectively strengthen, reorganize, and integrate them. Dudai et al. (2015) therefore describe consolidation as both stabilization and transformation: memory representations and their neural underpinnings change over time through reactivation, redistribution across systems, and integration into existing knowledge.

Read through the lens of orientation, consolidation helps explain how memory can support action and judgment without becoming a constant object of attention. It stabilizes and reorganizes footholds in the background, so that orientation can remain smooth on the surface. This gives a possible mechanistic interpretation to Stegmaier’s claim that memory works “imperceptibly” and “self forgotten”: the processes that make later recognition and reorientation possible often occur outside awareness, while their effects appear in practical familiarity, expectation, and the ability to find one’s way again.

3.2 Economy and selectivity: why memory must filter to remain usable

An orientational memory must be selective. If every detail of every experience remained equally accessible, relevant information would constantly compete with irrelevant information, making judgment and action more difficult. Contemporary research specifies this selectivity at several levels.

First, there is support for the claim that selectivity is architectural. The multiple-systems framework distinguishes declarative from nondeclarative memory and shows that different memory systems retain and express different kinds of information with different vulnerabilities (Squire, 1992; Squire, 2004). Declarative memory includes episodic memory for personally experienced events and semantic memory for facts and general knowledge. Nondeclarative memory includes skills, habits, priming, and conditioning. These systems can dissociate: a person may lose the ability to form new episodic memories while still learning a motor skill or maintaining an established habit. Retention and forgetting are therefore not global properties of one single memory store. What remains available depends partly on the kind of memory involved and the system supporting it.

Second, there is also support for the claim that selectivity is competitive and shaped by use. Retrieval-induced forgetting shows that selectively retrieving some information can impair later access to related information (Anderson et al., 2000). A simple example is learning several items from the same category and then repeatedly practicing only some of them. The practiced items become easier to retrieve, while related but unpracticed items may later become harder to recall. The act of remembering therefore does not merely reveal what is stored; it can change the later accessibility of related memories.

This provides a concrete mechanism for memory’s economy. Current orientation often requires one useful answer, interpretation, or course of action rather than every related possibility. Selective retrieval can streamline access to what is useful now. The cost is that information not selected may become less accessible when a later situation requires it. Memory’s economy thus supports present orientation while creating the possibility of future gaps.

Third, selectivity concerns access as much as storage. Tulving and Pearlstone’s distinction between availability and accessibility shows that information may still exist in memory while being difficult to retrieve under current conditions (Tulving & Pearlstone, 1966). Availability means that some trace remains; accessibility means that the trace can be reached with the cues currently present. A familiar example is being unable to recall a name until someone supplies the first letter or mentions the context in which the person was encountered. The information may not have been erased but the appropriate route to it was temporarily unavailable.

Finally, research on active forgetting suggests that forgetting is not always the passive result of a memory trace weakening over time. It can also arise from control processes that regulate which memories become active and accessible (Anderson & Hulbert, 2020). When a memory that is irrelevant to a current goal competes with the information one is trying to retrieve, cognitive control can reduce the activation of the competing memory. For example, an old password may repeatedly interfere when a person tries to recall a new one; suppressing the old password can make retrieval of the new password more efficient. Such regulation is adaptive because it limits interference and prevents irrelevant or unwanted memories from dominating present thought and action. However, it also carries a cost: information suppressed because it is currently irrelevant may later become harder to retrieve when circumstances change. Active forgetting therefore illustrates the central trade-off of memory’s economy. By restricting access to competing information, memory supports efficient orientation in the present, but it may also reduce access to footholds that become relevant in a later situation.

3.3 Reconstruction: why the past must be made usable and why misfires follow

According to Stegmaier, orientation does not require a perfectly preserved copy of the past. It requires a past that can guide present judgment and future action. Contemporary psychology therefore treats remembering as constructive. This means that recollection is assembled from stored information, present knowledge, expectations, and current cues rather than reproduced as an unchanged recording. Distortions are consequently not always random failures; they can arise from the same processes that make memory flexible and useful.

Schacter’s “seven sins” framework organizes characteristic memory errors and argues that they reflect mechanisms that normally serve memory’s functions (Schacter, 1999; Schacter, 2021). The framework includes failures such as transience, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. For example, misattribution occurs when a person remembers information but assigns it to the wrong source, while bias occurs when present beliefs or expectations reshape recollection. These errors show that remembering is influenced by the present standpoint from which the past is reconstructed.

Classic research on the misinformation effect shows how later information can become integrated into what is reported as memory (Loftus & Palmer, 1974; Loftus et al., 1978). In such studies, participants first witness an event and are later exposed to misleading information about it. Their subsequent reports can incorporate details introduced only after the event. The point is not that people deliberately invent memories, but that later language and cues can alter how the original event is reconstructed.

The source monitoring framework explains one mechanism behind such errors (Johnson et al., 1993). Source monitoring refers to the process of deciding where mental content came from: whether it was perceived, imagined, inferred, read, or suggested by someone else. People make these judgments by evaluating features such as perceptual detail, emotional vividness, contextual information, and the amount of deliberate thought involved. Because these judgments are inferential rather than infallible, a person may remember a detail while misidentifying its origin.

Under an orientational interpretation, these findings do not show that memory fails. They show that memory integrates, generalizes, and updates information under present demands. Such flexibility makes the past useful in changing situations, but it also produces characteristic liabilities: bias, misattribution, and suggestibility. These are structural trade-offs of reconstructive memory. The same capacity that enables a person to adapt earlier experience to a new situation also makes faithful reproduction uncertain.

3.4 Present-tense orientation: working memory, binding, and control in identification

If orientation begins when identifying something as something, then memory involvement begins before retrospective recall. Working-memory theory provides a vocabulary for this present-tense work. Working memory is the limited system that temporarily maintains and manipulates information needed for an ongoing task. It is what allows a person to hold the beginning of a sentence in mind while reaching its end, compare two alternatives, follow directions, or connect a current perception with prior knowledge. Working memory is described as an active system that supports reasoning and goal-directed behavior through temporary maintenance, manipulation, and executive control. Executive control refers to the regulation of attention: selecting relevant information, suppressing distraction, switching between tasks, and coordinating different forms of information (Baddeley and Hitch, 1994).

Baddeley’s (2000) later concept of the episodic buffer adds a mechanism of binding and integration. The episodic buffer is proposed as a limited-capacity system that combines information from different sources, such as visual input, language, and long-term memory, into a temporarily coherent representation. For example, recognizing a familiar person may involve integrating a face, a voice, a name, and knowledge of earlier encounters into one meaningful experience. Binding refers to this process of connecting otherwise separate features into a unified representation.

Cowan’s (2001) embedded-processes view treats working memory not as an entirely separate store but as the currently activated part of long-term memory under a limited focus of attention. This means that information already stored in long-term memory can become temporarily active and available for current thinking. The model therefore emphasizes that perception, recognition, attention, and memory are closely intertwined.

In orientational terms, these models show that recognition depends on stabilizing, selecting, and integrating information in the present. Disorientation can therefore result not only from loss of long-term memory but also from failures of attention, binding, or control. A person may possess the relevant knowledge yet fail to combine or maintain it effectively in the current situation.

3.5 Embodied substrates and dynamic stability: engrams without the archive picture

Orientation requires that some footholds persist beyond the immediate situation. Contemporary neuroscience has returned to the concept of the engram to investigate how such persistence is embodied. An engram refers to the enduring neural changes associated with the formation and later retrieval of a memory.

Josselyn and Tonegawa (2020) frame the engram as a neural substrate of memory and summarize research that identifies and manipulates engram cells and cell ensembles. An engram ensemble is a group of neurons whose activity and lasting changes are associated with a particular learned experience. Researchers can mark cells active during learning and later test whether reactivating or suppressing those cells affects behavior linked to memory. This makes it possible to study the relationship between neural reactivation and memory retrieval.

Crucially, this research does not treat engrams as single, static inscriptions. A neural substrate may persist while its retrievability and behavioral expression vary with cues, the organism’s state, and the activity of wider neural circuits. In other words, the existence of a trace does not guarantee that it can be retrieved at every moment.

Consolidation theory further differentiates this picture. Long-term memory is not adequately described as a fixed deposit but as transformation over time involving reactivation, redistribution, and integration (Dudai et al., 2015). Redistribution means that the neural systems supporting a memory may change as the memory becomes older and more integrated with existing knowledge. Stability is therefore not necessarily the preservation of an unchanged record; it can be a dynamically maintained achievement.

For an orientational account this is important because it changes how stability and failure are understood. If engrams are pictured as inscriptions, forgetting appears mainly as damage to or loss of a stored record. If they are pictured as dynamic substrates, retrieval depends on successful reactivation within a changing system. This makes room for cases in which a trace persists but is temporarily inaccessible, weakly expressed, or altered through integration. The choice of metaphor therefore shapes what counts as loss, access, fragmentariness, and disorientation.

3.6 Social footholds and cognitive cue-dependence: “Hold onto what was said” and context

 

Orientation is not only individual; it is also social, and language is one of its main technologies. Stegmaier’s concept of Hold onto what was said captures how conversation produces a socially binding handle: what has been said can later be cited, challenged, or enforced (Stegmaier, 2008, 403). A spoken commitment can therefore continue to orient expectations after the original conversation has ended.

Contemporary memory research emphasizes cue-dependence, meaning that remembering depends strongly on the prompts, contexts, or signals that help make a memory accessible. The principle of encoding specificity holds that retrieval is more successful when the cues available at retrieval overlap with features present when the memory was formed (Tulving & Thomson, 1973). A memory learned in a particular room, emotional state, or conversational context may become easier to retrieve when aspects of that context are reinstated.

Contextual information may guide retrieval even when a person does not explicitly remember or report it. Someone may recall a conversation more easily upon returning to the place where it occurred, hearing the same phrase, or encountering the same person. The context acts as a route to memory.

An orientational synthesis therefore distinguishes two levels. Social practice privileges the propositional residue—what was said—as a stable and enforceable handle. Cognitive retrieval, however, remains sensitive to the conditions under which the statement was originally encountered. Social orientation makes some parts of an event portable and binding, while cognitive orientation may still depend on contextual features that later disappear from explicit accounts.

 

3.7 Fragmentary memory and disorientation: structured failure modes

 

If memory is understood as an orientational infrastructure, then disorientation is not an anomaly but a feasible possibility. Contemporary frameworks specify several ways in which memory can become fragmentary.

First, multiple memory systems make selective failure possible. One system can be impaired while others remain intact, producing structured rather than uniform loss (Squire, 1992; Squire, 2004). A person may retain habits and skills while losing episodic memories or retain general knowledge while being unable to recall the particular experiences through which it was learned. System dissociation refers to this pattern in which different forms of memory can be independently preserved or impaired.

Second, consolidation theory identifies periods of vulnerability. A newly formed memory may be disrupted before it becomes more stable, and interference from later learning can alter what is retained (McGaugh, 2000). Fragmentation can therefore result from incomplete or disrupted stabilization rather than from the destruction of an already permanent record.

Third, accessibility-based models show that retrieval can fail even when some memory trace remains available (Tulving & Pearlstone, 1966). A person may therefore appear disoriented not because all relevant knowledge has disappeared, but because current cues fail to provide access to it.

These distinctions further differentiate disorientation in relation to memory. Different breakdowns correspond to different failures within the orientational infrastructure: damage to a particular memory system, incomplete consolidation, interference, cue mismatch, or temporary access failure. “Fragmentary memory” therefore does not name one single defect but several ways in which the footholds needed for orientation can become unavailable or disconnected.

 

3.8 Distributed memory: signs, artifacts, and collective remembering as scaffolds of orientation

 

Orientation is often stabilized externally. Stegmaier argues that signs “etch themselves” into memory and become crucial elements of the memory of our orientation (Stegmaier, 2019, 68). He also treats commemoration and collective memory as social practices that preserve orientational resources across time (Stegmaier, 2019, 277).

The term scaffolding describes such supportive structures. Just as physical scaffolding allows construction to proceed, cognitive scaffolding supports tasks that would otherwise be more difficult. Signs, written records, navigation systems, rituals, and institutions can all reduce the burden placed on internal memory.

Collective memory research similarly examines patterned remembering and forgetting within groups (Roediger & Abel, 2015). Collective memory does not mean that a group literally possesses one shared mind. It refers to the narratives, symbols, commemorations, and practices through which communities preserve and organize representations of the past. These shared structures influence what is repeatedly recalled, what is marginalized, and what becomes significant for group identity and future action.

Under an orientational interpretation, memory is therefore not only an internal trace but a distributed infrastructure. Signs, records, institutions, and rituals stabilize footholds across people and generations. At the same time, changes to these scaffolds, such as the removal of monuments, loss of records, or contestation of public narratives, can alter the conditions under which communities orient themselves toward their past and future.

 

4) Metaphors of memory in contemporary research: An orientational reading

 

If memory is approached as an orientation technology, then theoretical language shapes what counts as stability, loss, access, error, and reorientation. Contemporary memory research regularly relies on metaphors that are already orientational in character, such as access, cueing, control, integration, scaffolding, and these metaphors implicitly organize how memory’s strengths and weaknesses are understood. Stegmaier’s work is useful here because it makes explicit what research presupposes implicitly: memory is not a storehouse, but an orientation mechanism that relies on footholds under uncertainty (Stegmaier, 2008, 308; Stegmaier, 2019, 84).

 

4.1 Inscription/Archive vs. Orientation Technology

 

One influential family of metaphors pictures memory as inscription or archive. In this picture, the past is deposited and later retrieved; stability is preservation; forgetting is loss; and disorientation is failure because the right record is missing or damaged. This archive imagery is easily activated when engrams are described as “transcriptions” (Stegmaier, 2008, 308). It also aligns with everyday practices of writing, recording, and documenting. As a result, it can feel natural and explanatory.

However, the archive metaphor carries an orientational bias. It encourages a binary contrast—stored vs. not stored—and invites the expectation that successful memory is faithful read-out. Yet an orientational account (including Stegmaier’s) is not designed to privilege exhaustiveness or faithful reproduction. Stegmaier emphasizes selective retention, associative recombination, and actualization and he treats misfires as a structural possibility of remembering (Stegmaier, 2008, 308). If an archival metaphor dominates, it can reintroduce the very archive-ideal that an orientational approach tries to replace: memory gets measured by completeness and correctness rather than by whether it provides workable footholds for ongoing orientation.

4.2 Dynamic consolidation: stability as maintained achievement

 

Contemporary consolidation theory supports a different picture of stability. Dudai et al. (2015) define consolidation as transformation over time of representations and their neural underpinnings, involving recurrent reactivations during wakefulness and sleep, redistribution across systems, and integration into existing knowledge. In that framework, long-term memory is not adequately described as a fixed deposit preserved unchanged; stability is compatible with transformation. A memory can remain stable in the practical sense that it continues to support reorientation, while being reorganized through integration and redistribution.

For an orientation-technology thesis, the consequence is straightforward: footholds are not best pictured as static possessions but as maintained achievements. What matters is not only whether something exists “in storage,” but whether it remains retrievable under current cues and states, and how it has been integrated into a broader orientational economy. This aligns closely with Stegmaier’s claim that memory often functions “self forgotten,” as an infrastructure relied upon rather than inspected (Stegmaier, 2019, 84). It also shifts the interpretation of forgetting from simple erasure to changes in accessibility, competition, and integration.

 

4.3 Access, cueing, and context: metaphors already doing orientational work

 

A striking feature of contemporary memory research is how often it speaks in explicitly orientational terms without naming them as such. The availability/accessibility distinction already frames memory in terms of what can be reached under present conditions rather than what is abstractly stored (Tulving & Pearlstone, 1966). Encoding specificity makes cueing central: retrieval depends on the relation between encoding and retrieval conditions and the cues that reinstate relevant aspects of the prior situation (Tulving & Thomson, 1973). Both frameworks shift explanatory weight away from a storage-house model and toward a model in which memory’s success depends on orientational conditions; what cues are present, what context is reinstated, what makes a trace usable now.

For my paper, the methodological point is that these metaphors are not merely stylistic. They guide interpretation. If memory is framed in terms of access and cueing, then failure is naturally interpreted as cue mismatch or access failure, not necessarily as loss of the trace. Disorientation can then be understood as a situation in which available cues do not connect to the footholds needed for reorientation; even when some trace remains available in principle. This dovetails with Stegmaier’s emphasis on inconspicuous forgetting and the structural possibility of disorientation through fragmentary memory (Stegmaier, 2008, 308; Stegmaier, 2019, 90).

 

4.4 Workspace, binding, control: metaphors of present-tense orientation

 

Working-memory models introduce another family of metaphors that are explicitly orientational: memory as workspace, binding, and control. These metaphors foreground present-tense organization rather than retrospective storage. If perception and identification require holding, integrating, and selecting information in real time, then memory is involved already at the level of making the world intelligible (Stegmaier, 2019, 85). The orientational consequence is that disorientation need not be interpreted primarily as long-term loss; it can also arise from failures of present integration, binding, or control. The “hold” that allows something to be grasped as something determinate is therefore not only a long-term resource but also a momentary achievement that depends on stabilizing and coordinating representations.

 

4.5 Scaffolding and external supports: distributed footholds

 

Finally, the orientational thesis implies that memory is not only internal. Stegmaier’s emphasis on signs as privileged supports such as elements that “etch themselves” into memory and become central for the memory of orientation (Stegmaier, 2019, 68), already points beyond the skull. The extended mind thesis makes this explicit by arguing that external artifacts can become constitutive parts of cognitive systems when they reliably play the functional role of internal memory (Clark & Chalmers, 1998). In this vocabulary, scaffolding is not a mere aid but a part of the orientational infrastructure itself. The consequence is that stability and disorientation can be socially and materially produced: environments and practices can make certain footholds readily available (signs, records, rituals), while changes to these scaffolds can destabilize shared orientation.

This chapter’s point is not that different metaphors foreground different functional dimensions of memory as an orientation technology, and they therefore shape what memory is taken to be for. Archive/inscription metaphors privilege preservation and fidelity; access/cueing metaphors privilege conditions of retrieval and context; workspace/control metaphors privilege present integration; scaffolding metaphors privilege distributed supports. Making these metaphoric explicit shows how many dominant research frameworks already move from a storage-house picture toward an orientational picture, even when they do not name it as such. In that sense, the metaphor analysis is a way of clarifying how memory’s trade-offs; stability and change, economy and loss, flexibility and misfire, become intelligible once memory is treated as an orientational system rather than a data store.

 

5) Conclusion

 

I have argued that memory is better understood as an orientation technology than as a storage house. Its central function is not to preserve the past in complete and unchanged form, but to make recognition, judgment, and action possible under changing conditions. Stegmaier captures this by describing memory as “imperceptible” and “self forgotten”: it supports orientation largely in the background, without becoming a constant object of attention (Stegmaier, 2008, 308; Stegmaier, 2019, 84).

Contemporary memory research supports this idea. It shows that memory is stabilized and transformed over time, that it selects and prioritizes rather than preserving everything equally, and that remembering is reconstructive and dependent on cues and context. Memory also reaches beyond the individual through language, signs, artifacts, and collective practices. These findings support a view of memory as a flexible system that continuously adapts past experience to present and future needs.

This flexibility comes with costs. The same processes that make memory efficient and useful also produce omissions, distortions, and failures of access. These are not simply accidental defects. They follow from the structure of a system that must reduce complexity, select what matters, and remain responsive to changing situations.

The paper has also shown that the metaphors used to describe memory matter. An archival metaphor emphasizes preservation and loss, whereas metaphors of access, cueing, reactivation, and scaffolding present memory as a dynamic and distributed process. Understanding memory as an orientation technology therefore offers a more coherent way to grasp both its strengths and its vulnerabilities: memory keeps orientation possible by making enough of the past available, usable, and adaptable for the demands of the present.

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Saskia Janina Neumann is a philosopher and Social Media Manager at the Foundation for Philosophical Orientation. She received her Ph.D. in Analytic Philosophy from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest in 2025 with a dissertation on the justification of beliefs and the role of memory. She also holds master’s degrees in Philosophy from the University of Erfurt and in Cognitive Sciences from the University of Kaiserslautern, and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Computational and Cognitive Neuroscience at Eötvös Loránd University.

Her research lies at the intersection of epistemology, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and philosophy of technology, with particular interests in memory, knowledge, selfhood, artificial intelligence, and epistemic agency. Her recent work has examined topics such as robot epistemology, behavior-based robotics, the extended mind in AI, and the ethics of non-agentive artificial intelligence. She has presented her research at conferences across Europe and has published on epistemology, memory, cognition, and artificial intelligence.

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