Work across a range of different disciplines appeals to the notion of forgetting that occurs at the level of a group, with talk of collective forgetting, or social amnesia, for instance. Is there a way of understanding this kind of idiom as anything more than either a metaphor, or a shorthand for what is happening at the level of the individuals who comprise a group? In this talk I first of all disambiguate what it would take for forgetting to be truly (or interestingly) social. I then describe two ways in which this could come about: the first explores ways of aggregating the individual attitudes I claim are involved in forgetting, such that the resulting attribution of forgetting at the group level could come apart from our attributions of forgetting to the group’s members. The second thinks of forgetting in functional terms, and allows that the manifestation of that function can differ between individual and group in ways that allow the two to come apart. I argue that the second avenue offers the more fruitful way of understanding collective forgetting.
