Abstract
In Sven Bernecker’s excellent new book, Memory, he proposes an account of what we might call the “metasemantics” of memory: the conditions that determine the contents of the mental representations employed in memory. Bernecker endorses a “pastist externalist” view, according to which the content of a memory-constituting representation is fixed, in part, by the “external” conditions prevalent at the (past) time of the tokening of the original representation (the one from which the memory-constituting one is causally derived). Bernecker argues that the best version of a pastist externalism about memory contents will have the result that there can be semantically-induced memory losses in cases involving unwitting “world-switching”. The burden of this paper is to show that Bernecker’s argument for this conclusion does not succeed. My arguments on this score have implications for our picture of mind-world relations, as these are reflected in a subject’s attempts to recall her past thoughts.
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Notes
This account is developed in Burge (1993).
I think that Bernecker here means to be speaking, not of the subject’s thoughts about ‘water’ (that is, her metalinguistic thoughts), but rather her ‘water’-thoughts, that is, the thoughts she, the subject, expresses by using the word-form ‘water’.
Perhaps the thought is that the functional role of a term in one’s idiolect is “sticky”: once a term acquires a particular functional role, it can’t lose it (at least not without learning something new about the nature of the kind(s) to which the term applies). Of course, one need only make this point explicit to see that it is implausible as it stands. Whether a more refined version can be defended is something that remains to be seen. I am dubious.
They are WATER, TWATER, and the concept acquired on learning of the switching regimen—a concept whose functional role is different from that of both WATER and TWATER.
If this is what either Bernecker or Gibbons actually had in mind—and I am by no means certain of this!—then they have confused an epistemological issue with an issue in the metaphysics of mind. The epistemological issue is: given a subject who has more than one (subjectively-indistinguishable) ‘water’-concept associated with her term ‘water’, how can she (now) know which one was employed on a previous occasion on which she entertained a ‘water’-thought? But even if our subject doesn’t (now) know which ‘water’-concept she (then) employed, it is another matter entirely to say that she can’t access that concept (or the thoughts involving it).
In addition to what I will argue in the text above, the position as reconstructed here also appears to face a question of motivation in connection with its appeal to functional role considerations. Insofar as slow-switching cases give the subject a ‘water’-concept other than the one she originally had, as externalist views have it, and insofar as this new ‘water’-concept supplements (rather than replaces) the subject’s original ‘water’-concept, as the supplemental view has it, then the subject might make the sort of error in question: she might originally think a WATER-thought, yet on recollection (after a slow-switching regimen) regard that thought as a TWATER-thought. It would appear, then, that functional role considerations are a fifth wheel: they are not needed to secure the desired conclusion.
Of course, as with reference-preservation with anaphoric pronouns, so too here: the fact that a subject aims to be recalling a previously-tokened representation cannot override constraints that are built into the semantics of her expressions; but insofar as these constraints alone do not suffice to determine the content of a representation, and in particular leave it open whether that content involves WATER or TWATER, the fact that the subject aims to be recalling a previously-tokened representation can settle this matter. I discuss these sorts of consideration in Goldberg (2005, 2007b, c).
In this section I have claimed only that there is a strategy available to the pastist externalist who aims to avoid having to postulate semantically-generated memory failures in world-switching cases. I have argued that this strategy is available so long as our pastist externalist endorses the supplemental view and the non-amalgam view of the “semantics of switching.” In particular, nothing in Bernecker’s treatment of the metasemantics of memory addresses this strategy. However, the availability of this strategy need not be the final word on the semantics of switching: Goldberg (2005, 2007b, c).
References
Bernecker, S. (2009). Memory: A philosophical study. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Burge, T. (1993). Content preservation. Philosophical Review, 102(4), 457–488.
Gibbons, (1996). Externalism and knowledge of content. Philosophical Review, 105(3).
Goldberg, S. (2005). (Non-standard) lessons from world-switching cases. Philosophia, 32(1), 95–131.
Goldberg, S. (2007a). Anti-individualism: Mind and language, knowledge and justification. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goldberg, S. (2007b). Semantic externalism and epistemic illusion. In S. Goldberg (Ed.), Internalism and externalism in semantics and epistemology (pp. 235–252). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goldberg, S. (2007c). Anti-individualism, content preservation, and discursive justification. Noûs, 41(2), 178–203.
Acknowledgments
With thanks to Sven Bernecker for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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Goldberg, S.C. The metasemantics of memory. Philos Stud 153, 95–107 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9642-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9642-9