Abstract
Episodic memory is sometimes described as mental time travel. This suggests three ideas: that episodic memory offers us access to the past that is quasi-experiential, that it is a source of knowledge of the past, and that it is, at root, passive. I offer an account of episodic memory that rejects all three ideas. The account claims that remembering is a matter of representing the past to oneself, in a way suitably responsive to how one experienced the remembered episode to be. I argue that episodic memory is active, in the way this view suggests. I clarify the idea that it is, as the view also implies, not a source of knowledge but an expression of knowledge the subject already has. And I suggest the view need not limit memories to states that are in any way experience-like. This position offers a way to articulate the relations between episodic memory and related phenomena: factual memory, generic memory, remembering-how and anticipation. And it allows us to explain how we know which aspects of our episodic memory states to take seriously and which (such as the shift to an observer perspective on the remembered events) to treat as merely incidental.
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Notes
The Representing to Self view has much in common with the position advocated in Martin and Deutscher 1966. They offer examples of subjects whose remembering takes the form of his painting a scene (167–8) and of reproducing a gesture (161–2). They also place the notion of representing centre stage in their account of remembering (166). While they are more explicit about these ideas than some, I think that in these respects their views are shared by a range of earlier writers (see Ryle 1949, Ayer 1956 and Russell 1921)—though matters are complicated by the fact that by no means all these thinkers distinguish episodic memory from other forms of remembering. In advocating RtS my goal is not so much to present a new view of memory as to tease out and defend some of the commitments of a view that has fallen into undue neglect.
(i) and (ii) together provide the substance of the idea that episodic remembering involves representing the past to oneself. The subject (i) acts to produce something that (ii) is manifestly a representation. She is the one to whom its status as a representation is manifest, and she the one who produces it. Contrast the rather different idea that episodic memory necessarily involves awareness of oneself (Perner 2000, Dokic 2001, Perrin 2010).
Some Direct Realists, for instance, take the phenomenology of perception to incorporate its relational nature, while allowing that the sub-personal states underpinning perception might involve mental representation, in the psychologist’s sense. See e.g. McDowell 1994.
While my notion of representation is richer than the psychologists’, other notions are richer still. Peter Goldie, for instance, describes what he calls ‘autobiographical memory’. This combines memory of various kinds (factual, episodic and generic) into a narrative representation of some portion of one’s past (see Goldie 2012: 43–44).
What of the idea, with a distinguished history in philosophy and psychology, that perception involves more than receptiveness to the world; it also requires a contribution from the perceptual system? Sensory stimulation must be filtered, organized and categorized in certain ways, if perception is to occur. That is not denied. What is rejected is the idea that such contributions by the perceptual system amount to our doing something, to some action we subjects undertake.
Recently, Alva Noë (2004) has defended a position that comes closer to giving genuine action an essential role in perception. There is neither space nor reason to address whether his position, read charitably, is inconsistent with the position in the text. My main thought is not that perception is passive, but that memory is active.
For a different claim about how mental action relates to trying, see Peacocke 2007.
Of course, I might remember other episodes. This might give a sense in which I succeed in casting my mind back to the time, but don’t remember the target episode. But that is just remembering other things while failing to remember the thing I wanted. It can hardly give a sense in which (b) is true, but (c) is not.
For a rather different account of the active and passive ingredients in episodic recall, see Soteriou 2008: 474–7.
Strictly, factivity should be restricted to states that take propositional contents. If so, memory displays a related feature: its non-propositional contents are necessarily accurate.
This feature of memory is not explicitly captured by RtS’s claims (I)L to (III)L. Since these are only intended as necessary for episodic remembering, we might accommodate factivity (or its like) by adding a fourth condition. In fact, however, I think the idea is implicit in (III)L, properly understood. For discussion of the analogous issue facing the Inclusion View, see Hopkins forthcoming §2.
The factivity of memory is of no interest to psychologists, some of whom are happy to speak, without qualification, of our remembering what did not occur. Given their interest in mechanisms and functionally defined processes, this is understandable: it is not unreasonable to expect that the working of those mechanisms can be fully described without reference to such normative notions as accuracy. From the point of view of the subject however, the distinction between accurate and inacccurate memory states is crucial, and it is hardly surprising that our everyday concept of memory encodes it. Respecting factivity is just one way in which I pursue an understanding of episodic memory and related mental phenomena that does justice to the perspective on them of conscious subjects.
Recent work has called into question the traditional distinction between knowledge-that and knowledge-how (Stanley and Williamson 2001). Perhaps the latter is a subset of the former, in which the proposition known involves some irreducibly perceptual or agential mode of presentation. Perhaps, then, know-how too involves belief. Even if so, the point above can stand. If all knowledge-how involves belief, the distinction between know-how and knowledge-that lies in the differing modes of presentation those beliefs involve. We can then appeal to a parallel difference to distinguish the knowledge episodic memory expresses from the belief formed on the back of remembering.
Some argue that memory is not purely preservative. That is, we can learn from memory things we neither knew nor were in a position to know before. These positions are consistent with the truism. Some of them hold that new information is made available in some forms of memory (Dokic 2001; Matthen 2010). But the truism doesn’t claim that memory is nothing but the retention of information, only that it is always in core part that. Others (Lackey 2005) assert that memory’s generative role lies in its altering the subject’s epistemic relation to a content—e.g. rendering known what was earlier merely believed. Here there is not even new information, only a changed epistemic relation to information retained.
In framing RtS above, I in effect presented it as defining episodic memory (for some episode E) in occurrent form. Dispositional memory (of E) is simply the ability to form such occurrent memories. One can possess that ability (with respect to E) whether or not one currently, or indeed ever, exercises it.
For a rather different view of the canonical manifestations of the dispositions at the heart of ‘autobiographical’ memory, see Coburn 2001.
Compare Matthew Soteriou’s attempt to ‘understand what is right in Sartre’s claim that “nothing can be learned from the image that is not already known,” without assimilating episodic memory to semantic memory’ (Soteriou 2008: 481).
By how it was, or by how it was experienced to be? There are two ways for episodic memory to lead us into error about the past. We might misremember how we earlier experienced things as being; or we might accurately remember experiences that themselves misrepresented the past event. Remembering the past event as being thus and so presumably requires that both sources of error be avoided (with respect to the relevant remembered feature). Remembering how we experienced things to be requires only that we avoid error of the first kind. For simplicity’s sake, I here ignore cases of this second form.
There is one difference between memory and perception: only in memory do the facts determine occurrent states via dispositions. Since only occurrent states are conscious, this does not prevent memory involving direct determination, as defined. More importantly, since neither the process by which a disposition is established nor that by which it is manifested is clearly anything but passive, the root worry remains: memory can be no more active than perception is.
There are representations of the past we describe as remembering how: e.g. in my remembering how you looked when you heard the terrible news. This, however, just is a case of episodic memory. As I use ‘remembering-how’, the term is limited to remembering how to φ.
A qualification is required. If I say ‘he is remembering how to’, I don’t refer to the disposition. On the other hand, nor do I refer to a straightforward manifestation of it. Rather, I mean that he is attempting to reanimate his knowledge of how to perform the action, to piece together the elements of a capacity he has currently lost.
This needs qualifying. If asked the date of the battle, I might feel I can do little more than guess. If I nonetheless get the answer right, haven’t I remembered? Perhaps, then, the claims above only apply to factual memories that are presented as such, or perhaps some other qualification is required. My thought is that the claims are true of the central cases of factual memory, however identified.
This is part of the Expression Schema. The rest is that the occurrent state represents a content, where what is there represented is the same content as is known in the disposition. As noted (§4), remembering-how doesn’t fit all of this. It does, however, fit the part here, and that is all I need for present purposes.
I am grateful to the Guest Editor, two anonymous referees, Yonatan Shemmer and audiences in Stockholm and Fribourg.
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Hopkins, R. Episodic Memory as Representing the Past to Oneself. Rev.Phil.Psych. 5, 313–331 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0184-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0184-5