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Is memory preservation?

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Notes

  1. Traditionally, the specious present has been taken to be a moving window that reveals a constant-length stretch of the stream of consciousness. My view is that the specious present is event- or act-based rather than time-based. The temporal duration of acts of awareness varies with the duration of the acts at which they are directed. And my awareness of saying my name is not unified with my awareness of other things going on at the same time.

  2. Some philosophers, including Burge, suggest that imagistic content is non-propositional. I don’t agree with this: in my view, images are one way to express propositional content; sentences are another. I would therefore prefer to contrast sentential, or linguistically coded, memory from imagistic, or qualia-coded, memory. The point is not important to my present concerns.

  3. Construed in the latter way, this sentence expresses different propositions at different times, for as G. E. Moore remarks: “if I say twice over “Caesar was murdered,” the proposition which I express on each occasion is a different one—the first being a proposition with regard to the earlier of the two times at which I use the words, to the effect that Caesar was murdered before that time, and the second a proposition with regard to the latter of the two, to the effect that he was murdered before that time” (quoted by Salmon 1989, p. 344).

  4. Alex Byrne, this issue, makes a similar point.

  5. Alex Byrne seems to disagree with this in his contribution to this symposium: he does not think that pastness is a part of the experience of episodic memory.

  6. You may think that in observer-perspective memories don’t centre the self, that the child seems distinct from the person who is remembering. This is not correct. The remembering Freud effortlessly and immediately identifies the child as himself.

  7. I don’t mean to suggest that episodic memory doesn’t also have both forms of spatial coding simultaneously. I don’t know whether they do or not. But they are so coded that the egocentric and the allocentric are not experienced together.

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  1. University of Toronto, 70 Alexander Street, 806, Toronto, ON, M4Y 3B6, Canada

    Mohan Matthen

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Correspondence to Mohan Matthen.

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I could not have written this paper without Jennifer Nagel’s help. The paper was originally delivered in a symposium on memory at the meetings of the American Philosophical Association (Pacific Division) meetings in Vancouver in 2009. I am grateful to my co-symposiasts, Alex Byrne, John Sutton, and Becko Copenhaver, and to Sven Bernecker and Jordi Fernandez, for helpful comments and discussion. Alex also had helpful comments on the penultimate draft.

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Matthen, M. Is memory preservation?. Philos Stud 148, 3–14 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9501-8

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