Belief from the Past

European Journal of Philosophy 20 (4):598-620 (2010)
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Abstract

Abstract: A person who remembers having done something has a belief that she did it from having done it. To have a belief that one did something from having done it is to believe that one did the action on the (causal) basis of having done it, where this belief (in order for one to have it) need not be (causally) based even in part on any contributor to the belief other than doing the action. The notion of a contributor to a belief (as opposed to a mere facilitating cause of the belief) is explicated through a series of examples. The account of having a belief that one did something from having done it is then deployed in criticising Ginet's account of ‘memory connection’, in assessing Martin and Deutscher's causal theory of remembering, in indicating how diachronic justification functions in a nontraditional theory of memory, and in setting forth one type of psychological connectedness which, according to advocates of a psychological continuity theory of personal identity, may be employed (noncircularly) in formulating the theory, and which, according to opponents of the theory, provides a target for criticising the theory

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Andrew Naylor
Indiana University South Bend

Citations of this work

Preservationism in the Epistemology of Memory.Matthew Frise - 2017 - Philosophical Quarterly 67 (268).
Distributed traces and the causal theory of constructive memory.John Sutton & Gerard O'Brien - 2023 - In Current Controversies in the Philosophy of Memory. Routledge. pp. 82-104. Translated by Andre Sant' Anna, Christopher McCarroll & Kourken Michaelian.
Justification and Forgetting.Andrew Naylor - 2015 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 96 (3):372-391.

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References found in this work

Reasons and Persons.Derek Parfit - 1984 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
An essay concerning human understanding.John Locke - 1689 - New York: Oxford University Press. Edited by Pauline Phemister.
The Problem of Knowledge.Alfred Jules Ayer - 1956 - New York,: Harmondsworth.
Personal identity.Sydney Shoemaker - 1984 - Oxford, England: Blackwell. Edited by Richard Swinburne.

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