Abstract

The majority of psychologists studying memory think that one or another information processing model of memory should explain how human memory works and take computer memory to be its model. They say that: we remember because we store, in our brains, all that we know and know how to do; our minds are the Mind juggling "mental representations" stored in the Memory; recognition is matching an object of perception and its stored "representation", it is knowledge. The purpose of this dissertation is twofold: to demolish IPMM as misleading and useless and to introduce a competing theory of human memory. Some of my theses are: Historically, there have been two theories of memory as related to the brain, these of Aristotle and of William James. In the nineteenth century, the psychology of memory chose 'the wrong theory of evolution' with which it has since stayed. It was Spencer's epistemology that the psychology of memory mistook for a theory of evolution; it was the Darwinian one that the mainstream psychology totally disregarded. IPMM, whose formula is 'memory: computer + the mammalian brain', are only Spencerian, anti-Darwinian versions of Aristotle's theory of memory storage. The most enduring postulate of psychology-memory is storage in the brain, an empirical proposition, has to be given up because it does not have evidence for its support and because there is empirical evidence that the brain which IPMM demand does not exist. Recognition is the only demonstration of cognitive memory common to all mammalian brains, only this demonstration of human memory does not require language. Recognition demonstrates mere familiarity with, not knowledge of, objects, events, sciences, etc; multiple choice tests test mere recognition, not knowledge. The theses pertaining to the theory of memory storage are developed in the first four chapters and are followed by the chapter devoted to William James's Darwinian psychological scheme and my reconstruction of his theory of memory. In the last chapter modifications to James's theory of memory are considered