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Remembering requires no reliability

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Abstract

I argue against mnemic reliabilism, an influential view that successful remembering must be produced by a reliable memory process. Drawing on empirical evidence from psychology and neuroscience, I refute mnemic reliabilism by demonstrating that: (1) patients with memory impairments (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease) can also successfully remember the past despite the unreliability of their corresponding memory processes; (2) some reliability-affecting factors (e.g., stress, divided attention, and insufficient encoding time) can render the memory processes of healthy individuals unreliable without preventing them from occasionally resulting in successful remembering. Potential responses available for mnemic reliabilism are also evaluated. I show that those responses are susceptible to a challenge akin to the generality problem for process reliabilism.

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Notes

  1. Generally, successful episodic remembering occurs whenever one remembers a past event successfully, which, among other conditions (as we will soon see), requires at least to recall the event accurately.

  2. Unless otherwise noted, throughout this paper, the term ‘memory’ typically refers to ‘episodic memory’.

  3. Most relevant psychological researches use ‘false memory’ (i.e., a fabricated or distorted recollection of an event) and ‘inaccurate memory’ interchangeably, as well as ‘accurate memory’ and ‘true memory’. This paper follows this convention.

  4. It is unclear whether other causalists have any principled reason to endorse reliabilism. However, there are some passages suggesting that their causalist proposals might at least be compatible with the reliability condition. For example, in commenting on Michaelian’s simulationist reliabilism, Bernecker (2017: 9) notes that we can hardly explain how our memory system manages to reliably produce accurate representations without invoking the causal connection between the past and present representation. Robins (2017: 11) also appears to be sympathetic to Michaelian’s idea of sustaining the causal connection required for remembering by a properly functioning memory system.

  5. For example, Fred Dretske, Timothy Williamson, and perhaps Michael Williams are arguably epistemologists sympathetic to both ETM and reliabilism, even though they did not explicitly advocate mnemic reliabilism.

  6. For sceptical voices from psychology, see Schacter (2022).

  7. Since Michaelian often questions the role that intuitions can play in a philosophical theory of memory (see, e.g., Michaelian 2016: Ch. 4), he might bite the bullet and endorse the counterintuitive claim that AD patients do not genuinely remember the past (thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this point). Leaving aside whether this claim is too counterintuitive to be acceptable, as we will soon see, it is also in conflict with psychological studies affirming that AD patients can remember. Therefore, this claim neither enjoys support from intuitions nor from empirical evidence.

  8. Hitherto, there is no generally accepted solution to this problem. For some influential proposals, see Beebe (2004), Comesaña (2006), Bishop (2010), and Kampa (2018). For criticisms, see Dutant and Olsson (2013), Matheson (2015), Conee (2013), and Tolly (2021), respectively.

  9. Beebe’s solution is discussed in more detail in Sect. 3.

  10. Thanks to two anonymous reviewers for raising this problem.

  11. Michaelian maintains that when one’s memory process functions unreliably, it malfunctions.

  12. Note that I do not intend to challenge MR3 by refuting MR1. Whether my arguments in this section constitute substantial challenges to MR1 depends on how widespread those reliability-affecting factors are in our daily lives.

  13. Note that nothing in my argument, however, hinges on assumptions that that the source monitoring process is constitutive of the remembering process (though some psychologists seem to think so, e.g., Johnson, 2001: 5258; Shabani et al., 2022: 5), or that source monitoring errors must be incompatible with genuine remembering. Given that the source monitoring framework is usually employed to explain the generation of false memories (see El Haj et al., 2020; Johnson et al., 1993), my point in alluding to source monitoring errors is just to analyse why divided attention tends to cause false memories.

  14. For more about the psychologically classic Remember/Know judgements, see Tulving (1985).

  15. Traumatized individuals are also found to be more susceptible to generating false memories (see Zoellner et al., 2000). It is also noteworthy that traumatic memories are more common than one might think. Bereavement, childhood neglect, domestic violence, emotional abuse, job loss, natural hazards and so on can all lead to traumas (Centre for Substance Abuse Treatment [US] 2014: Ch. 1).

  16. See Stephens et al. (2021) for a similar solution to the generality problem, according to which a process type is individuated in terms of the process of neural pattern activation.

  17. One might presume that the ordinary memory process is reliable. I have qualms about this presumption as it seems to assume (without argument) that there are two distinct types of memory processes: a memory process is ordinary only if it is reliable and any unreliable memory process is unordinary. It is unclear whether this presumption is empirically grounded. Moreover, reliabilists would beg the question if they use it to imply that successful remembering can only be produced by ‘the ordinary/reliable memory process’.

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Acknowledgements

This paper was presented at a lecture series of the Epistemology Summer School held by Xiamen University and the ‘Science and Technology, Philosophy and Society’ Young Scholars Forum held by Huanan Normal University. I sincerely thank all attendees for helpful discussions, in particular, Haiqiang Dai, Haibin Tian, and Wenjun Zhang. I also thank Lu Teng for writing comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

Funding

This work was supported by National Social Science Fund of China [grant number 22CZX065].

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  1. Department of Philosophy, School of Humanities, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, No. 800, Dongchuan Road, Minhang District, Shanghai, China

    Changsheng Lai

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Lai, C. Remembering requires no reliability. Philos Stud 181, 43–63 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-02073-8

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