Cartesian critters can't remember
Section snippets
Memories and mere imaginings
You've lost your keys again. Consider two psychological acts you could perform in order to find them. You could remember where you left them. Or, if your memory fails, you could imagine where you might have left them. In either case, you would bring an idea to bear, such as an idea of keys resting in your coat pocket. In either case, your ability to bring this idea to bear would rely on traces left in your brain by previous sense experiences. Indeed, the distinct acts of memory and imagination
Memory as reconstruction recognized as such
Both remembering and imagining a past sensation produce a particular idea, such as the idea of keys resting in your coat pocket. Neither of these acts produce the relevant idea out of thin air. They recruit traces that past events have left in your brain, in order to construct an apt image for the situation at hand. The most obvious difference is that imagination sometimes cobbles together fresh images, whereas memory reconstructs previously sensed images. (I will call the latter phenomenon
Mechanizing the sensitive soul
Nowadays, philosophers and scientists use the term ‘memory’ variously to invoke declarative memory (including episodic memory and semantic memory), nondeclarative memory (including procedural memory), and memory traces, among other mental and neural phenomena (Squire, 2009). On my reading, Descartes taxonomized these cognitive functions in roughly the same way, and denied only declarative memory—the recognized reconstruction of particular ideas—to animals.16
Three interpretations of Descartes on sensory memory
Cartesian cats and dogs lack the ability to will themselves to remember, but their fancies do wander. Although the pineal gland swaying of its own accord usually results in the creation of obviously imaginary ideas, it sometimes results in true memories, even in the brains of soulless animals. Or so goes the corporealist interpretation of Descartes's theory of sensory memory.
Conclusion
I have argued that Descartes held the following account of declarative memory: to remember is to reconstruct an idea that you intellectually recognize as a reconstruction. To have an intellectual memory is to intellectually reconstruct a universal idea that you recognize as a reconstruction, and to have a sensory memory is to neurophysiologically reconstruct a particular idea that you recognize as a reconstruction.
More specifically, I have taken up the question of whether Descartes thought
Acknowledgements
This article results from a graduate career whiled away arguing about Descartes with Gary Hatfield. (I should have been writing my dissertation.) Thanks also to Patrick Ball, Dave Barack, Justin Bernstein, Colin Chamberlain, Andrew Chignell, Amelia Curry, David Curry, Karen Detlefsen, Martha Farah, Andree Hahmann, Nabeel Hamid, Jorge Secada, Jordan Taylor, and two extraordinarily thorough and thoughtful anonymous reviewers, as well as audiences at the 2015 Penn Workshop in the History and
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