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A Defense of Inner Awareness: The Memory Argument Revisited

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Abstract

The psychological reality of an inner awareness built into conscious experience has traditionally been a central element of philosophy of consciousness, from Aristotle, to Descartes, Brentano, the phenomenological tradition, and early and contemporary analytic philosophy. Its existence, however, has recently been called into question, especially by defenders of so-called transparency of experience and first-order representationalists about phenomenal consciousness. In this paper, I put forward a defense of inner awareness based on an argument from memory. Roughly, the idea is that since we can only recall something if we were aware of it at the time of its occurrence, and since we can recall our own experiences, we must be aware of our own experiences at the time of their occurrence. The argument is far from new: it goes back to the Buddhist tradition and has been revived more recently in Buddhist Scholarship but also in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind, in particular by Uriah Kriegel. However, I believe that, since it is the best extant argument for inner awareness, it deserves more extensive treatment. My goal is to strengthen the memory argument by (i) making some conceptual distinctions as to the exact thesis about inner awareness that the argument is supposed to support, (ii) considering different ways the argument may be reconstructed depending on the exact thesis to be supported, and (iii) defending the argument from a new objection, raised very recently by Daniel Stoljar.

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Notes

  1. Both higher-order representationalism (HOR) and self-representationalism (SR) explain inner awareness in terms of meta-representation: a subject S is aware of a mental state M in virtue of harboring a mental state M* that represents M. On HOR, M and M* are distinct states; on SR, they are the same state. As for HOR, see Armstrong (1968), Lycan (1996), and Rosenthal (1997). As for SR, see especially Kriegel (2009); see also Gennaro (1996), Carruthers (2000), Van Gulick (2004), and Frank (2015). For a collection of papers on SR, see Kriegel and Williford (2006).

  2. Here and throughout, “remembering” and “recalling” are treated as factive: remembering (or recalling) E implies that E occurred. “Seeming to remember” and “seeming to recall” are the non-factive counterparts of the verbs.

  3. The reasoning is partly inspired by Siewert (2004).

  4. This is very close to the way Kriegel (2019: 146) reconstructs the argument.

  5. Kriegel also considers an objection to P1 hinging on cases where S can correctly be said to remember E, but E’s occurrence was prior to S’s awareness of E. For example, I can correctly say that I remember the sun shining yesterday at 17:13, although what I was experiencing at 17:13 was really the way the sun was at 17:05 (given that it takes eight minutes for the light to get from the sun to my retina). He proposes two ways to deal with this: one is “to loosen sufficiently the relevant notion of simultaneity to allow for whatever additional time is needed for the causal process whereby E causes perception-of-E;” the other is “to restrict the scope of the first premise to ‘nearby events,’ understood as events for which there is no pertinent time lag between their occurrence and perceptual awareness of their occurrence.” (Kriegel 2019: 149). He opts for the latter, but I think that either option is satisfactory. I myself adopt the former and accordingly make no change to P1.

  6. Perhaps Stoljar’s idea is that construing “remembering the blue sky” as “representing the sky as having been blue” makes a dialectical difference, based on some transparency assumptions about memory. I am going to consider this below, and show that it fails to make the perceptual model more plausible.

  7. This paper benefitted from very helpful discussions with Davide Bordini, Arnaud Dewalque, and Uriah Kriegel. I am particularly grateful to Uriah Kriegel for generous and extensive comments on a previous draft.

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Giustina, A. A Defense of Inner Awareness: The Memory Argument Revisited. Rev.Phil.Psych. 13, 341–363 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-021-00602-0

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