Abstract
This paper explores the relationship between a prominent version of the relational view of memory and recent work on forms of unsuccessful remembering or memory errors. I argue that unsuccessful remembering poses an important challenge for the relational view. Unsuccessful remembering can be divided into two kinds: misremembering and confabulating. I discuss each of these cases in light of a recent relational account, according to which remembering is characterized by an experiential relation to past events, and I argue that experiential relations do not adequately distinguish between remembering and unsuccessful remembering. This is because there are, on the one hand, cases of remembering that do not instantiate the relevant experiential relations, and, on the other hand, cases of confabulation and misremembering that do instantiate the relevant experiential relations. I conclude by suggesting that any successful relationalist attempt to explain remembering needs to come to grips with unsuccessful remembering.
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Notes
Debus frames this idea in terms of the original experience and the memory being in the same “spatiotemporal path” traced by the subject in the world. According to her, by inhabiting the world, subjects trace a certain “spatiotemporal path”, and to count as remembering something, the spatiotemporal point in which the memory occurs must precede the spatiotemporal point in which the experience occurred, and both must belong to the same “spatiotemporal path”.
For a more detailed discussion of why relational views of perception are incompatible with representational views, see Crane (2006), Genone (2016), Locatelli and Wilson (2017). In what follows, I will take it for granted that one of the motivations for developing a relational account of memory is to avoid a representationalist account. As mentioned above, it is true that Debus (2008) does not discuss this opposition in her paper, but I take it that, in addition to her heavy reliance on the naïve realist/relationalist literature in perception, the absence of any reference to ‘representations’, ‘content’, ‘intentional properties’, ‘accuracy conditions’, and other similar terms that have been systematically utilized by representationalists allows us to safely conclude that she intends her relational view as an alternative account to representationalist accounts, even if she does so only implicitly. One may, of course, plausibly argue that her view is committed to the presence of representations, but since Debus (2008) is silent on this issue, settling it would require a much closer exegetical analysis of her work, a task that is beyond the scope of this paper.
It is important to note that representationalism, at least as understood in the context of the literature discussed here, is only committed to the claim that memory is a representational state at the personal level. This is what it means to say that representationalism and relationalism are opposing accounts of memory as a mental state. More recently, some have argued that memory is not representational in the sense that the subpersonal processes responsible for producing memories (understood as mental states) do not involve the manipulation of representations (e.g., Hutto and Myin 2017; Hutto and Peeters 2018; see Michaelian and Sant’Anna 2019 for discussion). The issue of whether memory understood as a mental state is representational is, as these authors recognize, independent of whether memory processes involve the manipulation of representations. Thus, whether or not a view is committed to the idea that memory processes involve the manipulation of representations at the subpersonal level is tangential to the issue separating representationalism and relationalism in the way that these views are understood here.
While some may view the argument developed in the paper as an implicit endorsement of representationalism, I shall not take a firm stand on the subject here. Recent work on the dispute between representationalism and relationalism in philosophy of perception suggests that they are not mutually exclusive views and hence that “hybrid” views are possible (see Schellenberg 2010, 2011; Siegel 2010; Logue 2014; Hanna 2015; Sant’Anna 2018b). In fact, in a recent paper, Sant’Anna (2020) has made a first attempt to propose a hybrid account of memory along these lines. Another promising approach would be to think about hybrid views in relation to the distinction between conceptual and nonconceptual content (see Russell and Hanna 2012; Hanna 2015). In particular, the notion of nonconceptual content developed by Hanna (2015), which sits at the core of his hybrid account of perception, seems to provide a promising starting point for hybrid approaches to memory. This is because, once we understand spatiotemporal representations in episodic memory within a Kantian framework, as has been suggested by Russell and Hanna (2012) and Hanna (2015), we can have a view that avoids various pressing problems for relational approaches to memory, such as the co-temporality problem and the problem of how we can be directly aware of the past (see Bernecker 2008; Sant’Anna and Michaelian 2019), while at the same time preserving core relationalist and representationalist claims. Since, however, hybrid approaches still continue to be largely unexplored in the memory literature, I will not discuss them any further.
In a more recent paper, Debus (2010) offers an analysis of remembering that tries to supplement the analysis offered by the causal theory of memory (see footnote 6) by adding an extra criterion, not present in the causal theory itself, according to which a subject counts as remembering only if the memory representation is epistemically relevant for the subject—i.e., the subject believes that he is remembering. In the following discussion, I will not appeal to the Debus’s 2010 paper in my attempt to outline an analysis of remembering in line with the relational view for two reasons. The first is that it is not obvious how the 2010 paper relates to the 2008 paper, which is the focus of my discussion. As I pointed out before, there are good reasons to view the 2008 paper as an attempt to provide a non-representational account of memory. However, due to its close reliance on the analysis offered by the causal theory of memory, which has often been interpreted as a representational account—and, in my view, rightly so, for one of the conditions it ascribes to remembering makes explicit reference to accuracy conditions—the 2010 paper seems to be in tension with the overall proposal of the 2008 paper. It may be that they belong to two different projects, or that Debus simply changed her mind, but since it is beyond my scope to provide a comprehensive criticism of her work, I will not speculate any further here. The second reason why the 2010 paper will not be further discussed is because, even if we were to set aside the worries about the coherence of the views defended in the 2008 and the 2010 paper, the novel condition discussed by the 2010 paper—the epistemic relevance condition—would not help addressing the problems raised later on in the paper, for all the cases discussed there are epistemically relevant for the subject.
Although see Bernecker (2008, ch. 5), who claims that the presence of representations in memory is not incompatible with a form of direct realism. I will leave this issue aside as it is not clear whether Bernecker’s view is a genuine form of direct realism.
One worry that one may have here is that relying on Martin and Deutscher’s (1966) classical analysis is unfair to the relationalist. This is because Martin and Deutscher’s view is allegedly a representational one and, as such, the analysis provided by them is bound to be incompatible with relationalism. In response, I would like to make it clear that the reasons for relying on Martin and Deutscher’s analysis are two: first, it is by far the most prominent analysis of remembering in the recent literature, so it has shaped virtually all subsequent attempts at such an analysis; and second, and more importantly, alternative causal theories of remembering, including Debus’s (2008) relational account, have relied on Martin and Deutscher’s account more or less systematically (see Michaelian and Robins 2018 for discussion). More to the point, though, the fact that Martin and Deutscher’s original analysis is a representational analysis does not harm my current project. Condition (R1), which is the same as Martin and Deutscher’s condition (1), and condition (R2), which is the relational version of Martin and Deutscher’s condition (3), are non-representational conditions, and consequently, they do not require any commitment to representationalism—the representational conditions, (2) and (4), have been consistently rejected precisely because they rely on a form of representationalism. Moreover, the motivation for endorsing conditions (R1) and (R2) do not come from some veiled commitment to Martin and Deutscher’s original theory; instead, these conditions reflect central claims of the relational view espoused by Debus, as was discussed in more detail above.
At this point, some relationalists might want to object that they do not need to be concerned with this, as what I am calling “unsuccessful remembering” is not actually a form of remembering, but a mental state of another kind entirely. I address this objection in more detail in the next section.
I should say that this is not necessarily what Robins understands by misremembering. For Robins, “[m]isremembering is a memory error that relies on successful retention of the targeted event” (2016a, 433), which is paradigmatically illustrated by the DRM effect, where the content of what is misremembered is non-trivially related to the content of what is remembered or retrieved—e.g., subjects are more likely to misremember seeing particular fruits, such as bananas, if the content of what is remembered or retrieved also involves fruits, such as apples and oranges. The definition of misremembering that I am using here does not require such a non-trivial relation. According to this definition, one misremembers if the content of what is misremembered was not originally experienced.
With the exception of a few remarks about “memory hallucinations”, Debus (2008) says very little about memory errors, so the criticism that I will present in the following sections relies mostly on a characterization of unsuccessful remembering at play in recent debates in the philosophical literature. How to characterize memory errors and how to account for them are lively and controversial questions in the current literature, so I shall not take a stand on them, but the basic distinction between misremembering and confabulating utilized here seems to be relatively uncontroversial. For more discussions about misremembering and its relationship to current theories of remembering, see Robins (2016a) and Michaelian (2016b). For discussions about confabulation in particular, see Hirstein (2005), Robins (2018), and Michaelian (2018), and for discussions about the relationship of confabulation to current theories of remembering, see Michaelian (2016b, 2018), Bernecker (2017), and Robins (2018, 2019).
As I will argue below, it fails to account for cases of veridical confabulations (Michaelian 2016b).
I am not suggesting here that Debus (2008) herself is committed to partial experiential relations. While I believe that her view does not require us to commit to full experiential relations, I think that such a commitment is an underlying assumption of her proposal. However, as I will argue in what follows, the commitment to full experiential relations leaves relationalists with an overly restrictive account of remembering in light of research on the constructive character of remembering. Appealing to partial experiential relations, I will suggest, is the best way to avoid this worry in a relationalist framework.
One worry here is that it is difficult to see how a subject could enjoy a single and unified conscious experience of remembering an event if multiple experiential relations constitute a single memory. For my present purposes, I am taking this for granted since, as it will become clear later, I think that appealing to partial experiential relations is the best strategy available for relationalists to make sense of the constructive character of remembering. However, if this turns out to be correct, then the question of how multiple experiential relations allow for a unified conscious experience in remembering will need to be properly addressed by relationalists. This point is discussed in more detail below.
I’m indebted to an anonymous referee for raising this objection.
I’m grateful to Sarah Robins for calling my attention to this issue.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Kirk Michaelian, Sarah Robins, Steve James, Cathy Legg, Bill Fish, and Andrew Moore for comments on previous drafts of this paper. I am also grateful to two anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions. This work is supported by the French National Research Agency in the framework of the “Investissements d’avenir” program (ANR-15-IDEX-02).
Funding
Funding was provided by Agence Nationale de la Recherche (Grant No. ANR-15-IDEX-02).
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Sant’Anna, A. Unsuccessful Remembering: A Challenge for the Relational View of Memory. Erkenn 87, 1539–1562 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00261-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00261-0