Memory and time

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to clarify the notion of mnemonic content. Memories have content. However, it is not clear whether memories are about past events in the world, past states of our own minds, or some combination of those two elements. I suggest that any proposal about mnemonic content should help us understand why events are presented to us in memory as being in the past. I discuss three proposals about mnemonic content and, eventually, I put forward a positive view. According to this view, when a subject seems to remember a certain event, that event is presented to her as making true a perceptual experience that caused the very memory experience that she is having.

The Philosophy of Memory Today and Tomorrow: Editors’ Introduction

“…The chapters making up the fi nal part of the book are all concerned, in one way or another, with the content and phenomenology of episodic and semantic memory. Rowlands , in his chapter, sets out the idea, developed in his own recent work ( Rowlands, 2017 ) and in that of others ( Fernández, 2008 ), that the content of a retrieved episodic memory must be understood as referring not only to the remembered episode but also to the location of the remembered episode in the subject's personal past, suggesting that the latter aspect of episodic memory content can be described using the Fregean notion of a mode of presentation. He argues further that this implies that the content of an episodic memory is not independent of the act of remembering and that this entails that remembering is reconstructive in character.…”

The Episodicity of Memory

“…A first basic question is why the episodically remembered event is conscious as reexperienced. Should one conceive of the feeling of pastness as resulting from a component of the memory content relating, for instance, to the causal role played by the perception of the past remembered event with respect to the memory (Perner 2000;Fernandez 2008)? Or ought one to contend that the feeling stems from a procedural feature of the retrieval process of the stored information (Jacoby et al 1989;Matthen 2010)?…”

Is memory preservation?

“…Episodic memory plays a very important role in the formation of memorial beliefs, but its role has been wildly exaggerated. Meinong, for example, says: ''Almost everybody would be willing to admit that I cannot remember something that I have not experienced'' (quoted by Fernandez 2008a). Though obviously false, much traditional epistemology of memory and memorial belief relies on the conception Meinong thus articulates.…”

“…What does an image of pastness look or sound like? Husserl was right when he said, ''in the case of memory, the appearance has a modified character, by virtue of which the object stands out not as present but as having been present'' (quoted by Fernandez 2008a). However, the modification that Husserl rightly demands cannot consist in changes in the imagistic content of the original perception.…”

“…On such an account, what one recalls in episodic memory are not merely past events, but also one's experiencing those events. But as Fernandez (2008a) has argued, this won't account for the felt pastness of the remembered events. For even if the pastness of the events remembered is inherited from the pastness of experiencing them, the question arises what marks our experience of past experience as such, as opposed to an experience of presently perceiving the same thing (or just imagining it).…”