Remembering objects

Abstract

Conscious recollection, of the kind characterised by sensory mental imagery, is often thought to involve ‘episodically’ recalling experienced events in one’s personal past. One might wonder whether this overlooks distinctive ways in which we sometimes recall ordinary, persisting objects. Of course, one can recall an object by remembering an event in which one encountered it. But are there acts of recall which are distinctively objectual in that they are not about objects in this mediated way (i.e., by way of being about events in which they featured)? This question has broad implications, not least for understanding the nature and role of imagery in remembering, the requirements of memory-based singular thought about objects, and the sense in which remembering involves ‘mental time travel’ through which one ‘relives’ past events. In this paper, I argue that we sometimes do recall objects from our past without remembering events in which they featured. The positive view of such cases I go on to propose draws on a wide body of empirical work in its support and accommodates a more nuanced picture of the role of imagery in remembering. Succinctly, remembering might essentially involve a kind of ‘re-experiencing’, but it need not involve ‘reliving’.

Experiential Attitude Reports

“…The latter include objectual attitude reports (e.g. (32); see Forbes, 2000; Grzankowski, 2013; Openshaw, 2022) that share the syntactic structure of (29h). In contrast to (30), these reports do not assert the agent's relation to a single, specific event or scene (see the non‐availability of the event‐interpretation in (32b)).…”

(In defence of) preservationism and the previous awareness condition: What is a theory of remembering, anyway?

“…On such a view, what distinguishes such knowledge is that it is about experiences or the phenomenal qualities thereof 16. An alternative view is that remembering can at least sometimes consist in the activation of knowledge that simply concerns the perceptible qualities of past events or objects, while nevertheless being knowledge somehow grounded in experience (Openshaw 2022). 17 At any rate, against all epistemic theorists, there are those who deny that either remembering (PQ) or referential remembering (RQ) entail successful remembering (AQ).…”

The repair shop of memory

“… 2 There might be other ways of remembering objects that do not involve recalling events in which they featured (Openshaw 2022). Our concern in this paper is not with these forms of “objectual” recall, but rather the way in which objects can in fact scaffold memories of (specific) events or experiences that are associated with them.…”