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.
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Notes
Similarly for ‘S perceives that p’ and ‘S has a perception that p’, as opposed to ‘S apparently perceives that p’, ‘S has an apparent perception that p’ and ‘S has a perceptual experience that p’.
I borrow these terms from Endel Tulving (1972).
I discuss two other aspects of the phenomenology of episodic memory in Fernandez (2006).
I am taking this term from Bertrand Russell (1961).
See Brown et al. (1985) for details.
I am not suggesting that this approach is not worth pursuing. I explore it in Fernandez (2007).
The idea that there are different kinds of truth-conditions is not new. It can be found in the literature on indexicals. See, for instance, John Perry (1999). The (in my view, corresponding) idea that there are different kinds of content for mental states is not new either. It can be found in the two-dimensionalism literature. See David Chalmers (2002), for instance.
Since I will be assuming this view on the nature of propositions, I will occasionally speak of possible worlds belonging to propositions, or propositions containing possible worlds. Also, I will be somewhat loose in my use of the expressions ‘possible situation’ and ‘possible world’, which I will use interchangeably. Strictly speaking, talk of a possible situation should be understood as referring to a possible world where the situation is the case. Hopefully this will cause no confusion.
To my knowledge, the best case for the view that perceptual experiences have different kinds of content can be found in Chalmers (2006).
Otherwise, our intuition about the veridicality of E may not tell us much about which kind of entity its truth-maker is. Instead, it may provide us with information about what the truth-maker of E would have been under different circumstances.
Our intuition that E is false in B, for instance, is informative for these purposes: It suggests that causal facts are relevant for the selection of E’s truth-maker in the situation where it occurs.
The converse is not true: The fact that there is such a memory experience and possible situation does not show that the proposal is making it too difficult for possible situations to count as being accurately represented by the experience. It only shows that the proposal is drawing the line that separates those possible situations that are well represented by the experience from those that are not at the wrong place in logical space. I am thankful to an anonymous referee for correcting me on this point.
The converse is not true: The fact that there is such a memory experience and possible situation does not show that the proposal is making it too easy for possible situations to count as being accurately represented by the experience. I am thankful to an anonymous referee for correcting me on this point as well.
See Friedman (2001) for this distinction.
This seems to have been the guiding idea behind the so-called ‘time-tagging theories’ of memory in psychology. Thus, in Tzeng (1976), it was hypothesized that the outputs of some organic pacemaker might be associated with perceived events, which could encode temporal information for later retrieval in memory.
There are some intimations of this view in Edmund Husserl’s writings on memory. Thus, in (1964, 82), he writes (my emphasis): “I remember the lighted theatre of yesterday [...]. Accordingly, the theatre hovers before me in the representation as something actually present. I mean this, but at the same time I apprehend this present as lying back in reference to the actual present of perceptions now extant. [...] What is remembered appears as having been present, that is, immediately and intuitively. And it appears in such a way that a present intuitively appears which is at an interval from the present of the actual now.”
It is sometimes argued that time travel is not logically possible (in which case, there is no such world as W3). The prima facie challenge for the logical possibility of time travel concerns the paradoxes of time travel. These paradoxes are sometimes taken to show that the very notion of time travel is incoherent. Chief among these paradoxes are the following two. If you could travel in time, you could kill your father before you were conceived. But if you killed him, you would not be born and, therefore, you would not be there to kill him in the first place. Thus, it seems that you could only succeed in the killing if you failed, which is absurd. Also, if you could travel in time, you could meet yourself at some earlier time of your life. But if you found yourself at some earlier time of your life, then you would be wholly in two places at the same time, which is equally absurd.
Whether or not these paradoxes indeed reveal that time travel is logically impossible, it seems that the difficulties they raise can be largely avoided by considering a slightly modified time travel scenario, which we may call ‘recurrence.’ Suppose that, in W3*, I am given the option to re-live a portion of my life starting some time before 1980. I can make it the case that the current time becomes, let us say, 1/1/1979. However, it will not be up to me to change anything in my life. I can only, so to speak, ‘rewind’ time. So I just get to re-experience the past events of my life all over again. In the recurrence scenario, I cannot meet myself in the past. Similarly, I cannot exist before I was born. This allows us to sidestep the two time travel paradoxes above. Nonetheless, it seems conceivable that, when I start to re-live my childhood days before 1980, I could have experiences such as M. This is all we really need in order to make the point that W3 is meant to illustrate. For the sake of simplicity, though, I will ignore these complications and keep using the traditional variety of time travel presented in W3 (as opposed to the ‘recurrence’ variety presented in W3*).
In the terminology from David Lewis (1976), my perception of the gorilla is in my ‘personal past’ even though it is not in the ‘objective past’.
John Searle seems to have had this view in mind when he claimed that memory is causally self-referential. Searle introduces causal self-referentiality as a feature of the intentionality of perception in (1983, 48). Commenting on the extension of that idea to the intentionality of memory, he adds: “The memory of seeing the flower represents both the visual experience and the flower and is self-referential in the sense that, unless the memory was caused by the visual experience which in turn was caused by the presence of (and features of) the flower, I didn’t really remember seeing the flower.” (1983, 85)
If someone claimed that she seems to remember something but she does not have any views on whether she seems to have perceived it or she seems to have imagined it, then we would be inclined to attribute a semantic memory of that event to her, as opposed to an episodic memory of it. Once you seem to remember a certain event (in the episodic sense of ‘remember’), the question of whether you seem to have perceived it or not is no longer open to you.
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for suggesting this objection.
In Michael Martin’s terminology from (1992), the memory is ‘faithful’ even if it is not ‘correct’. (Basically, correct memories accurately represent past events whereas faithful memories match the perceptual experiences they are based upon.)
Recently, Michael Martin has argued for a stronger position than the position sketched in this objection. In Martin (2001, 278), he seems to suggest that there is a single dimension of evaluation for memories, and matching the relevant original perceptual experience is all it takes for a memory experience to be correct. This proposal was originally put forward by Wolfgang Von Leyden in (1961). It does not really speak to the issue of the feeling of pastness and, for that reason, it is outside the scope of this essay. However, it seems to me that cases like W4 can be used, together with the analogy with testimony, to illustrate that our intuitions about the truth-conditions of memories do not fit with that proposal. I discuss Von Leyden and Martin’s views in (2006).
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for suggesting this interesting case.
This seems highly plausible to me but, in any case, the advocate of VM does not need to endorse this claim. Even if it turned out to be nomologically possible that some effect precedes its cause, it seems that, as a matter of fact (if not as a matter of law), causes precede their effects. For the purposes of explaining our inclination to treat the feeling of pastness as the experience of temporal properties, this is all the advocate of VM really needs.
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Fernandez, J. Memory and time. Philos Stud 141, 333–356 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9177-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9177-x