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Feeling the Past: A Two-Tiered Account of Episodic Memory

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Abstract

Episodic memory involves the sense that it is “first-hand”, i.e., originates directly from one’s own past experience. An account of this phenomenological dimension is offered in terms of an affective experience or feeling specific to episodic memory. On the basis of recent empirical research in the domain of metamemory, it is claimed that a recollective experience involves two separate mental components: a first-order memory about the past along with a metacognitive, episodic feeling of knowing. The proposed two-tiered account is contrasted with other, reductionist two-tiered accounts as well as with reflexive accounts of episodic memory to be found in the literature.

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Notes

  1. See Hoerl (2001) for a philosopher’s discussion of the phenomenology of episodic memory. I should add that the present essay focuses on only one central aspect of the phenomenology of episodic memory. Other important aspects, such as those having to do with the relationship between episodic memory and emotions, have to be put to one side here.

  2. For instance, the notion of first-handedness should allow for the present memory to have several past personal sources, or to be the result of some amount of reconstruction from the previous experience.

  3. The question of whether all episodic memories feel episodic will be discussed in the last section, where a tentative “yes” answer will be offered.

  4. Throughout the essay the meaning of the adjective “first-order” must be understood as being relative to the second component in the two-tiered account, namely (to anticipate) a metacognitive feeling. Although the content of many “first-order” memories can be about the world (e.g., I remember the nice dinner with my friend the other night), others can have in fact higher-order, i.e., metarepresentational contents (e.g., I remember having thought that she was crazy). Some philosophers would claim that all “first-order” memories are in fact about our own past experiences, but what I have to say here is largely neutral with respect to this issue.

  5. See Dokic (2001). This non-sufficiency claim also receives some empirical support from Souchay et al. (2013), which shows that people with Autism are able to report the source of an item in an episodic memory task without reporting the phenomenology of episodic recollection.

  6. In the terminology of Recanati (2007), the conditions of satisfaction correspond to the “wide” or “complete” content of the memory state, which includes its “narrow” content, or what Recanati calls “the lekton”.

  7. See also my own attempt in Dokic (2001).

  8. Suppose that the subject entertains a first-hand memory content as merely a piece of visual imagery, and realizes only later that this mental content is a first-hand memory content. The subject’s later awareness does not have a reflexive content, but points outwards to a distinct state of visual imagery. Perhaps the subject eventually forms another mental state with a reflexive content, but strictly speaking that state would be a false episodic memory, because it does not itself originate directly from the relevant past visual experience.

  9. One might object to this argument that we can generate mental images with episodic-like content about a future state of affairs, as the literature on “mental time travel” suggests (see, e.g., Schacter and Addis 2007). However, even though episodic memory and what is sometimes called “episodic future thinking” (Atance and O’Neill 2001) share important neural and functional resources, as well as some of their phenomenology, I take it that conscious episodic memory is necessarily past-oriented, since its phenomenology track first-handedness, a relational property involving some remembered past event.

  10. In Brentano’s own words: “[Every conscious act] includes within it a consciousness of itself. Therefore, every [conscious] act, no matter how simple, has a double object, a primary and a secondary object. The simplest act, for example the act of hearing, has as its primary object the sound, and for its secondary object, itself, the mental phenomenon in which the sound is heard” (1874, pp. 153–4).

  11. The name “ascent routine” comes from Gordon (1995), who refers to the classical discussion in Evans (1982). See Roessler (2013) for a recent defence of the rationality of such procedures of self-ascription.

  12. An anonymous referee urged me to clarify my use of the phrase “feeling of knowing” in this context. First, I claim that both the SFOK and the EFOK are feelings rather than mere judgments. It is true that many of the relevant studies directly test judgments rather than feelings, but these judgments are still “experience-based” in Koriat’s (2006) sense, i.e., they emanate from specific (though often subtle) affective experiences. Admittedly, in some cases, especially those involving SFOKs, these experiences reduce to the subject’s felt inclination to make a metacognitive judgment (such as “I know the answer to this question”). Second, the relevant studies have focused mainly on feelings of knowing made following a failure of retrieval, not alongside it. This is not an obstacle to considering that feelings of knowing can be experienced even in cases of successful retrieval (although a failure of retrieval might bring about additional, negative evaluative phenomenology).

  13. Psychologists sometimes talk as if the remembering subject “attributes” some piece of information to the past on the basis of “inferences” from local cues. This is the “attributionalist inferentialist” stand prominent in the psychology of episodic memory (see, e.g., Jacoby et al. 1989). However, as the psychologists would probably agree, there is no attribution or inference at the personal level here. These operations are entirely subpersonal, although they can generate specific metacognitive feelings at the personal level.

  14. For a defence of the general claim that epistemic feelings do not have explicit or transparent contents but must be interpreted (i.e., bound to independently apprehended contents) by the subject in order to be recruited in theoretical and practical reasoning, see Dokic (2012).

  15. This is consonant with the finding that the accuracy of episodic FOK predictions is correlated with the phenomenology of remembering at retrieval (see Souchay et al. 2007; Hicks and Marsh 2002).

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Correspondence to Jérôme Dokic.

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I have greatly benefited from extensive and most helpful comments from the Guest Editor, Denis Perrin, as well as Uriah Kriegel, Cathal O’Madagain, Joëlle Proust and two anonymous referees for this journal.

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Dokic, J. Feeling the Past: A Two-Tiered Account of Episodic Memory. Rev.Phil.Psych. 5, 413–426 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0183-6

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