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The hybrid contents of memory

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Abstract

This paper proposes a novel account of the contents of memory. By drawing on insights from the philosophy of perception, I propose a hybrid account of the contents of memory designed to preserve important aspects of representationalist and relationalist views. The hybrid view I propose also contributes to two ongoing debates in philosophy of memory. First, I argue that, in opposition to eternalist views, the hybrid view offers a less metaphysically-charged solution to the co-temporality problem. Second, I show how the hybrid view conceives of the relationship between episodic memory and other forms of episodic thinking. I conclude by considering some disanalogies between perception and memory and by replying to objections. I argue that, despite there being important differences between memory and perception, those differences do not harm my project.

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Notes

  1. In fact, even this characterization is problematic, as I can semantically remember events that I experienced previously in my life. For my purposes, however, these problems can be put aside.

  2. Although see Crane (2001, 2013) for a contemporary discussion on the topic.

  3. See Sect. 4.1 for a more detailed discussion of what it means to say that events constitute the contents of memory.

  4. I should note that the term “hybrid contents” is my own terminology. Despite not using the same term, I ascribe the core idea behind this notion to Schellenberg’s (2010, 2011, 2016) account of perceptual content.

  5. See Sect. 4.2 for a more detailed account. I should note here that the temporal location specified by the modes of presentation is coarse-grained in the sense that it does not specify a particular day or time, but only whether the event is located in the past or in the future.

  6. While I distinguish between modes of presentation of instantiated and non-instantiated properties here, most occurrences of remembering and also of episodic thinking discussed in Sect. 4.2 will contain only modes of presentation of instantiated properties. This is because, in most occurrences of those mental states, the properties are presented to subjects as being instantiated, even though they might not be in reality. Thus, while it might be possible for a subject to remember non-instantiated properties of events, such as remembering a cathedral and a sunny day, but not ascribing these to any particular event, I will focus, from now on, exclusively on cases where the properties are instantiated.

  7. For more details on confabulation and misremembering, see Sect. 3.2.

  8. I’m grateful to Kirk Michaelian for pressing me on this point.

  9. The notion of a referential index is an adapted version of Charles Peirce’s notion of an index, which plays a central role in his theory of representations.

  10. It might be argued here that the non-gappy modes of presentation in remembering and misremembering are different from the gappy modes of presentation in confabulating. In response, I want to clarify that when I say that the modes of presentation in remembering, misremembering, and confabulating are of the same kind, I mean that how they present events to the subject is the same, regardless of whether or not they are successful in referring. Thus, because modes of presentation are responsible for the phenomenology of memory and because the phenomenology does not necessarily change when modes of presentation are fulfilled, it is not incoherent to say that remembering, misremembering, and confabulating can have the same kind of modes of presentation.

  11. I would like to thank Markus Werning for raising this objection.

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Acknowledgements

I’m grateful to three anonymous referees and the editor for helpful comments and suggestions made to previous drafts of the paper. I’m also grateful to Kirk Michaelian, Andrew Moore, Cathy Legg, Chloe Wall, Ligia Coutes, Denis Perrin, and Bill Fish for reading and commenting on previous drafts of the paper. I’m also indebted to audiences at the University of Otago and at the University of Cologne for discussions on previous versions of this material.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin, 9054, New Zealand

    André Sant’Anna

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Sant’Anna, A. The hybrid contents of memory. Synthese 197, 1263–1290 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1753-4

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