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Recollection, perception, imagination

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Notes

  1. Seeming to recall is an important category, but space precludes the discussion it deserves.

  2. See Squire (1992, p. 233, Fig. 1). The suggestion that procedural memory (“memory-how”) is not memory for facts is doubtful for the reasons given in Stanley and Williamson (2001).

  3. The quotation is actually something of an overstatement; for some history see Tulving (1983, pp. 17–18).

  4. Alternative terminology includes ‘personal memory’, ‘direct memory’, ‘event memory’, and a host of others.

  5. If the episodic/semantic distinction corresponds to two separate memory systems in the brain, then double dissociations would be expected. There is some evidence that these occur: see Tulving (2002, p. 14) and Hodges and Graham (2002).

  6. Cross-modal effects raise an ignorable minor complication.

  7. See Byrne (2010, Sect. 9).

  8. For discussion of related objections, see McGinn (2004, ch. 1). On a superficial reading, McGinn is very much opposed to the conclusions of this paper. On closer examination, however, a lot of this apparent disagreement arguably vanishes.

  9. For the reason for the qualification see Lackey (2005).

  10. For instructive discussion of this point see King (2007, ch. 6).

  11. Martin asks: “what sense can we make of this distinction between retained past apprehension and current apprehension?”, and addresses it at length (p. 267ff.). The objection immediately below in the text is more simple-minded. Martin’s intricate paper contains a wealth of material relevant to present concerns; a proper treatment would examine his views in detail.

  12. ‘Cognitive contact’ is actually used by Martin, although with a different meaning: in his usage, both knowledge and apprehension are forms of cognitive contact (p. 266).

  13. Russell’s first question is, in effect, why does recollection (unlike imagination) tend to compel belief? (Cf. McGinn 2004, p. 21.) That is one of the many pressing questions this paper does not address.

  14. A point also made by Matthen in his contribution to this symposium (Matthen 2010, Sect. 6).

  15. This is to skirt well-known tricky issues about tense and content; see Matthen (2010) for more on this.

  16. For one account of the source of the feeling of familiarity (in a nutshell, an unexpected discrepancy in cognitive processing) see Whittlesea et al. (2005), Whittlesea and Williams (2000); for criticism see Karpicke et al. (2008).

  17. Evans’ appproach to the epistemology of belief has received the lion’s share of the discussion: e.g. Byrne (2005), Gallois (1996), Moran (2001).

  18. See also Matthen 2010, sect. 5.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to my fellow symposiasts at the 2009 APA Pacific Division meeting in Vancouver, Mohan Matthen and John Sutton, and to Becko Copenhaver. Jennifer Nagel, and Susanna Siegel. Special thanks to Mohan for last-minute comments on the penultimate draft. Due to space limitations, some premises in the preceding arguments have been omitted.

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  1. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, 32-D808, MIT, 77 Mass. Ave., Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA

    Alex Byrne

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Byrne, A. Recollection, perception, imagination. Philos Stud 148, 15–26 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9508-1

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