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Episodic memory is not immune to error through misidentification: against Fernández

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Abstract

The claim that episodic memory is immune to error through misidentification enjoys continuing popularity in philosophy. Psychological research on observer memory—usually defined as occurring when one remembers an event from a point of view other than that that from which he originally experienced it—would seem, on the face of it, to undermine the IEM claim. Relying on a certain view of memory content, Fernández (Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-02050-3, forthcoming), however, has provided an ingenious argument for the view that it does not. This paper reconstructs Fernández’ argument and shows that there is reason to reject the definition of observer memory and the view of memory content on which it relies. Once these are rejected, it turns out that observer memory does indeed imply that the IEM claim is false.

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Notes

  1. Consider, e.g., Bernecker’s (2017) insistence, shared by McCarroll (2018), that successful memories are both “true” (accurate with respect to the remembered event) and “authentic” (accurate with respect to the subject’s experience of that event).

  2. In addition to Fernández (forthcoming), see McCarroll (2018). McCarroll’s discussion of observer memory would require a separate treatment and will therefore not be considered here.

  3. All references without page numbers are to Fernández (forthcoming), published online ahead of print and unpaginated.

  4. It will matter in what follows that, given how IEM in memory is defined, the IEM claim, strictly speaking, says not that memories are IEM but rather that memory judgements (or beliefs) are IEM.

  5. Fernández does not employ these terms, but they will serve as convenient shorthand when summarizing his argument. The same thing goes for the notion of “believed position”, introduced below.

  6. We are assuming that the accident took place in Australia.

  7. He concedes this point in Fernández (2019). One might take this difficulty to provide sufficient reason to reject the belief principle, but, as it is not necessary, in order to secure the conclusion of this paper, to reject the belief principle, the principle will not be challenged here. Note that the conclusion that episodic memory is liable to error through misidentification does not depend on the belief principle.

  8. Once the content principle is rejected, the memory might be fully accurate in either case. Thus, each case would potentially be such that the subject has a fully accurate memory but nevertheless ends up with a belief that is erroneous due to misidentification.

  9. Again, the key question here is not how to define the field/observer distinction. Note, however, that it will turn out that, if we reject the content principle, then there are cases of observer memory that undermine the IEM claim even if we adopt the experience-divergent definition.

  10. The idea is, of course, not that information about the subject’s position at the time of the remembered event is the only content of his memory but rather that such information is part of the content of his memory.

  11. If, in order to avoid this implication, we were to reject the belief principle, then, if we were to accept the content principle, case 1 would turn out to be a counterexample to the IEM claim; if we were to reject the content principle, both case 1 and (potentially) case 3 would turn out to be a counterexample to the IEM claim.

  12. McCarroll, who maintains that identity “is given immediately and non-inferentially” in both field memory and observer memory (2018: p. 165), arguably adopts a similar strategy, but, again, space does not permit a detailed discussion of his approach to IEM here.

  13. Note that Fernández’ argument for the IEM claim turns specifically on his view of memory content, not on his functionalist theory of memory.

  14. On the causalist–postcausalist debate, see Michaelian and Robins (2018).

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to audiences at the Experience of Ownership workshop at the University of Adelaide, the Memory: A Self-Referential Account workshop at the Université Grenoble Alpes, and seminars at the University of Otago and East China Normal University. Thanks also to three referees for Synthese. Special thanks to Jordi Fernández for detailed discussion. This work is supported by the French National Research Agency in the framework of the “Investissements d’avenir” program (ANR-15-IDEX-02).

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  1. Centre de Philosophie de la Mémoire, Université Grenoble Alpes, Bätiment CTL, 7 allée de Palestine, 38610, Gières, France

    Kourken Michaelian

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Michaelian, K. Episodic memory is not immune to error through misidentification: against Fernández. Synthese 198, 9525–9543 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02652-w

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