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Episodic memory and the feeling of pastness: from intentionalism to metacognition

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Abstract

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest among philosophers of memory in the questions of how to characterize and to account for the temporal phenomenology of episodic memory. One prominent suggestion has been that episodic memory involves a feeling of pastness, the elaboration of which has given rise to two main approaches. On the intentionalist approach, the feeling of pastness is explained in terms of what episodic memory represents. In particular, Fernández (2019) has argued that it can be explained in terms of memory representing itself as being caused by a past perceptual experience. On the metacognitive approach, which we have recently developed in (Perrin et al., 2020), the feeling of pastness results from the monitoring and interpretation of the processing features of episodic remembering. In this paper, we show that the metacognitive approach should be preferred over the intentionalist approach. We argue that intentionalism, and Fernández’ causal self-referential view in particular, ultimately fail as accounts of the feeling of pastness. The difficulties faced by intentionalism allows us to single out three constraints that any satisfactory account of the temporal phenomenology of episodic remembering needs to meet. We conclude by arguing that the metacognitive view satisfies those constraints in a neat way, and as such, that it should be preferred over intentionalism.

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Notes

  1. An important issue here concerns the specific sense in which the feelings involved in the temporal phenomenology are affective states. Roughly put, there are two main views on the table. On the inferentialist approach, they are intuitive states resulting from the conjunction of an inferential process of which they are the conclusion, and of the subconscious character of this process. As Koriat puts it: “the phenomenal quality could be explained in terms of the idea that experience-based judgments are based on an inferential process that is not available to consciousness, and hence the outcome of that process has the phenomenal quality of a direct, self-evident intuition” (Koriat, 2007, p. 314). On the embodied approach, feelings are bodily states in nature, thus properly affective. As Dokic puts it: “They are diffuse affective states registering internal physiological conditions and events” (2012, p. 307). Since our argument is orthogonal to this debate, in what follows we will take it for granted that feelings are affective states at least in a loose sense. See our (Perrin et al., 2020) for more details.

  2. Tulving sometimes goes as far as saying: “Autonoetic awareness (…) represents the major defining difference between episodic and semantic memory” (Wheeler et al., 1997, p. 350).

  3. More recently, Tulving has distinguished between ‘autonoesis’ and ‘chronesthesia’, with the former referring to consciousness of the self in episodic memory, and the latter being the “the conscious awareness of subjective time” (2002b) that is characteristic of episodic memory. However, as Michaelian (2016, p. 192–3) notes, “[c]hronesthesia and autonoetic consciousness are developing concepts, and the terms are not always used in consistent ways. On one view, they refer to the same capacity but emphasize different aspects of that capacity, autonoesis putting the accent on the subject who mentally travels in time, while chronesthesia puts the accent on the subjective time in which the subject travels (Szpunar, 2011). On an alternative view, it may ultimately be more useful to define autonoetic consciousness purely in terms of awareness of one’s self, whether or not in subjective time, and to define chronesthesia purely in terms of awareness of episodes in subjective time, whether including one’s self or not”. Since these subtleties will not matter for our argument, we will use ‘autonoesis’ or ‘autonoetic consciousness’ as referring to a unified capacity that we have to become aware of both self and subjective time.

  4. On another affectivalist view, the feeling of pastness is explained in terms of the proprietary phenomenology of the mental mode of episodic remembering, thus as a cognitive phenomenological feature (Matthen, 2010; Recanati, 2007, p. 141–142; Brown & Mandik, 2012). But due to the underspecification of that proposal and the difficulties it raises (Dokic, 2014, p. 6–8), we will leave it aside. Note that despite considering as legitimate the notion of a feeling of pastness as mode-dependent (see Sect. 5.1), our own preferred metacognitive account does not appeal to the notion of a proprietary phenomenology intrinsic to the mental mode to explain such a feeling (see Sect. 5.2). Thus, it is distinct from any account phrased in terms of cognitive phenomenology.

  5. For a similar distinction about the phenomenology of perception, see Dokic & Martin (2015) and Chasid & Weksler (2020).

  6. Intentionalism belongs in the family of views on which phenomenal features cannot be ‘separated’ from representational properties—hence the label of ‘anti-separatism’ (for an overview of the separatism vs. anti-separatism debate, see Horgan & Tierson, 2002; Chalmers, 2006; Siewert, 2017; for the endorsement of anti-separatism by Fernández, see 2018, p. 9). As we sketch out the metacognitive alternative in Sect. 5, we will argue for a separatist approach.

  7. By “veridical” Fernández means that the perceptual experience that is a part of the content of memory must have represented the world in the way it was back when it took place.

  8. Fernández offers a detailed discussion as to why the SR view provides a better account of the content of memory in comparison to competing approaches (see 2019, chapter 3).

  9. Due to our focus on temporal phenomenology (see Sect. 2), we will not discuss the feeling of ownership here.

  10. A potential concern is that Fernández does not provide a mechanistic account properly speaking, contrary to what we will do in Sect. 5. But his account implies that content should play a central role in such an account. Moreover, the mechanistic account we propose implies that the feeling of pastness is not an experience of the content of a memory. There is no risk, therefore, that our accounts talk past each other.

  11. As a reviewer rightly points out, one alternative here is to interpret Fernández’ “thick” notion of experience in terms of a higher-order perception, as opposed to a higher-order thought (see Gennaro, 2004). While we think that this is indeed a possibility, there is little evidence that Fernández actually holds a view along these lines. In other words, Fernández does not say anything to indicate that his account requires postulating the existence of an inner sensory mechanism—i.e., an “inner sense”—that is responsible for making episodic memories conscious states. Moreover, given the various problems faced by higher-order perception theories (see Carruthers & Gennaro, 2020), we believe that a more likely interpretation of Fernández’ view consists in appealing to higher-order thoughts.

  12. Note that we endorse the minimal representationalist notion of the content of a feeling on which feelings can carry information, and hence can have content, without taking any stand about the format of this information, in particular as to whether this format is propositional or not.

  13. For a more detailed discussion of this idea, see our discussion of the identity view of the relationship between content and phenomenology in Sect. 3.2.2.

  14. More specifically, according to Fernández, the propositional content of an episodic memory M of a subject S about an event q consists in the set of possible worlds W such that in W, M is caused by S having perceived q through a perception P (2019, p. 79). While a possible-world-based account is just one among many options to make sense of the nature of propositions, for our purposes here we will simply grant Fernández that the content of episodic memory can be characterized in this way.

  15. We emphasize that, on Fernández’ analysis, the phenomenology of pastness is supposed to supervene on content as conscious, for content is a component of an actual episode of remembering.

  16. As a reviewer pointed out, one could doubt whether a feeling of pastness can vary in intensity just as feelings of sadness or pain do. Here is an argument to say it can. Suppose that an image of a birthday party comes to your mind and that you do not have any other means to decide whether this is a mnemonic or an imaginative image than the phenomenology of it—this is an instance of the process problem we evoke below. Arguably, the feeling of pastness associated with the image is the phenomenological feature on which you will draw to make your decision. You could hardly draw on the feature of ownership, for instance, since episodic remembering and episodic imagination can involve this feature alike. If this is right, then a feeling of pastness varying in intensity predicts that mnemicity should be a more or less salient feature of the image. Absent any feeling of pastness, the image should not appear as mnemonic at all and you should make your decision accordingly. If there is a dim feeling of pastness, the image should appear as possibly mnemonic, while if there is an intense feeling of pastness, the image should appear as definitely mnemonic. Now, the possibility of a more or less salient mnemicity is one of the striking features of our cognitive life. Consequently, we have a good reason to think that the feeling of pastness can vary in intensity.

  17. Echoing the situation considered in footnote 16, for example, when the image comes to your mind with a given content, it can be accompanied by a more or less intense feeling of pastness and it can appear as mnemonic in a more or less salient way. Since the content is constant ex hypothesi, and thus does not involve any information about temporal distance, the feeling of pastness must be distinguished from the latter. This renders it difficult to hold an intentionalist account à la Fernández. Thanks to a reviewer for bringing to our attention the importance of the distance-intensity distinction for our argument.

  18. The process problem is a version of the memory marker issue, which traces back to classical empiricism. For an overview of the relevant historical discussions, see Bernecker (2008, 6.1).

  19. One might object at this stage that we unduly restrict Fernández’ account of phenomenology to the feeling of pastness, while it requires the whole set of phenomenological features, viz. the feelings of pastness and of ownership as well as the awareness of previous experience, for the process problem to be solved. In response, our specific point is that on Fernández’ analysis the feeling of pastness is necessary for phenomenology to solve the process problem, yet Fernández’ analysis is unable to account for how consciousness of content can ground this feeling. Thus, one of the essential components of phenomenology is left unaccounted. As a result, Fernández’ analysis fails to solve the process problem.

  20. As we will see, this dependence relation is often defined in causal terms. As far as our discussion of Fernández is concerned, positing a weaker relation of dependence—implied by a causal relation—between the feeling of pastness and the occurrence of procedural features will suffice.

  21. “[T]he fluency heuristic is based on the ease or efficiency of processing a stimulus that is physically present” (Whittlesea and Leboe, 2000, p. 85).

  22. Other cognitive tasks different from the evaluation of pleasantness or pastness of an item can trigger yet further interpretations of fluency, e.g. the correctness of conceptual categorization (see Whittlesea and Leboe, 2000). See also Schwarz (2004) and Oppenheimer (2008) for reviews.

  23. Note that our claim is not that these are the only constraints to accommodate. More modestly, given the goal of our paper, we say instead that they are important enough for an account to be preferred over another if it succeeds in accommodating them.

  24. Thanks to a reviewer for bringing to our attention the importance of this aspect of our argument.

  25. The empirical literature is unclear on the issue of the relationship between these two feelings, both with regard to the underpinning mechanisms giving rise to them and their phenomenological characterizations. For instance, Jacoby et al., 1989, and Whittlesea, 1997, take for granted without further argument that the feeling of pastness and the feeling of familiarity are one and the same thing. For a criticism of the phenomenological unclarity of the attributionalist literature, see Hoerl (2001). For discussion of non-intentional elements that distinguish familiarity and pastness, see our (Perrin et al., 2020) and Kurilla & Westerman (2011). While important, pursuing this point any further is beyond the scope of this paper.

  26. More precisely, Unkelbach & Greifeneder (2013) distinguish between background beliefs learned through feedback from the subject’s environment in a perception-like manner, and background beliefs that take the more elaborate form of naïve theories about the interpretation to give of procedural cues. Our argument does not depend on this refinement.

  27. By bringing background beliefs into play, one could object, we are required to admit that some content takes part in the production of a feeling of pastness. While we agree with this comment, we note that the content in question is not the content of the first-order memory accompanied by the feeling of pastness, which is just what intentionalism argues for and what we reject in this paper. On the same note, one could say that in a loose sense our account makes the content of the first-order memory play a role in the production of the feeling of pastness, since fluency is a feature of the processes that underpin the first-order memory. Again, while we agree with this comment, we insist that what underpins the production of the feeling of pastness are not the semantic features constitutive of the content, but the procedural features of the vehicle of the latter.

  28. Some people even go so far as to say that depending on the task context, fluency can give rise to feelings with opposite meanings (see Unkelbach, 2006, and Landwehr & Eckmann, 2020), a view that is discussed by Olds & Westerman (2012), however.

  29. Like we said above (footnote 4), our account does not claim that the mnemonic psychological mode would exhibit an intrinsic proprietary phenomenology, the feeling of pastness, for instance. Differently, we say that the mode selects the content of the metacognitive feeling triggered by fluency detection and associated to the memory. It is thus a feeling distinct from the mode that provides the memory with its pastness phenomenology.

  30. By “voluntary memory”, we mean a memory that the rememberer had the intentional project to form beforehand. By “involuntary memory”, by contrast, we mean a memory that pops up in the rememberer’s mind while she had not the intention to remember.

  31. On epistemic feelings, see Arango-Muñoz (2014). On the temporal phenomenology of episodic remembering as an epistemic feeling, see our (Perrin et al., 2020).

  32. In line with what we said in footnote 6, remember that intentionalism is an anti-separatist view, according to which phenomenology is dependent on content. Separatism, by contrast, argues for the independence of phenomenology from content.

  33. The feeling of pastness is an ‘epistemic’ feeling to the effect that it represents the causal origin of the mental state it accompanies.

  34. See Whittlesea (1997, p. 220).

  35. Remember that, for our purposes, we focus on the process problem in relation to temporal phenomenology only.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks for feedback to audiences at the workshop around J. Fernández’ book “Memory - A Self-Referential Account” in Grenoble and at the Centre for Philosophy of Memory’s internal seminar. This work is supported by the French National Research Agency in the framework of the “Investissements d’avenir” program (ANR-15-IDEX-02) and by CAPES-COFECUB (Grant Sh 967/20).

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  1. Institute of Philosophy in Grenoble, Centre for Philosophy of Memory, Université Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble, France

    Denis Perrin

  2. Department of Philosophy, Washington University in Saint-Louis, Saint-Louis, USA

    André Sant’Anna

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Perrin, D., Sant’Anna, A. Episodic memory and the feeling of pastness: from intentionalism to metacognition. Synthese 200, 109 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03567-4

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