Abstract
I argue against preservationism, the epistemic claim that memories can at most preserve knowledge generated by other basic types of sources. I show how memories can and do generate knowledge that is irreducible to other basic sources of knowledge. In some epistemic contexts, memories are primary basic sources of knowledge; they can generate knowledge by themselves or with trivial assistance from other types of basic sources of knowledge. I outline an ontology of information transmission from events to memory as an alternative to causal theories of memory. I derive from information theory a concept of reliability of memories as the ratio of retrieved information to transmitted information. I distinguish the generation of knowledge from reliable memories from its generation from unreliable memories. Reliable memories can generate new knowledge by forming together narratives and via colligation. Coherent, even unreliable, memories can generate knowledge if they are epistemically independent of each other and the prior probability of the knowledge they generate is sufficiently low or high. Ascertaining the epistemic independence of memories and eliminating possible confounders may be achieved through the generation of knowledge from independent memories in different minds, when memories are primary basic sources of knowledge and the testimonies that report them are trivial.
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Notes
Preservationism may accept testimony as a fourth basic source of knowledge. However, I am not familiar with a philosopher who held a preservationist view of memory and considered testimony an irreducible basic source of knowledge.
Michaelian (2016, 40) argues that it is impossible to evaluate the reliabilities of processes that generate beliefs from memory because they would have to rely on memory itself for evaluating which beliefs are true. Michaelian overstates his case since memory does not have to epistemically bootstrap itself when it is possible to measure the coherence, or what Lewis (1946) called “congruence,” of beliefs generated by types of memory with knowledge generated by other basic sources of knowledge. But since it is impossible to measure the frequency of true beliefs among all the beliefs that types of memory have generated, it would be necessary to measure the frequency of true beliefs in samples of them. It may be difficult in avoid unintentional sampling biases and errors.
Bernecker (2010, 99) dismisses such cases under the rubric of “inattentive remembering.” He claims that despite the absence of belief at t1 when the memory is formed, there is a “representation” at t1 that has identical epistemic status to that of the belief that would be formed from memory. “What distinguishes S’s propositional attitude at t1 from his propositional attitude at t2 is awareness or conceptualization but not justification.” However, there is no reason to believe that when information flows through the senses to memory, bypassing consciousness, it creates a representation, let alone a justified one. Information is encoded in memory and later decoded. When it is encoded, it does not have to constitute a justified representation and when it is decoded it can serve as justification for new knowledge or belief. In between, memory in its encoded latent state is not a representation.
A defeater can be normative, if it implies that the belief ought to be defeated, or a psychological state of mind that prevents the agent from knowing, like a trauma. (Lackey 2008, 44–5) More orthodox distinctions are between “external” propositional or factual defeaters, and “internal” states of mind. (Cf. Grundmann 2011)
In Dumas’ novel, abbé Faria contributes the empirical generalization that the handwriting of right-handed people who write with their left hand are similar and information about the Deputy who examined Dantès and his motivation for destroying evidence that could have exonerated him. I ignore this part of the plot because the rest is sufficient to make the epistemic point.
I thank Sanford Goldberg for presenting me with this argument in our conversations after I presented a version of this paper at the European Epistemology Network Meeting in Paris in the summer of 2016.
Ceteris paribus, the more information rich, e.g., detailed, are independent and coherent memories, the lower is the prior probability of the information they transmit and hence the higher is their posterior probability. This creates a psychological association between degree of detail of memory and reliability. However, the reliabilities of individual memories or testimonies are independent of their richness of detail. Fantasized memories and fabricated testimonies (like the email you received from Nigeria about a financial transaction…) can be very detailed. The degree of detail decreases the prior probability and hence is significant if and only if there are multiple coherent and independent memories or testimonies.
Experimental psychologists attempt to understand how “metamemory” monitors the reliabilities of memories through “source monitoring.” When we reconstruct memories, we check for “tags” in the traces about their origins to authenticate them. The rules that regulate this unconscious process that accompanies memory construction are fallible but should be statistically reliable. The degree of detail seems to be one of these “tags.” (Michaelian 2011, 329 following Mitchell and Johnson 2000) Such tags assigned to individual memories, as distinct from multiple, independent, and coherent memories are not reliable evaluators of reliability. Here, epistemology should be “denaturalized” to normatively distinguish rational from actual-psychological evaluation of reliability, as behavioral economics demonstrated the gap between rational and actual economic behavior.
Pr(H|E&B) = [Pr(E|H&B)xPr(H|B)]:Pr(E|B)
Pr stands for the probability of...
H stands for any hypothesis, which in our case means what the memories assert, the winning number in the lottery.
E stands for evidence, which in our case means the coherent and independent memories.
B stands for background knowledge that assists in determining the variables (including ranges of possible probabilities).
The vertical line | should be read as “given,” for example, Pr(H|E&B) means the probability of a hypothesis given evidence and background information.
Pr(H|B) is the prior probability of a particular hypothesis given background knowledge, for example, the odds of a winning a lottery.
Pr(E|H&B) expresses the likelihood of the evidence given the hypothesis in question in conjunction with background knowledge, the reliability of the memories in this context. For example, given the winning number in the lottery, how likely it is that Rene remembers it forty years later?
Pr(E|B) expresses the expectedness, the probability of the evidence given background information, whether or not the hypothesis is true. Another way of putting it formally is:
Pr(E|B) = [Pr(E|H&B) x Pr(H|B)] + [Pr(E|-H&B) x Pr(−H|B)].
The posterior probability of the hypothesis given the evidence and background information, Pr(H|E&B), is the ratio of the likelihood of the evidence (coherent independent memories) given the hypothesis and its prior probability, to the expectedness of the evidence whether or not the hypothesis is true. Imagine all the possible worlds where the memories in question occur, and then ask in which fraction of these worlds the hypothesis is the case.
Bovens and Hartmann (2003, 115–123) applied Bayesian probability to the epistemology of testimony, but it is just as applicable to any independent epistemic sources such as memories. They modelled the effects of prior probabilities on posterior probabilities in a Cartesian space, given multiple independent epistemic sources: The curve is U shaped. As the prior probabilities increase, the posterior probabilities decrease, up to a point where high priors begin to determine the posterior probabilities that rise in tandem with them. The more unreliable are the memories the deeper is the “valley” in the U-shaped curve between the high posterior probabilities that result from very low and very high prior probabilities.
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Tucker, A. Memory: Irreducible, Basic, and Primary Source of Knowledge. Rev.Phil.Psych. 9, 1–16 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-017-0336-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-017-0336-5