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The Epistemological Disunity of Memory

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Mind, Values, and Metaphysics

Abstract

A long-standing debate surrounds the question as to what justifies memory judgements. According to the Past Reason Theory (PastRT), these judgements are justified by the reasons we had to make identical judgements in the past, whereas the Present Reason Theory claims that these justifying reasons are to be found at the time we pass the memory judgements. In this chapter, I defend the original claim that, far from being exclusive, these two theories should be applied to different kinds of memory judgements. The PastRT offers the most appealing account of justified propositional memory judgements, while the Present Reason Theory provides the best approach to justified episodic memory judgements. One outcome of my discussion is thus that memory is not epistemologically unified and my argument in favour of this conclusion connects with the issues of internalism, reliabilism and the basing relation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    If you disagree, this means that MIT does not constitute an alternative to the Source Monitoring Theory I discuss below.

  2. 2.

    Senor (1993) and Owens (1999) offer further criticisms of MIT.

  3. 3.

    Note in passing that VIT also appears to imply that forgetting a bad source of information while preserving a belief enhances its justification.

  4. 4.

    As opposed to a classical analysis defended in Landesman (1962), Malcolm (1963), Munsat (1967) and Zemach (1968).

  5. 5.

    Naylor defends a similar account of propositional memory reports: ‘B remembers that p from t iff (1) there is a set of grounds a subset of which consists of (a) only those grounds B has at both t and the present for being sure that p, and (b) enough such grounds to make it reasonable at both t and the present for B to be sure that p, and (2) there is no time prior to t such that B has a set of original grounds dating from that time’ (Naylor 1971, p. 33).

  6. 6.

    PastRT is of course compatible with the idea that accessible past reasons have an epistemic impact. It only denies that this is required for justification at t e . For one way to develop this point, see the end of Sect. 2.6 below.

  7. 7.

    Favouring Partial, Lackey (2005) argues that memory can for that reason be a generative epistemological source: The judgement is justified because it is a memory judgement. This would mean that judgements are justified at t e because they manifest beliefs reliably preserved from t 1 and so that preservation in itself positively contributes to justification. Yet, the fact that preservation explains why the judgement is made at t e does not imply that it plays such a role. We should rather say that preservation allows past reasons to (potentially) justify the judgement at t e by making it the case that this judgement depends on a belief acquired because of the past reason. For judgements are not justified simply because they manifest a preserved belief; they rather inherit their justification from the past reasons. So, even though Partial were correct, this would not support the claim that memory is a generative epistemological source.

  8. 8.

    Memory is often said to be epistemologically similar to testimony (e.g. Burge 1997). If so, then my argument has the following implication. The fact that one would not share the witness’ reasons against his claim is not enough for justification. What is required is that one actually realizes that the witness’ defeaters are themselves defeated. Justification transfer is sometimes blocked by irrationality (or malice) and to get rid of it requires access to an undefeated reason.

  9. 9.

    This means that the Source-Monitoring Theory (Sect 2.3) is true in these more complex cases. The mistake is to extend it to all cases of propositional memory.

  10. 10.

    Hoerl (2001) and Martin (2001) rightly emphasize the central role of experiences in episodic memory.

  11. 11.

    Chisholm (1989; Chap. 5) defends a closely related principle.

  12. 12.

    A similar objection is made in Naylor (1985) and Senor (1993, pp. 456–459).

  13. 13.

    My conclusion has some affinities with Burge’s distinction between substantive and purely preservative memory (1993, 1997).

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Acknowledgment

This chapter is the descendent of Kevin Mulligan’s suggestion that I might be interested in working on memory, but I guess I am the only person still episodically remembering that event. It is in any case a modest tribute to what I learnt from him.

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  1. University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Fabrice Teroni

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  1. Fabrice Teroni
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Correspondence to Fabrice Teroni .

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  1. Institute for Cognitive Sciences, Bron Cedex, France

    Anne Reboul

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Teroni, F. (2014). The Epistemological Disunity of Memory. In: Reboul, A. (eds) Mind, Values, and Metaphysics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05146-8_12

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