Abstract
In opposition to the natural view that observer perspective memory is bound to be inauthentic, McCarroll (2018) argues for the surprising conclusion that memories in which the subject sees himself in the remembered scene are, in many cases, true to the subject’s original experience of the scene. By means of a careful reconstruction of his argument, this paper shows that McCarroll does not succeed in establishing his conclusion. It shows, in fact, that we ought to come to the opposed conclusion that, while it may be possible in principle for observer perspective memory to be authentic, this is unlikely ever to happen in practice. The natural view, in short, is more or less right.
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Notes
The fact that what distinguishes OPM from FPM is the presence of a visual representation of the self in OPM does not imply that the self is not involved in another, nonvisual manner in FPM (90). Only OPM, however, involves a visual representation of the self, and it is on this characteristic of OPM that our argument will focus.
There are disagreements between causal theorists and simulation theorists about questions other than whether appropriate causation or, instead, reliability is the key condition for genuine remembering; we will return to these in Sect. 5.
McCarroll refers to the denial of preservationism not as “generationism” or “antipreservationism” but rather as “reconstructivism”; we explain why in Sect. 3. Note that “preservationism” has also been used by epistemologists to refer to the view that memory is capable of preserving but not of generating epistemic justification (see Lackey 2005; Frise 2017); epistemological preservationism plays a role neither in McCarroll’s argument nor in ours.
McCarroll attributes more or less this approach to Debus, who writes that “we might try to explain [the completely new information contained in an observer memory] in at least two different ways. Firstly, we might find that the new information is “filled in” by some sub-personal mechanism. Alternatively, one might hold that (at least sometimes) the subject herself actively imagines those aspects that are new in the observer-memory as compared to the original perceptual experience” (2007: 201–202). She appears to take both potential processes to take place during retrieval. It is not entirely clear whether she takes authenticity in addition to truth to be required for successful remembering,
This qualifier suggests that McCarroll holds that successful remembering is compatible with the introduction of small quantities of new content. This is not entirely clear, as formulations that he uses elsewhere suggest that he holds that successful remembering precludes the introduction of any new content. What is clear is that he holds that a retrieved memory that includes a representation of the self cannot be successful unless the corresponding earlier experience included an equivalent representation of the self, and this is all that will matter for our critique of his argument. We will thus disregard the qualifier.
Whether seeing via mirrors and video cameras can, strictly speaking, amount to genuine seeing is an issue that can be left to philosophers of perception.
It is unclear whether the notion of perspective is meaningful with respect to modalities other than vision and, perhaps, audition, but our argument will not rely on this point.
It is also possible that McCarroll aims to establish the trace authenticity thesis but takes OPMs to be authentic not with respect to autoscopic traces but rather with respect to nonautoscopic traces. If this is the view that he has in mind, it faces issues analogous to those that we raise for the experience authenticity thesis.
Note that, while McCarroll makes use of the term “translation”, he does not provide an explicit definition of the term. Our discussion here is meant to make explicit the concept of translation that remains somewhat implicit in the text.
McCarroll is less clear than we might wish about when translation is supposed to occur, but, given that his focus is on constructive encoding, he presumably takes it to occur during encoding rather than retrieval. To the extent that he is concerned to establish the authenticity thesis, however, it should not matter when translation occurs—all that should matter is that it is preservative in character.
This explains why he makes no use of the terms “generationism” and “antipreservationism”.
See also Trakas 2020 for a discussion this point. McCarroll does acknowledge in passing that his position may be compatible with “quasi-preservationist” approach (45); our point is that there is nothing “quasi” about it. In a recent paper, McCarroll has objected, in response to a draft of this paper, that preservationism is in fact best understood as including both what we refer to as preservationism and what we refer to as antireconstructivism, claiming that.
the notion of passivity and static traces is inherently linked to preservationism. For example, the view that memory is reconstructive is frequently contrasted with the idea that memory is reproductive, (passively) replaying stored images in much the same way as a video camera would. […] Preservationism, as I understand it, is a view that combines content matching with a purely passive process. It is this notion of preservationism that I reject. (2020a: 292)
McCarroll is, of course, free to define the term “preservationism” however he likes. But we note, again, that his preferred definition combines two distinct theses, a content-matching thesis (preservationism, as we define it) and a passivity thesis (antireconstructivism). Notwithstanding McCarroll’s suggestion that there is inherent link between these two theses, they are, as we have shown, logically independent of one another. Setting the terminological issue aside, our substantive point thus stands: rejecting the passivity thesis does not entail rejecting the content-matching thesis, and McCarroll’s own position combines a rejection of the passivity thesis with an endorsement of the content-matching thesis.
This inference assumes that there is no kind of experience other than OPE with respect to which OPM could, in theory, be authentic. We do not anticipate any objections to this assumption.
To reinforce this point, consider McCarroll’s appeal to O’Keefe’s (1993/1999) argument that the human “allocentric spatial system … represents the environment from any location and includes within itself a representation of the subject-as-object” (1993/1999: 44–45). McCarroll’s take on this is that “spatial cognition essentially involves the use of allocentric cognitive maps, in which one may see oneself from-the-outside” (76). The notion of “seeing” is clearly being used here in a metaphorical sense: it is one thing to represent one’s position on a map; it is quite another to represent one’s own appearance. But what is needed, in order to secure the authenticity thesis, is precisely a nonvisual representation equivalent to the later visual representation of one’s own appearance.
The fact that we concede that OPMs might, in certain rare cases, be authentic, is compatible with the claim, made above, that McCarroll’s own evidence does not show that OPMs can be authentic.
McCarroll (2020a) suggests that the relevant content is indeed the content that the subject entertained during the relevant experience but that he not have entertained this content actively, invoking the possibility of content that was “part of [the subject’s] experience but not attended to” (297). We take it to be only slightly less unlikely that McCarroll entertained, while packing for Sydney, a proposition to the effect that his hair was brown and that he did not attend to that proposition than it is that he entertained, while packing for Sydney, a proposition to the effect that his hair was brown and that he did attend to that proposition.
An additional reason to be sceptical of the authenticity thesis is that we are generally able to switch, when remembering, among multiple observer perspectives. Unless we suppose that OPEs contain representations of the self from many different perspectives, which seems unlikely, most of the representations involved in an OPM in which one switches among multiple perspectives are bound to be inauthentic. Thanks to Ying-Tung Lin for this point.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this objection.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this objection.
The same thing holds with respect to truth: accuracy with respect to an event presumably comes in degrees; if it does, then truth comes in degrees. Because our argument concerns authenticity rather than truth, there is no need for us to consider this point any further here, but we will note that philosophers of memory have so far paid surprisingly little attention to the graded character of authenticity and truth.
Thanks to Denis Perrin and to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this objection and to the anonymous reviewer to suggesting the term “perspectival gist”.
While it may have little to do with authenticity as standardly understood, the notion of perspectival gist is certainly worth exploring.
Further alternatives to authenticism are available. We suspect that the lay view is, roughly, that success presupposes authenticity but not truth. De Brigard (2014), meanwhile, can be read as arguing that success presupposes neither authenticity nor truth. We acknowledge that alethism faces objections. See McCarroll 2020b. These objections are important, but answering them will have to be left as a task for future work. One who is reluctant to endorse alethism might, in principle, reject the authenticity thesis and nevertheless continue to endorse authenticism. To do so would, in effect, require him to reject the first premise of the argument sketched above. We leave it to those who accept our conclusion that the authenticity thesis is false but wish to reject our conclusion that authenticism is false to make a case against the claim that successful remembering is the norm. To put the point somewhat less abstractly, we leave it to those who wish to reject the authenticity thesis and nevertheless continue to endorse authenticism to make a case for the view that many cases of apparent remembering—and, in particular, most cases of observer perspective remembering—amount to unsuccessful remembering.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to audiences at the 8th International Conference of Cognitive Science (Tehran), the Centre for Philosophy of Memory’s internal seminar, the Bay Area Philosophy of Memory workshop (San Francisco State University), the Memory and Perception: Starting the Conversation workshop (Université Grenoble Alpes/Washington University in Saint Louis), the Generative Episodic Memory 2021 workshop (Ruhr- Universität Bochum), and the CamPoS (Cambridge Philosophy of Science) seminar for feedback. Thanks also to Ying-Tung Lin for written comments, to Chris McCarroll for written comments and extensive discussion, and to two anonymous referees. 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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Michaelian, K., Sant’Anna, A. From authenticism to alethism: Against McCarroll on observer memory. Phenom Cogn Sci 21, 835–856 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09772-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09772-9