Abstract
I describe and discuss one particular dimension of disagreement in the philosophical literature on episodic memory. One way of putting the disagreement is in terms of the question as to whether or not there is a difference in kind between remembering seeing x and remembering what x looks like. I argue against accounts of episodic memory that either deny that there is a clear difference between these two forms of remembering, or downplay the difference by in effect suggesting that the former contains an additional ingredient not present in the latter, but otherwise treating them as the same thing. I also show that a recent ‘minimalist’ approach to episodic memory (Clayton & Russell in Neuropsychologia 47 (11): 2,330–2,340, 2009; Russell & Hanna in Mind & Language 27 (1): 29–54, 2012) fails to give a satisfactory explanatory account of the difference between the two types of remembering. I finish by sketching an alternative approach to episodic memory, which turns on the idea that episodic recollection recruits a specific form of causal reasoning that provides for a concrete sense in which remembered events are remembered as belonging to the past.
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Notes
The history of the term is in fact slightly more complicated than I am portraying it here; see Hoerl (2001, p. 315). Recent discussions of memory in the philosophical literature that use the term ‘epsodic memory’ include Martin 2001; Genone 2006; Fernandez 2006; Byrne 2010; Sutton 2012; Soteriou 2013, ch. 7.
The kinds of issues I have in mind here relate to the claim, made e.g. by M. G. F. Martin (2001), that the content of episodic recollection is intrinsically particular, whereas that of sensory imagination is not. For the purposes of this paper, I will largely set aside the question of the extent to which this is true, though some of the material in section 1 may bear on it.
I will typically use ‘remembering’ to denote a standing condition, and ‘recalling’ or ‘recollecting’ to denote an episodic occurrence.
At least in central cases. As I discuss in section 2, it is possible to conceive of cases in which, e.g., an actual physical picture substitutes for a mental image.
Where different theories stand on this issue can sometimes be difficult to make out. For instance, Hopkins (forthcoming) puts forward what he calls the ‘inclusion view’ of episodic memory, according to which “[e]pisodic memory is experiential imagining put to a particular purpose, or occurring in a particular context” (ibid., p. 2). Assuming a sufficiently broad understanding of ‘experiential imagining’ (crudely: generating mental images, where this need not just be for the purpose of making things up), the view that there is a difference in kind between remembering seeing x and remembering what x looks like is compatible with at least the first of those claims. However, on a narrower understanding of ‘experiential imagining’ (crudely: generating mental images for the purposes of making things up), it is also plausibly read as a version of a view that Hopkins thinks the inclusion view is opposed to, which he calls the ‘no overlap view’. This is the view that “imagining and [episodic] memory lack any common components at all”. Even if, on a high enough level of abstraction, we can speak of one cognitive ability exercised in both episodic recall and visual imagining (understood in the narrower ‘making things up’ sense), it is possible that different exercises of that one cognitive ability (in episodic recall and such visual imagining, respectively) yield mental states that have no ingredients in common.
Of course I may fail to do so. I might be dramatically wrong, and what I think of as the Mona Lisa is in fact Delacroix’ Liberty Leading the People. In which case what I will imagine hanging on my living room wall will, contrary to what I believe, be Liberty Leading the People. Or I may find that my imagination simply gives out, because I can’t recall what the Mona Lisa looks like. The point here is that if I succeed (and in so far as I succeed), it will be because I possess knowledge about the Mona Lisa, viz. knowledge of what the Mona Lisa looks like. Note also the ‘in so far’ here: What I imagine may only match the Mona Lisa to a certain degree of accuracy, and I may get some details wrong. The ability to visually imagine something comes in degrees. I may be more or less successful in visually imagining the Mona Lisa, depending on the amount of knowledge I possess of what the Mona Lisa looks like.
More recently, philosophers have used the term ‘the admissible contents of experience’ to frame discussions about the precise range of things or properties that can figure directly in visual experience. See, e.g., Hawley and Macpherson 2011.
It might be objected here that it is possible for someone to imagine – and even produce a picture of – e.g., a species of animal that they have never seen for themselves, as is the case with Albrecht Dürer’s famous woodcut of a rhinoceros, which was based on the description of a rhinoceros in a letter (plus a very rough sketch). It seems to me, though, that in so far as Dürer can count as having imagined a rhinoceros, this is not merely due to what he visually imagined. Rather, what Dürer had to do was to visually imagine an animal that fitted the descriptions in the letter, and in addition to that he had to suppose that, in so visually imagining, he was imagining a member of the existing species of animal described in the letter. Similarly, one can of course imagine a unicorn by visually imagining a horse with a horn projecting from its forehead and in addition supposing that it is the species of animal featuring in certain myths. In these cases, visual imagination alone does not make it the case that the mental image is one of the specific (supposed) species of animal in question. This is different, I would argue, for the case in which someone has seen deer before and now draws on her perceptually acquired knowledge of deer in visually imagining a scene featuring deer. (Compare here also the analogous contrast between visualizing an individual of whom one has only been given a verbal description versus visualizing an individual whom one has actually met oneself.)
Elsewhere, Byrne also says: “[S] uppose I have seen many skunks, and on that basis can recall what skunks look like. When I recall what skunks look like, I visualize a prototypical skunk, a perceptual amalgam of the various skunks I have encountered. Such a memory is best classified (at least initially) with paradigmatic episodic memories – recalling seeing a skunk in my garden this morning, for instance” (Byrne 2010, p. 17). Byrne does not expand on the qualification “(at least initially)”. One thing he might have in mind is that we might well ultimately decide to reserve the term ‘episodic memory’ for what he calls ‘paradigmatic episodic memories’ here, but that this is in fact just a verbal move. I discuss such a view at the end of the next section.
Note also, though, that this is a stipulation that goes beyond the basic characterization of episodic memory provided by the typical kinds of theories of episodic memory that have been offered recently. It does not follow, for instance, from the idea that episodic memory has a representational content that includes the information that what is being remembered lies in the past (Byrne 2010, pp. 23 ff.), or that the present memory experience causally derives from past perceptual experience (Fernandez 2006, p. 162).
Campbell’s example involves demonstrative reference to an object encountered in the past. However, it is also plausible to think that a key role of episodic memories lies in grounding demonstratives referring to past events. The defender of the idea that there can be episodic memories for past events of a type that happened repeatedly need have no qualms about this. She can simply say that, in those cases, the relevant demonstratives are plural demonstratives (‘those visits to the Louvre’, for instance).
Holland also connects this with the idea that episodic recollection is not a source of knowledge, but rather a manifestation of knowledge.
The idea that our ability to distinguish between episodes of remembering and episodes of imagining rests on a form of practical self-knowledge is also explored in Soteriou 2013, pp. 317 ff. It sometimes encounters the objection that recollecting is not always an exercise of agency, as there can be such a thing as, e.g., involuntary remembering. There is no scope to discuss this objection in this paper, but see, e.g., Hopkins (this issue, section 1) for some material that could be used to respond to it.
See also Pears 1991, pp. 40 f., who draws a related distinction between what he calls the “question about meaning” and the “question about truth” with respect to mental images. Bernecker (2008, p. 85), who quotes Pears, concurs that there is a difference between the question as to how one “know[s] what kind of cognitive activity one is engaged in” and the question as to how one “know[s] whether one succeeds in this activity.” Yet, he construes both of those questions as sceptical questions. In so doing, Bernecker arguably commits the very same mistake that Urmson and Pears accuse the empiricist of – i.e. to assume that they are questions requiring a unified treatment. The question as to how we can distinguish between defective and non-defective exercises of a cognitive capacity is indeed best construed as a sceptical question, because we can’t normally tell the two apart from each other. But in as far as we do sometimes succeed in imagining in Urmson’s second sense, and do at other times succeed in episodic recall, there is little question that we are able to tell these two kinds of cases apart from each other, and it makes sense to enquire into the grounds that enable us to do so.
As Urmson acknowledges, there may of course be particular situations in which I have specific reasons for suspecting my recollections to be more unreliable than usual – e.g. when trying to recollect a childhood incident whilst running a high fever – but this is a different matter.
Byrne (2010), for one, is explicit about the empiricist heritage of his representationalist account.
For instance, one worry one might have here is that Clayton and Russell’s position seems to imply that only ‘field’ memories can qualify as episodic, whereas ‘observer’ memories can’t. For the field vs. observer distinction see, e.g., Nigro and Neisser 1983.
At least that is the case I will focus on, given the general focus in this paper on visual imagination. Of course, you could also remind yourself of which way is clockwise by imagining turning something clockwise with your hand, for instance, or by imagining touching something that is turning clockwise. My argument in the main text carries over to cases of this type involving the imaginary employment of modalities other than vision.
In fact, one of the empiricist critics of Holland also argues that I can tell that I am remembering from the fact that “the whole incident is being presented to me forcibly, independent of my will; the details are not malleable” (Furlong 1956, p. 545).
And our being able to do is arguably required if episodic recollection is to play a particular epistemic role it sometimes plays. For instance, if episodic recollecting is meant to help me decide, whilst on my way to work, whether or not I have left the stove on at home, it is clearly no good simply bringing to mind an episode (or episodes) of turning off the stove and finding some way or other of making concrete to myself that what I thus remember lies in the past. Rather, what I need to do is reconstruct the particular sequence of events that led up to my being on my way to work now. Note also, though, that it would be wrong to tie the very concept of episodic memory too tightly to the fact that episodic memory can sometimes play an epistemic role of this kind. There are clearly many episodic memories we have that cannot play such an epistemic role, because they have no particular implication for what is the case in the present.
For helpful comments, I am grateful to Denis Perrin, two anonymous referees, and members of the Consciousness and Self Consciousness Research Seminar at Warwick.
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Hoerl, C. Remembering Events and Remembering Looks. Rev.Phil.Psych. 5, 351–372 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0191-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0191-6