^There are two basic types of foundationalist theory of memory knowledge—the inferential theory and the naive foundational theory—
and they are similar in structure to the two types of foundationalist theory of knowledge on the basis of sense perception.
^According to the inferential theory, the way that you acquire knowledge on the basis of memory is that you have a memory experience and then you argue that, given that experience, what you seem to remember probably did occur.
^For example, consider a case of discursive knowledge. Suppose you seem to remember that George Washington was the first president of the United States of America. You’d then reason as follows:
1 I seem to remember that
Washington was the first president of the United States of America.
2 In the past, whenever I have seemed to remember something, it has usually turned out that what I remembered is true.
3 Therefore, it’s probably true that Washington was the first president of the United States of America.
^This model seems very implausible as described. It just doesn’t seem that memory works like that. But there’s a more serious problem with this model: It is viciously circular. In order to establish the second step of the argument, you have to remember what happened in the past. This is the problem that Reid raised for the Hume and Russell model of memory presented in the previous
Theories of Knowledge LECTURE 10 Confabulations and false Memories
lecture. So, the inferential form of foundationalism is a nonstarter.
^According to the naive theory, memory gives you a good reason to believe something when you seem to remember it and you are not presently aware of anything that suggests that what you remember is false.
^In some ways, this seems a much more plausible picture of how memory actually works—as a personal process. In other words, when you ask yourself how it feels to remember something, it doesn’t feel like you’re putting puzzle pieces together, nor does it feel like you’re formulating an argument. Instead, it feels like you remember something and—unless you have some specific reason to question that memory—it’s okay simply to rely on what you remember.
^However, there are two very significant problems for the naive theory.
] Consider a case in which you see some event but have reason at the time to doubt that what you’re seeing is genuine. For example, suppose you see a very well- executed fake documentary in which a group of children seems to knock down a grown man and steal his briefcase, but you know that it’s a fake documentary
because you’re viewing it in the context of a film festival of fictive documentary films. At a later date, you remember what you experienced previously, but you’ve forgotten the reasons you had at the time to doubt what you saw. As far as the naive theory is concerned, this would be a case in which you have good reason to believe the children really did knock down the grown man and steal his briefcase.
That’s because your memory now meets the two conditions required by the naive theory: You seem to remember the children committing the theft, and you are not presently aware of anything that suggests what you remember is false. This seems strange, however. It would be odd if your forgetfulness of the evidence rebutting your experience would actually help you. But that’s exactly what the naive theory suggests in this case.
] When we remember something, our brains fill in the remembered experience with plausible details.
Rather than being a recording of the details of the experience that is simply recalled in the brain, a memory is more like a reconstruction. This is one of the ways that our memories can mislead us, and it is the source of one of the problems for the coherentist picture of memory.
Theories of Knowledge LECTURE 10 Confabulations and false Memories
P sychologists call our ability to remember where we acquired a particular piece of information source monitoring. The problem is that we’re really bad at source monitoring. It’s maybe not surprising that we’re bad at remembering the specific source of information—say, whether we read something in The New York Times versus The Wall Street Journal. However, it turns out that we’re even bad at remembering whether we actually read the information at all—rather than, say, hearing it during a 10-minute gossip session at the water cooler.
Theories of Knowledge LECTURE 10 Confabulations and false Memories
Even more dramatically, we often mistake the source of our memory as involving our own experiences when the source was actually something we read or heard or a photo we saw.
Our difficulties with source monitoring pose a problem for foundationalism. Part of the plausibility of naive foundationalism is that when you have a seeming memory, the memory experience you have isn’t devoid of additional information. In other words, it’s not merely a seeming memory experience of a past object or event (if it’s an episodic memory) or of a supposed fact (if it’s a declarative memory).
Instead, the seeming memory experience also contains information of its supposed source; that is, you remember it as something you experienced yourself or as something you heard or read. And the fact that you remember it as having come from a certain source seems to be part of what makes the supposed memory so believable.
But if it’s true that we are subject to source
monitoring failures we’re unaware of, this suggests that the naive foundationalist theory is just that—
naive. We should look for something better.
Theories of Knowledge LECTURE 10 Confabulations and false Memories
I
f what’s been presented so far in this lecture is correct, neither form of internalism—neither coherentism nor foundationalism—does a good job of explaining how memory provides us with support for knowledge.But there are some ways in which both coherentism and foundationalism add to our understanding of how memory contributes to knowledge.
It is in fact likely that the computational processes involved in the retrieval of memories from the information encoded in the brain operate according to coherentist principles. Because of this, it is plausible that an investigation of how coherence can contribute to accurate reconstructions of information will be useful for cognitive scientists. It will help them better understand how the brain supports the encoding, storage, and retrieval of memories. In other words, paying attention to the lessons we learn from coherentism can help us understand the subpersonal mechanisms involved in memory.
Furthermore, the way it feels to rely on memory for
information seems to be best explained by a foundationalist account. For that reason, when it comes to explaining why someone might behave in a certain way on the basis of his or her memory, it would be good to pay attention to lessons we’ve learned from foundationalism. In other words, appealing to foundationalism can help us understand how memory contributes to the personal factors that can help explain someone’s behavior.
The problem is that neither coherentism nor foundationalism is sufficient to explain how memory can support knowledge.
That’s because neither of them does a good job of accounting for if and when memories are reliably accurate. In order to do that, we’ll need to turn to a consideration of externalism.
Theories of Knowledge LECTURE 10 Confabulations and false Memories