^Despite the fact that Thomas Reid offered a devastating criticism of Russell’s view of memory almost 150 years before Russell proposed his theory, it wasn’t until the middle of the 20th century that philosophers began to appreciate Reid’s idea that memory requires a connection to a past object or event.
^Then, in a 1966 article entitled
“Remembering,” C. B. Martin
and Max Deutscher provided an argument in favor of what is known as the causal theory of memory.
According to that theory, memory involves a certain type of causal connection between your current cognitive state and the object or event that you remember. Since the article’s publication, the causal theory has become widely accepted within the philosophical community.
Theories of Knowledge LECTURE 9 The importance of Memory for Knowledge
I n a 2017 article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , philosophers of memory Kourken Michaelian and John Sutton wrote,
The idea that remembering is characterized by an appropriate causal connection has ... taken on the status of philosophical common sense.
^Although the broad idea of some sort of connection between the past event and your current cognitive state is important for memory, recent discussions in philosophy have continued to pick away at specific components of the causal account.
^Consider a case in which it seems to you as if you remember a certain object or event. What makes that apparent memory a genuine instance of memory is if your seeming memory has a reliably stable, continuous brain-based connection to the past object or event that you seem to remember. This “reliably stable connection” view has two advantages that it inherits from the classic Martin and Deutscher account.
^First, it allows us to distinguish a number of cases of merely apparent memories from those of genuine
^Suppose Harry visited Disneyland when he was four with his family.
While there, he got separated from his family. Years pass and Harry forgets that experience. One day, Harry reads a book about a character who, at the age of four, visits Disneyland with his family and gets separated from them. The story makes an impression on Harry, so much so that years later, he comes to take the memory of the experience of the character in the book as if it’s his own. When Harry later remembers the experience of getting lost at the age of four at Disneyland, it’s because he read it in the book—not because it really happened to him. In a case like this, even though Harry really did get lost at Disneyland at the age of four, we wouldn’t want to call that seeming memory a genuine memory. It lacks the reliably stable connection to the actual event.
Theories of Knowledge LECTURE 9 The importance of Memory for Knowledge
^The second kind of case, taken from Martin and Deutscher’s 1966 article, is described as follows:
b
[L]et us say that [Kent] has told his friend Gray what he saw of an accident in which he was involved.Kent has a second accident in which he gets a blow on the head which destroys all memory of a period in his past, including the time at which the first accident occurred. When Gray finds that Kent can no longer remember the first accident, he tells him those details which Kent had told Gray in the period between the first and second accidents. After a little while Kent forgets that anyone has told him about the first accident, but still remembers what he was told by Gray. It is clear that he does not remember the accident itself. ... Kent witnessed the first accident, can now recount what he saw of it, but does not remember it.
^Martin and Deutscher introduce this example to demonstrate that the reliably stable connection component of the theory isn’t enough. There is a reliably stable connection between Kent’s experience of the first accident and his later memory of it,
but the reliably stable connection consists in part in Gray’s recollection and testimony to Kent as to what occurred in that first accident. What’s missing from the case of Kent is the
“continuous brain-based connection.”
This is why Kent’s seeming to remember also can’t count as a genuine instance of remembering.
^Because many philosophers found Reid’s criticisms of Hume (and by extension Russell) compelling and because of the popularity of the causal theory of memory, in the years since the publication of Martin and Deutscher’s article, a great many philosophers have come to think that memory has a very specific sort of limitation when it comes to providing support for knowledge.
^To see that, let’s look back at some other sources of knowledge, such as self-awareness and sense perception.
] If you’re currently experiencing a certain mental state—say, a headache—and you ask yourself whether you are, you can form the belief that you are currently experiencing a headache. That’s a new piece of information, one that you didn’t previously have.
] If you look outside and see that there are now two robins in the shrub outside your window, that’s also a new piece of information.
The only way that you could now know that there are currently two
Theories of Knowledge LECTURE 9 The importance of Memory for Knowledge
robins in that shrub would be to check and see for yourself, or to have somebody else tell you.
^This suggests to philosophers that both self-awareness and sense perception are generative sources of knowledge—both can generate new knowledge, or give you knowledge that you didn’t previously have.
^For a long time, the common view among philosophers has been that memory is not a generative source of knowledge. Instead, most philosophers hold that memory is a preservative source of knowledge.
This means that you can’t know something on the basis of memory unless you knew it at some previous
time on the basis of some other source of knowledge.
^Take the case of your headache again.
If your current knowledge that you had a headache at some earlier time is based on memory, then that can only be because at that earlier time you knew about your headache on the basis of self-awareness.
^Recently, however, some philosophers have begun to question the received view that memory is a purely preservative source of knowledge.
For example, philosophy professor Jennifer Lackey has offered a number of examples of cases that she takes to illustrate the possibility of memory as a generative source of knowledge.
]Bernecker, Memory.
Locke, Memory.
]
reAdings
yTheories of Knowledge LECTURE 9 The importance of Memory for Knowledge
QUIZ
1 Which type of memory do we rely on when we remember a specific fact, such as a date from history?
a Procedural b Declarative c Episodic 2 TrUe or fAlse
The phenomena of aphantasia and severely deficient autobiographical memory provide an example of the independence of declarative and episodic memory.
3 The fact that H. M., who had no ability to store long-term semantic or episodic memories, was able to learn the mirror-drawing skill is an example of which of the following?
a The independence of procedural memory from the other types of memory
b The independence of episodic memory from the other types of memory
c The independence of semantic memory from the other types of memory
4 TrUe or fAlse
Bertrand Russell thought that his five-minute hypothesis was evidence that memories are not dependent on the past.
5 TrUe or fAlse
Thomas Reid objects that David Hume’s view of memory—like Bertrand Russell’s—is objectionable because it actually relies on the view of memory that it rejects.
6 Which view of memory suggests that it relies on a reliably stable, continuous brain-based connection to a past object or event?
a The Russell-Hume view b Thomas Reid’s view
c The Martin-Deutscher causal theory of memory
]
Answer key can be found on page 207.
yTheories of Knowledge LECTURE 9 QUIZ