A propositional interpretation of knowledge by acquaintance seems more promising than the nonpropositional one, endorsed by Russell. According to the propositional interpretation, to be acquainted with an object means to attend (pay attention) to individuating features of the object. For the actual, direct acquaintance with an object, a subject's perception of the object and his attending to the individuating features of it (just as the fact that these features do belonge to the object in question) are the essential factors. (...) Proper names of objects and subject's memory images referring to objects of acquaintance may be viewed as their special individuating features (in spite of being attached to these objects "externally"). For the dispositional (non-actual) notion of acquaintance, a relativization of time must be added, together with the subject's ability to attend to the individuating features of the object under proper conditions (when the object of previous acquaintance is presented or represented to the subject). Although the conditional formulas expressing these situations contribute to the explication of the concept of knowledge by acquaintance, their truth-status remains open and contingent upon the ways of solving the problem of individuation (identification). (shrink)

A propositional interpretation of knowledge by acquaintance seems more promising than the nonpropositional one, endorsed by Russell. According to the propositional interpretation, to be acquainted with an object means to attend (pay attention) to individuating features of the object. For the actual, direct acquaintance with an object, a subject's perception of the object and his attending to the individuating features of it (just as the fact that these features do belonge to the object in question) are the essential factors. (...) Proper names of objects and subject's memory images referring to objects of acquaintance may be viewed as their special individuating features (in spite of being attached to these objects "externally"). For the dispositional (non-actual) notion of acquaintance, a relativization of time must be added, together with the subject's ability to attend to the individuating features of the object under proper conditions (when the object of previous acquaintance is presented or represented to the subject). Although the conditional formulas expressing these situations contribute to the explication of the concept of knowledge by acquaintance, their truth-status remains open and contingent upon the ways of solving the problem of individuation (identification). (shrink)

Bali island’s beautiful nature in Indonesia are the result of volcanic activity under the sea, more than 23 million years ago. The geology of Bali island lies in the Sunda mountains arc, part of the volcanic rings of Pacific ring of fire. This causes the condition of Bali island is often unstable in ancient times, due to the shocks of volcanic eruptions. One of the beautiful areas caused by ancient volcanic activity is the Caldera of Mount Batur. On the northwestern (...) side of the caldera of the ancient Mount Batur, the archaeological traces of statues in sacred venues have been found since the prehistoric Balinese civilization. The holy place built on the hill at the highest peak of this ancient Batur Mountain caldera, often called Pura Penulisan. This holy place is designed in accordance with local wisdom, the concept of punden berundak, a concept of the original architectural space of Indonesia since prehistoric times. The shape of the architectural space design follows the topography of the hills, in form of leveled terrace and equipped with plaza. Archaelogical of Pura Penulisan merges with the caldera of Mount Batur, which was formed due to eruption 5,500 years ago. Therefore, Pura Penulisan architecture and the ancient Batur Mountain caldera, are both a valuable heritage, containing knowledge, and can knit memories. (shrink)

People with Down syndrome often exhibit deficiencies in wayfinding activities, particularly route learning (e.g., Courbois et al., 2013 ; Davis et al., 2014 ; Farran et al., 2015 ). Evidence concerning more sophisticated survey learning has been sparse. In the research reported here, two experiments are reported that evaluated survey learning of youth with DS and typically developing children (TD) matched on mental age. In Experiment 1, participants learned two overlapping routes consisting of three turns each through a virtual environment (...) depicting 9 square city blocks. Following acquisition, they were tested on multiple measures of survey knowledge: finding a shortcut, identifying the direction of landmarks not currently visible from their location in the environment, and recognizing a bird’s-eye representation of the overall environment. Under these conditions, which should provide relatively optimal opportunities for survey learning, the participants with DS performed comparably to TD participants matched on non-verbal ability on all of our measures of survey learning. Hence, we concluded that people with DS can acquire some survey knowledge when tasked with learning a small environment and given the opportunity to do so. In Experiment 2, the experimenter navigated participants through a large, relatively complex, virtual environment along a circuitous path, beginning and ending at a target landmark. Then, the participants were placed at a pre-specified location in the environment that they had viewed previously and instructed to navigate to the same target (a door) using the shortest possible path from their current location. They completed the task three times: once after being shown the environment one time, once after three exposures, and once after five exposures. Results indicated that the participants with DS exhibited significantly less skill at identifying the shortcut than did the TD participants, with differences emerging as the number of exposures increased. Participants with DS were also less able to recall landmarks at the end of the experiment. Overall, however, the performance of both groups was relatively poor in both experiments – with the performance of participants with DS being worse as conditions became less optimal. These results were discussed in terms of underlying mechanisms that may account for variations in survey learning as environmental complexity increases. (shrink)

I argue against preservationism, the epistemic claim that memories can at most preserve knowledge generated by other basic types of sources. I show how memories can and do generate knowledge that is irreducible to other basic sources of knowledge. In some epistemic contexts, memories are primary basic sources of knowledge; they can generate knowledge by themselves or with trivial assistance from other types of basic sources of knowledge. I outline an ontology of information transmission (...) from events to memory as an alternative to causal theories of memory. I derive from information theory a concept of reliability of memories as the ratio of retrieved information to transmitted information. I distinguish the generation of knowledge from reliable memories from its generation from unreliable memories. Reliable memories can generate new knowledge by forming together narratives and via colligation. Coherent, even unreliable, memories can generate knowledge if they are epistemically independent of each other and the prior probability of the knowledge they generate is sufficiently low or high. Ascertaining the epistemic independence of memories and eliminating possible confounders may be achieved through the generation of knowledge from independent memories in different minds, when memories are primary basic sources of knowledge and the testimonies that report them are trivial. (shrink)

This paper aims to outline, and argue for, an approach to episodic memory broadly in the spirit of knowledge-first epistemology. I discuss a group of influential views of epsiodic memory that I characterize as ‘two-factor accounts’, which have both proved popular historically and have also seen a resurgence in recent work on the philosophy of memory. What is common to them is that they try to give an account of the nature of episodic memory in (...) which the concept of knowledge plays no explanatory role. I highlight some parallels between these two-factor accounts and attempts to give a reductive definition of knowledge itself. I then discuss some problems two-factor accounts of episodic memory face in explaining the distinctive sense in which episodic recollection involves remembering personally experienced past events, before sketching an alternative approach to episodic memory, which takes as basic the idea that episodic memory involves the retention of knowledge. I argue that we can give an exhaustive constitutive account of what episodic memory is, and how it differs from other types of mental states, by considering what particular type of knowledge is retained in episodic memory, and what exactly having that knowledge consists in. (shrink)

One distinct interest in self-knowledge concerns whether one can know about one’s own mental states and processes, how much, and by what methods. One broad distinction is between accounts that centrally claim that we look inward for self-knowledge (introspective methods) and those that claim that we look outward for self-knowledge (transparency methods). It is here argued that neither method is sufficient, and that we see this as soon as we move beyond questions about knowledge of one’s (...) beliefs, focusing instead on how one distinguishes, for oneself, one’s veridical visual memories from mere (non-veridical) visual images. Given robust psychological and phenomenal similarities between episodic memories and mere imagery, the following is a genuine question that one might pose to oneself: “Do I actually remember that happening, or am I just imagining it?” After critical analysis of the transparency method (advocated by Byrne 2010, following Evans 1982) to this latter epistemological question, a brief sketch is offered of a more holistic and inferential method for acquisition of broader self-knowledge (broadly following the interpretive-sensory access account of Carruthers 2011). In a slogan, knowing more of the mind requires using more of the mind. (shrink)

Collaborative remembering, in which two or more individuals cooperate to remember together, is an ordinary occurrence. Ordinary though it may be, it challenges traditional understandings of remembering as a cognitive process unfolding within a single subject, as well as traditional understandings of memory knowledge as a justified memory belief held within the mind of a single subject. Collaborative memory has come to be a major area of research in psychology, but it has so far not been (...) investigated in epistemology. In this chapter, we attempt an initial exploration of the epistemological implications of collaborative memory research, taking as our starting point the “extended knowledge” debate which has resulted from the recent encounter between extracranialist theories of cognition and externalist theories of knowledge (Carter et al., 2014; Carter et al., forthcoming). Various forms of socially and technologically augmented memory have played important roles in the extended knowledge debate, but the debate has so far not taken collaborative memory, in particular, into account. We will argue that collaborative memory supports a novel externalist theory of knowledge: distributed reliabilism. Distributed reliabilism departs in two important respects from both traditional reliabilism (Goldman, 2012) and updated theories such as extended (Goldberg, 2010) and social reliabilism (Goldman, 2014). First, it acknowledges that belief-forming processes may extend extracranially to include processing performed both by other subjects and by technological artifacts. Second, it acknowledges that distributed sociotechnical systems themselves may be knowing subjects. Overall, then, the main aim of the chapter is to draw out the philosophical implications of psychological research on collaborative memory. But our argument will also suggest that it may be useful to broaden the standard conception of collaborative memory to include not only the sorts of direct interactions among subjects that have been the focus of psychological research so far but also a range of more indirect, technology-supported and -mediated interactions, and it thus has implications for psychology as well. (shrink)

Sosa (2007) claims that a necessary condition on knowledge is manifesting an epistemic competence. To manifest an epistemic competence, a belief must satisfy two conditions: (1) it must derive from the exercise of a reliable belief-forming disposition in appropriate conditions for its exercise and (2) that exercise of the disposition in those conditions would not issue a false belief in a close possible world. Drawing on recent psychological research, I show that memories that are issued by episodic memory (...) retrieval fail to satisfy either of these conditions. This presents Sosa, and other proponents of similar conditions (e.g. some safety theorists and process reliabilists), with a dilemma: (1) deny that episodic memories count as knowledge or (2) give up the conditions as necessary conditions on knowledge. I explore the implications of this dilemma for our understanding of knowledge, memory and the relationship between them. (shrink)

Abstract In this paper I present a short outline of an Indicativity Theory of Knowledge, for the cases of Perceptual Knowledge and Knowledge by Memory. I explain the main rationale for a token-indicativity approach, and how it is fleshed out precisely in terms of chances. I elaborate on the account of the value of knowledge it provides, and what that value is. I explain why, given the rationale of conceiving Knowledge as token indicativity, separate (...) sub-accounts in terms of chances should be extracted for the different modes of Knowledge, elaborating on the common core of high token-indicativity. In the main section that outlines the account of Perceptual Knowledge, the main Indicativity condition is presented, as are the main condition of in what sense high token indicativity should yields high chance, the important Discriminability condition, and its associated Contrast Class. (shrink)

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington was a key figure in the development of modern astrophysics, who also made important contributions to the philosophy of science and popular science writing. The Arthur Eddington Memorial Trust was set up after his death in order to hold annual lectures on the relationship between scientific thought and aspects of philosophy, religion or ethics. This 2012 collection gathers together six of these lectures, including contributions by Sir Edmund Whittaker, Herbert Dingle, Richard B. Braithwaite, John C. Eccles, (...) Dame Kathleen Lonsdale, and Baroness Mary Warnock, together with Eddington's 1929 Swarthmore Lecture on Science and the Unseen World. A preface written by the Astronomer Royal, Baron Rees of Ludlow, is also included. This is a fascinating book that will be of value to anyone with an interest in the philosophy of science and Eddington's legacy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Memory in Augustine’s Theological Anthropology by Paige E. HochschildJoseph T. Lienhard, S.J.Memory in Augustine’s Theological Anthropology. By Paige E. Hochschild. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. 251. $125.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-19-964302-8.When students of St. Augustine consider his teaching on memory, they turn instinctively to the Confessions, book 10, and to On the Trinity, books 11 and 12. The lyrical passage in the Confessions is easy (...) to teach and intriguing in its contents. Paige Hochschild paints a much larger picture, drawing on far more sources. She also sees memory as a central category in Augustine’s thought. In the opening paragraph of the introduction, she describes memory (for Augustine) as the way the mind meets the world, as the way things external to the body are apprehended, as the way intelligible objects are known, and as what it means to be constituted in the image of God. This is a big order. And “order,” in Augustine’s sense, is key: the mind, as memory, brings order to the natural world, but also brings to light a providential order that is implicit in the sensible.The book is divided into three parts: (1) the philosophical tradition (Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus), (2) Augustine’s earlier writings (from the Cassiciacum dialogues up to De magistro and De musica), and (3) the Confessions and De trinitate. The conclusion of this complex study is that memory is salvific: it accounts for the soul’s progress by the dialectical play of the knowledge and love of what is possessed, yet not possessed. The lifelong process of healing in which memory functions is fulfilled in contemplation.Two characteristics of Hochschild’s book can be mentioned at the outset. First, she studies each author diachronically, measuring progress and growth in the author’s thought, and particularly in his understanding of memory. Second, she readily invokes a wide range of categories to explain and illuminate her main topic. The book is anything but an extended encyclopedia article on “memoria in Augustine.” The two principal terms in the title, “memory” and “theological anthropology,” are richly developed and elaborated.Chapter 1 begins with a short note on Augustine’s knowledge of Plato. It is generally admitted that Augustine read some of the dialogues of Plato in translation: the Timaeus, the Republic (albeit only parts of it), the Phaedo, and the Phaedrus. Some of these works, at least, may have come down to him through doxographers. But Plato’s influence on Augustine remains shadowy. It is “Platonism,” and particularly Plotinus, that influences him so clearly, a point made memorably in Confessions 7.9.13-15, and its intriguing reference to the libri Platonicorum. Before all else, Platonism delivers Augustine from the bondage of materialism.Hochschild treats Plato’s doctrine of memory under four headings: sense perception, knowledge as recollection, divisions in the ways of knowing, and the practice of dialectic. In regard to sense perception, the sharp distinction (found in the Republic) between opinion (doxa) and knowledge (epistêmê) [End Page 144] needs to be refined, Hochschild avers. At least in some later works, the sensible is an image of the intelligible, and hence some sense perception can be infallible. On the next topic, Plato invokes recollection to explain direct apprehension of the forms, but recollection does not recall what was perceived in the past but is a restoration of a clear, logical relationship. The Republic introduces a new element, “the illuminative power of the Good” (21). The final section of chapter 1 treats dialectic, concluding that “knowledge is fulfilled in virtue, and the art of dialectic is not merely an exercise in definition, but a hexis, and a way of living” (27).Chapter 2, on Aristotle, begins with the observation that, if Plato’s influence on Augustine was indirect, Aristotle’s was even more indirect, reaching Augustine through Plotinus. Most familiar, of course, are Augustine’s account of reading Aristotle’s Categories during his days at Carthage (Confessions 4.16.28-31) and his later use of the categories of substance and relation in his understanding of the Trinity, creating the category of “substantial relation,” which would... (shrink)

At Theaetetus 163d-164b Socrates objects to the thesis that knowledge is perception by pointing out that a man who has seen something can still remember it, and so has knowledge of it; but this is impossible, if knowledge is perception, since he is no longer perceiving it.To this Protagoras is made to reply with two sentences at 166b 1–4: .Cornford translates ‘ For instance, do you think you will find anyone to admit that one's present memory (...) of a past impression is an impression of the same character as one had during the original experience, which is now over? It is nothing of the sort’.Cornford understands this as the suggestion that the memory and the original perception are of different things: ‘ All that the objection in fact established was that “ perception” must be stretched to include awareness of memory images’. So too Lee: ‘Protagoras’ “way out”… appears to be to say that what we now know is not properly X but rather our memory trace of X - some present πά θ ο ς quite distinct from X and very different from that ’. McDowel. (shrink)

The Meno has traditionally been viewed as "one of Plato's earliest and most noteworthy forays into epistemology." In this dialogue, and in the course of a discussion between Socrates and his young interlocutor, Meno, about the nature of virtue and whether it can be taught, “Meno raises an epistemological question unprecedented in the Socratic dialogues.” This question - or rather, dilemma - has come to be known in the philosophical literature as Meno’s Paradox of Inquiry, due its apparently containing an (...) easy-to-detect equivocation of the word ‘know’. Immediately after the paradox, and in an apparent response to it, Socrates recounts a myth: a story told by priests and priestesses about the pre-natal existence and immortality of the soul. From this this myth, Socrates concocts the infamous theory of recollection – a theory according to which the soul has acquired knowledge of everything before it was born, while in a disincarnate state. According to the traditional reading of Meno’s paradox, this theory constitutes Plato’s response to it. The traditional reading has come under fire in recent years by advocates of the epistemological reading (ERM), who argue that the theory of recollection is not Plato’s intended response to the paradox. Instead, they suggest, Plato’s distinction between true belief and knowledge – which appears towards the end of the dialogue – is sufficient for solving the paradox; and as such, it ought to be read as Plato’s response to it. In this thesis, I argue against ERM’s claim that a mere epistemological distinction is all it takes to solve the paradox. To do so, I explore the metaphysics of change in Plato’s ontology. From this, I appeal to our everyday notion of ‘memory’ in order to show that Meno’s paradox, in fact, contains a hidden-premise, which when laid bare, reveals two distinct challenges contained within the argument: a superficial one, and a deeper one. I argue that although it appears at first blush as though the former could easily be dismissed as an equivocation, to which the epistemological distinction between belief and knowledge could provide an answer, the latter cannot. This is because the deeper challenge threatens the very preconditions of knowledge itself – that is to say, it renders cognition impossible – and, as such, it cancels out any effort to provide an epistemological response to the superficial challenge. Hence, unless the deeper-level challenge is satisfactorily disarmed, both challenges remain unanswered. I argue that although the major motivation for the theory of recollection in the Meno is indeed to provide an answer to scepticism about knowledge, nevertheless, it ought to be understood, first, as a theory of cognition – i.e. as a theory about the preconditions and atomic building blocks of knowledge – and not a theory of knowledge per se. This answer comes in the form of a radical theory of the mind and cognition – one that stands in stark opposition to our common-sense views about the mind: a view from which, Plato believed, the paradox arises. Drawing on recent debates between Nativists and Empiricists in the Cognitive Sciences, I argue that it was a great achievement of Plato’s to grasp that our common-sense view about the mind, and its concomitant process of learning, language acquisition and knowledge acquisition, might in fact be at the very root of scepticism about our ability to engage in meaningful philosophical practice, and our ability to acquire objective knowledge – especially, objective moral knowledge. The Meno’s paradox, then – so I contend - is not a puzzle whose solution rests upon merely pointing to an epistemological distinction between true belief and knowledge, as advocates of ERM have suggested. Rather, it is a puzzle about cognition. More precisely, it is a puzzle that targets the rudimentary cognitive stages of initial cognition and truth-recognition - one whose solution entails offering an account of the mind that would make these elementary cognitive processes possible. Accordingly, Plato’s theory of recollection in the Meno ought to be read as an attempt to map the structure of the mind, and as such, to provide an account of cognition. In doing so, he intended to put forward a view about the preconditions of knowledge – the sort of preconditions without which language acquisition and knowledge acquisition would simply not be possible. With this theory, Plato has the beginnings of an argument against the kind of relativism and scepticism prevalent at his time. As such, a correct interpretation of the so-called paradox of inquiry (and Plato’s proposed solution to it via the theory of recollection) should approach it as a puzzle about mind and cognition – and not solely as an epistemological one, as it has previously been treated. (shrink)

Agentialism about self-knowledge is the view that key to understanding our capacity for self-knowledge is appreciating the connection between that capacity and our identities as rational agents—as creatures for whom believing, intending, desiring, and so on are manifestations of a capacity to be responsive to reasons. This connection, agentialists maintain, consists in the fact that coming to know our own minds involves an exercise of our rational capacities in the service of answering the relevant first-order question. Agentialists face (...) the task of accounting for the connection between our identities as rational agents and our capacity to know our stored beliefs. It’s plausible that one comes to know that one believes that p by exercising one’s rational capacities in those cases where the belief that p is formed on the basis of present consideration of the reasons for and against p. But what exactly is the relevance of our rational capacities in the case where one has already formed the belief in question? In this paper I provide an answer to this question. That answer involves an appeal to a particular model of memory. According to the model I favor, memory preserves, in addition to the content of one’s beliefs, one’s commitment to their truth. (shrink)

Reid rejects the image theory --the representative or indirect realist position--that memory-judgements are inferred from or otherwise justified by a present image or introspectible state. He also rejects the trace theory , which regards memories as essentially traces in the brain. In contrast he argues for a direct knowledge account in which personal memory yields unmediated knowledge of the past. He asserts the reliability of memory, not in currently fashionable terms as a reliable belief-forming process, (...) but more elusively as a principle of Commonsense. There remains a contemporary consensus against Reid's position. I argue that Reid's critique is essentially sound, and that the consensus is mistaken; personal memory judgements are spontaneous and non-inferential in the same way as perceptual judgements. But I question Reid's account of the connection between personal memory and personal identity. My primary concern is rationally reconstructive rather than scholarly, and downplays recent interpretations of Reid's faculty psychology as a precursor of functionalism and other scientific philosophies of mind. (shrink)

It is commonly believed that our episodic memory teaches us about the reality of personal identity over time. Derek Parfitt’s notion of quasi-memory challenges this belief. According to Parfit, q-memories provide us with knowledge of past experiences in the same way that memory does, without presupposing that the rememberer and the experiencer are the same person. Various aspects of Parfit’s theory have met with criticism from scholars such as D. Wiggins, J. McDowell, M. Schechtman, and others. (...) In this paper, I will focus primarily on the holistic argument that q-memories cannot be squared with the complex nature of mental life. This is a well-known argument and, when understood as criticism of memory-trace copying, is accepted by some q-memory proponents. In this paper, I will try to show why it is impossible to defend quasi-memory, even when wholesale psychological continuity applies, and why post-fission persons are not genuine cases of q-memories. (shrink)

How well does memory work, how accurate is it, and can we tell when someone is reporting an accurate memory? Can we distinguish a true memory from a false one? Can memories be selectively enhanced, or erased? Are memories altered by emotion, by stress, by drugs? These questions and more are addressed by Memory and Law, which aims to present the current state of knowledge among cognitive and neural scientists about memory as applied to (...) legal settings. (shrink)

Event sequences or scripts are the conceptual representations of activities in memory. Traditional views hold that events are represented in amodal networks and are retrieved by associative strategies. The embodied cognition approach holds that knowledge is grounded in perception and retrieved by mental simulation. We used a script generation task where event sequences of activities had to be produced. Activities varied in their degree of familiarity. In a regressional design we investigated whether amodal or perceptual variables best predicted (...) knowledge retrieval to gain insight into the underlying representation. Retrieval depended on the familiarity of the activity. While novel activities mainly relied on perception‐based simulation and to a lesser extent on associative strategies, moderately familiar activities showed the opposite pattern, and events of familiar activities were retrieved by association alone. We conclude that amodal structures exist in all representations that become stronger with increasing frequency and finally prevail over perceptual structures. (shrink)

This book provides a survey of the major issues in the philosophy of mathematics, such as ontological questions regarding the nature of mathematical objects, epistemic questions about the acquisition of mathematical knowledge, and the intriguing riddle of the applicability of mathematics to the physical world. Some of these issues go back to the nascent years of mathematics itself, others are just beginning to draw the attention of scholars. In addressing these questions, some of the papers in this volume wrestle (...) with them directly, while others use the writings of philosophers such as Hume and Wittgenstein to approach their problems by way of interpretation and critique. The contributors include prominent philosophers of science and mathematics as well as promising younger scholars. The volume seeks to share the concerns of philosophers of mathematics with a wider audience and will be of interest to historians, mathematicians and philosophers alike. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to enquire into neuroscientific research on memory and relate it to topics of skill, knowledge and consciousness. The article outlines some contemporary theories on procedural and working memory, and discusses what contributions they give to sport science and philosophy of sport. It is argued that memory research gives important insights to the neuronal structures and events involved in knowledge and consciousness contributing to sport skills, but that these explanations are (...) not exhaustive. The article argues that phenomenal consciousness in skills is not explained by the neuroscience of memory, and hence neither are skills. (shrink)

We learn a lot. Friends tell us about their lives. Books tell us about the past. We see the world. We reason and we reflect on our mental lives. As a result we come to know and to form justified beliefs about a range of topics. We also seem to keep these beliefs. How? The natural answer is: by memory. It is not too hard to understand that memory allows us to retain information. It is harder to understand (...) exactly how memory allows us to retain knowledge and reasons for our beliefs. Learning is largely a matter of acquiring reasons for changing views. But how do we keep reasons for the views we keep? The epistemology of memory concerns memory’s role in our having knowledge and justification. This branch of epistemology, unlike nearly all other branches, addresses our having knowledge and justification over time. This article reviews the major epistemic roles that philosophers have assigned to memory. Section 1 surveys the nature of memory and the various memory systems. Some philosophers think the relation knowledge bears to at least one memory system is maximally strong: remembering just is a way of knowing. Section 2 covers this strong relation. Section 3 canvases the main problems that data on human memory pose to theories of justification and the central attempts to solve these problems. Section 4 discusses the historical and contemporary responses to two main skeptical challenges about memory. (shrink)

How should we understand our capacity to remember our past intentional states? And what can we leam from Wittgenstein's treatment of this topic? Three questions are considered. First, what is the relation between our past attitudes and our present beliefs about them? Realism about past attitudes is defended. Second, how should we understand Wittgenstein's view that self‐ascriptions of past attitudes are a kind of “response” and that the “language‐game” of reporting past attitudes is “the primary thing”? The epistemology and metaphysics (...) of past‐tense self‐ascription are examined in the light of those comments, and our acquisition of the concept of past attitudes is discussed. Third, does Wittgenstein give us reason to think that the identity of a past attitude may be constituted, not by anything that was true of the subject at the time, but by her retrospective tendency to self‐ascribe it? It is argued that, contrary to some interpretations, he does not. (shrink)

The development of the semantic externalism in the 1970s was followed by a debate on the compatibility of externalism and self-knowledge. Boghossian’s memory argument is one of the most important arguments against the compatibilist view. However, some compatibilists attack Boghossian’s argument by pointing out that his understanding of memory is internalistic. Ludlow and others developed the externalist view of memory to defend the compatibility of externalism and self-knowledge. However, the externalist view of memory undermines (...) the epistemic status of memory since it gives memory a burden that is too heavy for it to carry. This paper argues that only if we take the content of memory to be narrow and take that of self-knowledge to be wide and replace Cartesian self-knowledge with contextually constrained self-knowledge, can the compatibility of externalism and self-knowledge be effectively defended. (shrink)

Philosophical theories of memory rarely distinguish between importantly different sorts of memory: procedural, semantic and episodic. I argue for a temporal representation theory to explain the unique characteristic of episodic memory as the only form of conscious memory. A careful distinction between implicit and explicit representation shows how the past figures in memory. In procedural and semantic memory, the influence of the past is implicit by which I mean that the past experience is used (...) but not represented in the skill or knowledge. Episodic memory, in contrast, depends on representing a past experience as past. On a temporal representation theory of consciousness, a conscious state represents the present moment, and in the case of episodic memory, it includes a representation of past experience. The embedded account of the ‘feeling of pastness’ takes past experience to be part of the explicit content of a conscious state. An episodic memory is a representation of the present that includes a representation of the past. Whereas a higher-order theory of consciousness can give no reason why only episodic memories are conscious, a temporal theory explains why episodic memories are both higher-order and conscious. Finally, I consider the essential role of episodic memory in the formation of a temporally extended self. The demands of a social environment motivate development of an ability to track the mental states of others and oneself over time. By incorporating past experience (and future experience) into the present, episodic memory extends experience in time to form the sense of self. Through a careful examination of the function of temporal representation, we can see why the past is not consciously represented in procedural and semantic memory and the value of consciously representing the past in episodic memory. (shrink)

Since antiquity, there had been close ties between imagined movement through built spaces and organising knowledge. Philosophers and rhetorical theorists had argued that one remembered most effectively by imagining a sequence of places, including built spaces, and storing images of what should be recalled in those places. Authors of medieval pilgrimage narratives had led their readers on tours of sacred sites beginning in the twelfth century. From the late fifteenth century, however, imagined movement became more insistently physical and increasingly (...) deployed to communicate, rather than simply store, knowledge: built memory spaces were for the first time categorised according to size; volumes began to present pre-designed memory structures devoted to a particular topic; guidebooks to Rome started to lead readers on tours similar to those of pilgrimage narratives; and university botanic gardens offered the lived equivalent of sequences of memory places. By the seventeenth century, tours with sequences of spaces that stored information were a familiar technique across discourses from natural philosophy to architecture. This article examines the increasing physicality of imagined movement through these spaces and its connection to communicating knowledge as well as to shaping the attitudes of readers. I focus on mnemonic treatises and volumes presenting pre-designed spaces, the books where imagined movement was especially apparent, alongside guidebooks and botanic gardens. Consequently, built memory spaces, which have been little studied, are highlighted, and two rich but usually discrete strands of early modern history are brought together: history of memory and studies of movement through the built environment. (shrink)

People unfamiliar with Chinese characters show poorer visual working memory (VWM) performance for Chinese characters than do literates in Chinese. In a series of experiments, we investigated the reasons for this expertise advantage. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that the advantage of Chinese literates does not transfer to novel material. Experts had similar resolution as novices for material outside of their field of expertise, and the memory of novices and experts did not differ when detecting a big change, (...) e.g., when a character’s color was changed. Memorizing appears to function as a rather abstract representation of word forms because memory for characters’ fonts was poor independently of expertise (Experiment 3), though still visual. Distractors that were highly similar conceptually did not increase memory errors, but visually similar distractors impaired memory (Experiment 4). We hypothesized that literates in Chinese represent characters in VWM as tokens of visual word forms made available by long-term memory. In Experiment 5, we provided novices with visual word form knowledge. Participants subsequently performed a change detection task with trained and novel characters in a functional magnetic resonance experiment. We analyzed set size- and training-dependent effects in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) and the visual word form area. VWM for trained characters was better than for novel characters. Neural activity increased with set size and at a slower rate for trained than for novel characters. All conditions approached the same maximum, but novel characters reached the maximum at a smaller set size than trained characters. The time course of the bold response depended on set size and knowledge status. Starting from the same initial maximum, neural activity at small set sizes returned to baseline more quickly for trained characters than for novel characters. Additionally, high performers showed generally more neural activity in the IPS than low performers. We conclude that experts’ better performance in working memory (WM) is caused by the availability of visual long-term representations (word form types) that allow a sparse representation of the perceived stimuli and make even small changes big because they cause a type change that is easily detected. (shrink)

This paper examines a leading traditional account of memory knowledge. (A “traditional” account of memory knowledge locates whatever positive justification there may be for the belief which constitutes that knowledge in a present memory-impression.) The paper (1) presents a pair of cases designed to show that Carl Ginet’s four-part defeasibility-type definition of memory knowledge that p is either too weak or too strong, and (2) suggests how these cases could be handled by (...) one sort of non-traditional account. (shrink)

both the initial justification for adopting it and the justification for retaining it provided by seeming memories. This view captures our intuitions about justification in several cases, while none of the alternative views can.

Let us recapitulate here. A unified learning process is presented here, the principles of which are consistently applied through three distinct periods; the acquisition of knowledge, the analytical examination of it and a third stage where knowledge might be called wisdom. The last stage has been referred to as a synthetic function of memory, the stage where the significance of knowledge is revealed; an understanding of the whole, the capacity for understanding details within the whole, a (...) generative stage of knowledge similar to language, a revelatory knowledge, metaphysical, samadhi, heightened perception, vision.Throughout these stages the passive aspect of mind is emphasized as a practical learning technique in acquisition, analysis and understanding. That is exploited at a physical level in asanas, in the three thinking processes and in metaphysical realization. Quotes illustrate this aspect as a basic principle of the mind, of metaphysics and of the acquisition of knowledge at different levels. This principle is used to explain aesthetic experience and ultimate realization. The reason for its predominance and the metaphysical presuppositions that perhaps cleared the way for systematic training in this technique have been given. It is of interest to note that systematic training in this technique still occurs in India today.This process is a peculiar union of memory and perceptive capacities. Essentially, the haphazard memory fund is eliminated for a form of creative and exact thinking or knowledge. This unification of memory and perception has given this paper its name. This learning process has as its aim not the accumulation of knowledge but guidance in correct thinking. It stems from the realization that our perception is conditioned by our memory, that is, the limitations of our knowledge. That conditioning, like ajñāna, prevents us from knowing what we do not know. The transformation involved requires an instantaneous understanding which, while remaining aware of the objects of perception and the process of perception, really centres in the perceiver himself.An old Lapp song brings out the paradox in memory: And its we too, Our memory, memory of ourselves... Disappears, disappears... We remember and we've forgotten. We are both old.The Chandogya states: smaramupāssva Ch. U 7.13.1, devoted yourself to memory. (shrink)

The modus operandi of this book is contextual—throughout he demonstrates how ideas emerge from or are inspired by particular environments. And the need to put philosophical ideas in their larger historical and cultural context so as to fully understand them is, as will be illustrated below, a facet of his philosophical method. Another of its facets is fallibilism, a deep commitment to subjecting all theories and concepts (in any field) to incessant scrutiny, testing, correction, and clarification. This suggests that a (...) totality of knowledge of the world or the absolute truth about things is a pair of ideals impossible of realization and approachable at best asymptotically. If his method is contextualist and fallilbilist, then his metaphysics is pluralistic. In his view reality is not reducible to just one single substance or principle but instead is constituted irreducibly of many different kinds of thing or principles. He is thus implacably opposed to any form of ontological monism—what James designates a “block-universe”—and Hegelian absolutism. Callaway conceives of the world as a Jamesian multiverse. Contextualism, fallibilism, and pluralism, then, are the themes brought to the fore in his book and which emerge from his travels at home and abroad. (shrink)

This paper explores the prospects for a Pritchardean epistemological disjunctivist account of memory knowledge. We begin by providing an overview of Duncan Pritchard's epistemological disjunctivist account of perceptual knowledge, as well as the theoretical advantages of such an account. Drawing on that account, we present and motivate our own Pritchardean epistemological disjunctivist account of memory knowledge. After distinguishing different sorts of memory and the different roles that memory can play in knowledge acquisition, (...) we set out our account and argue that the case for epistemological disjunctivism enjoys parity with the case for epistemological disjunctivism of perceptual knowledge. We also consider objections to our account. The first is from Joe Milburn and Andrew Moon, who argue against a general epistemological disjunctivism of memory on the basis of differences in memory types. The second objection arises from a Radford-like case whereby one's true belief is from memory even though one lacks rational support that is reflectively accessible to one. (shrink)

Memory is ordinarily taken to be one of the most fundamental sources of knowledge. However, memory sceptics argue that memory is unable to provide us with knowledge about the past. In the existing literature, there are two most discussed forms of memory sceptical arguments, namely, the argument from memory reliability and the argument from underdetermination. Correspondingly, the two most representative anti-sceptical proposals nowadays attempt to disarm the two sceptical arguments by employing explanationism and (...) disjunctivism respectively. This paper will first illustrate their defects: The explanationist response fails to explain why the common-sense explanation is preferable. Besides, it succumbs to the petitio principii fallacy. The disjunctivist response fails to establish that memorial experiences are factive in paradigmatic cases. After that, a novel solution will be proposed, according to which memory sceptical arguments are self-hollowing, viz, their conclusions deprive their premises of the foundation of plausibility. (shrink)

The metric devised by Halford, Wilson & Phillips may have considerable potential in distinguishing between the working memory demands of different tasks but may be less effective in distinguishing working memory capacity between individuals. Despite the strengths of the metric, determining whether an effect is caused by relational complexity or by differential levels of expertise is currently problematic.

"The analogy between memory and a repository, and between remembering and retaining, is obvious and is to be found in all languages; it being natural to express the operations of the mind by images taken from things material. But in philosophy we ought to draw aside the veil of imagery, and to view them naked.".

How should we understand our capacity to remember our past intentional states? And what can we learn from Wittgenstein's treatment of this topic? Three questions are considered. First, what is the relation between our past attitudes and our present beliefs about them? Realism about past attitudes is defended. Second, how should we understand Wittgenstein's view that self-ascriptions of past attitudes are a kind of "response" and that the "language-game" of reporting past attitudes is "the primary thing"? The epistemology and metaphysics (...) of past-tense self-ascription are examined in the light of those comments, and our acquisition of the concept of past attitudes is discussed. Third, does Wittgenstein give us reason to think that the identity of a past attitude may be constituted,not by anything that was true of the subject at the time, but by her retrospective tendency to self-ascribe it? It is argued that, contrary to some interpretations, he does not. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a probabilistic account of factual knowledge,[1] based on the notion of chance.[2] This account has some affinity with my chance account of token causation,[3] but it neither relies on it nor presupposes it. Here I concentrate on the core cases of perceptual knowledge and of knowledge by memory (based on perception). The analysis of knowledge presented below is externalist; but pursuing such an analysis need not detract from the significance of (...) attempts to flesh out justificational analyses knowledge; indeed, I have pursued such an analysis in great detail myself. (shrink)

Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's _Memory, History, Forgetting_ examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the production (...) of historical narrative. _Memory, History, Forgetting_, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora. A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, _Memory, History, Forgetting_ provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's _Time and Narrative_ and _Oneself as Another_ and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation. “His success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications of modern events.... It is indeed a master work, not only in Ricoeur’s own vita but also in contemporary European philosophy.”—_Library Journal _“Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear.”— _New York Times Book Review _. (shrink)

Russell’s theory of memory as acquaintance with the past seems to square uneasily with his definition of acquaintance as the converse of the relation of presentation of an object to a subject. We show how the two views can be made to cohere under a suitable construal of ‘presentation’, which has the additional appeal of bringing Russell’s theory of memory closer to contemporary views on direct reference and object-dependent thinking than is usually acknowledged. The drawback is that (...) class='Hi'>memory as acquaintance with the past falls short of fulfilling Russell’s requirement that knowledge by acquaintance be discriminating knowledge – a shortcoming shared by contemporary externalist accounts of knowledge from memory. (shrink)

In the paper, we address the question of the relation between language and culture from a Cognitive Linguistic perspective. While accounting for the role of language as an aid to cultural transmission in maintaining the community’s conceptual order, we address the question of whether the concept of a linguistic worldview aptly captures the interplay between language and culture. We suggest that, due to cumulative cultural evolution spurred by the incessant development of human knowledge, layers of conceptualisations accumulate over time. (...) It is proposed that this palimpsest of conceptualisations results from human interaction that transcends the constraints of the present moment, encompassing the past and present, as well as delineating possible developments of the community’s future conceptual order. (shrink)

The notion of perfect recall in extensive games was introduced by Kuhn (1953), who interpreted it as "equivalent to the assertion that each player is allowed by the rules of the game to remember everything he knew at previous moves and all of his choices at those moves''. We provide a characterization and axiomatization of perfect recall based on two notions of memory: (1) memory of past knowledge and (2) memory of past actions.

Sven Bernecker presents an analysis of the concept of propositional (or factual) memory, and examines a number of metaphysical and epistemological issues crucial to the understanding of memory. -/- Bernecker argues that memory, unlike knowledge, implies neither belief nor justification. There are instances where memory, though hitting the mark of truth, succeeds in an epistemically defective way. This book shows that, contrary to received wisdom in epistemology, memory not only preserves epistemic features generated by (...) other epistemic sources but also functions as a source of justification and knowledge. According to the causal theory of memory argued for in this book, the dependence of memory states on past representations supports counterfactuals of the form: if the subject hadn't represented a given proposition in the past he wouldn't represent it in the present. The book argues for a version of content externalism whereupon the individuation of memory contents depends on relations the subject bears to his past physical or social environment. Moreover, Bernecker shows that memory doesn't require identity, but only similarity, of past and present attitudes and contents. The notion of content similarity is explicated in terms of the entailment relation. (shrink)

This paper aims to reconfigure the place of memory in epistemology. I start by rethinking the problem that memory systems solve; rather than merely functioning to store information, I argue that the core function of any memory system is to support accurate and relevant retrieval. This way of specifying the function of memory has consequences for which structures and mechanisms make up a memory system. In brief, memory systems are modeling systems. This means that (...) they generate, update and manage a series of overlapping, simplified, relational representations that map out features of the world. Succeeding at building and maintaining models requires the kind of active knowledge generation traditionally associated only with deliberative reasoning. (shrink)

The epistemic arrow of time is the fact that our knowledge of the past seems to be both of a different kind and more detailed than our knowledge of the future. Just like with the other arrows of time, it has often been speculated that the epistemic arrow arises due to the second law of thermodynamics. In this paper, we investigate the epistemic arrow of time using a fully formal framework. We begin by defining a memory system (...) as any physical system whose present state can provide information about the state of the external world at some time other than the present. We then identify two types of memory systems in our universe, along with an important special case of the first type, which we distinguish as a third type of memory system. We show that two of these types of memory systems are time-symmetric, able to provide knowledge about both the past and the future. However, the third type of memory systems exploits the second law of thermodynamics, at least in all of its instances in our universe that we are aware of. The result is that in our universe, this type of memory system only ever provides information about the past. We also argue that human memory is of this third type, completing the argument. We end by scrutinizing the basis of the second law itself. This uncovers a previously unappreciated formal problem for common arguments that try to derive the second law from the “Past Hypothesis”, i.e., from the claim that the very early universe was in a state of extremely low entropy. Our analysis is indebted to prior work by one of us but expands and improves upon this work in several respects. (shrink)

This paper comprises an analysis of an aspect of the history of psychiatric/psychological knowledge. The case in point is the transience of the notion of memory recovery in the context of childhood sexual abuse. By transience is meant that the concept of memory recovery apparently vanished and re-emerged despite the fact that its source, childhood sexual abuse, did not disappear. Such abuse is a fairly common phenomenon worldwide, whereas memory recovery seems to be temporally and locally (...) limited. Is it possible to say that psychiatric/psychological knowledge of memory recovery is also context-dependent and culture-bound? If so, what would this mean in relation to the applicability of this knowledge? (shrink)

In this paper, I provide a probabilistic account of factual knowledge, based on the notion of chance, which is a function of an event given a prior history. This account has some affinity with my chance account of token causation, but it neither relies on it nor presupposes it. Here, I concentrate on the core cases of perceptual knowledge and of knowledge by memory. The analysis of knowledge presented below is externalist. The underlying intuition guiding (...) the treatment of knowledge in this paper is that knowledge boils down to high token discriminative indicativeness. Type indicativeness or type discriminability are neither necessary nor sufficient for knowledge: the token aspect comes out in the strong dependence on the specific circumstances and chances of the case. The main condition of the first section, the indicativity condition, properly refined, yields pertinent indicativity as a main constituent. Very roughly, it involves the chance of the content clause p being higher given the subject's believing that p than otherwise. The discriminability condition in question captures the sense of discriminability appropriate for knowledge and yield the indicativity condition: it is an extension of the indicativity condition KI. Roughly, the subject’s ability to discriminate the object in front of her being red from its being green is captured by holding fixed, in the indicativity condition, the condition “the object in front of her is red or green.” A major element in the analysis is the so-called Contrast Class, which governs the scope of discriminability. This is the class of features that have to be taken into account in the discriminability condition, and it is characterized by two constraints. Very roughly, according to the first constraint, for a feature to be in the contrast class, it must not represent a sub-type of the predicate in the content clause. According to the second constraint, which is a central condition with many implications, the chance that the object specified in the content clause has a feature represented in the contrast class must not under the circumstances be too low. This constraint, within the framework of the discriminability condition, brings out a major constitutive aspect of knowledge: knowledge amounts to a limited vulnerability to mistakes of the belief in question under the circumstances at hand. The contrast class plays a major role in my treatment of skepticism. The second constraint on the Contrast Class together with the VHP condition below bring out precisely the way in which perceptual knowledge is fallible. (shrink)