Locke and Reid on Remembering

THIS IS A DRAFT. DO NOT CITE. Forthcoming in the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory Sven Bernecker and Kourken Michaelian, eds. Locke and Reid on Remembering Rebecca Copenhaver Lewis & Clark College 1 Introduction As I write this, I remember the first time I saw the statue of David Hume on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. But what exactly am I remembering? We commonly think of such memories as about the past, and in particular, about past experiences. On this view, what I remember now are sensations, feelings, thoughts, and ideas that I had on the day I saw Hume’s statue. The objects of memory, on this story, are past experiences. But if we travel three hundred years into the past, we find two philosophers—John Locke and Thomas Reid—whose theories of memory and the role it plays in our lives are very different from these common assumptions about memory. Locke presents remembering as an activity that may be, but need not be, about the past. His remembering is a roomy notion. It includes recollection, but also contemplation, attention, reverie, daydreaming, and study. This remembering needs past experience because it needs ideas that have been already been formed. But remembering is not directed at the past or mainly about the past. Remembering renews an acquaintance with things already apprehended. But the acquaintance has uses not tied to the past: contemplating a problem, navigating an environment, attending to a story, or planning for the future. What such activities need is not just present ideas formed in response to present impressions; another thing they need, according to Locke, is remembering. Like Locke, Reid holds that remembering renews acquaintance with things already apprehended. For both philosophers, then, remembering requires a past which, for Locke, it need not address. Both Reid and Locke see remembering as releasing us from a persistent specious present that would keep the world always new, yet leave it always alien. Without remembering, the present would stay incomprehensible and the future would remain unimaginable. Remembering makes the world less strange, reestablishing connections to things already experienced, helping make sense of the present, and enabling a vision of the future. Despite his agreements with Locke, Reid’s account of memory is more restricted: his version of remembering is just to conceive of past events that have been witnessed, as having been witnessed. Moreover, Reid imbeds memory within his direct realism: remembering directs us, in the first instance, not to experiences of the world—past or present—but to the world itself. Perception relates directly to present events and things; remembering preserves this relation by renewing acquaintance with things and events previously apprehended. 1 2 Locke on Memory Thus the ideas, as well as children, of our youth, often die before us: and our minds represent to us those tombs, to which we are are approaching; where though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time, and the imagery moulders away. The pictures drawn in our mind, are laid in fading colors. Locke An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Book II, Chapter X, Section 5 Locke, using a common distinction, divides the human mind’s powers into thinking and volition. “The power of volition is called the will,” and it acts by willing. “The power of thinking is called the understanding,” and it acts by perceiving (Locke 1975: 128).1 Locke’s ‘perception’ is broader than ours. It includes all the powers of thinking—discerning, judging, reasoning, imagining, and knowing—but also what we now call ‘perception.’ This is Locke’s word for the power to form ideas in response to sensible objects. Sensible objects make impressions on our bodies, thereby affecting us through the senses. In response, the understanding forms sensations, which are ideas of sensible qualities: “yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, hard, bitter, sweet…” (Locke 1975: 104-106; 117; 226-227). The power to form sensations or ideas of sense in response to sensible objects belongs to the understanding, not the will: we do not exert this power voluntarily (Locke 1975: 118). Whether an idea is a sensation depends on its origin – on whether the idea makes it “entrance…into the understanding by the senses” or by another route (Locke 1975: 226-227). We know about these activities because we have the power to form not just ideas of sense but also ideas of reflection. When the mind points outside—toward sensible objects, sensations are formed. But when “the mind turns its view inwards upon itself, and contemplates its own actions…,” ideas of reflection are the result. We reflect by observing our own mental operations and producing ideas in response to them. By sensing, we have distinct ideas of “white and red, a square or a circle…” By reflecting, we have distinct ideas of attention, dreaming, reasoning, judging, willing, and remembering – in short, “the different states of mind in thinking” (Locke 1975: 104-105; 226-228). Perceiving—the power of thinking—includes what we would now call sensory perception. It also includes remembering, another activity of the understanding. Locke identifies three broad types of memory. These are (1) remembrance—which includes recollection, contemplation, reverie, attention, study, dreaming, and ecstasy; (2) retention; and, most controversially, (3) consciousness of past actions and thoughts. In Book II of the Essay, Locke presents two accounts of remembering separated from one another by eight chapters on different topics: ideas of space, duration, extension, number and others. Both discussions of remembering—Chapter 10 “Of Retention,” and Chapter 19 “Of the Modes of Thinking”—present taxonomies, but they do not match each other. Did Locke write these two chapters to discuss the same topic—remembering—or did he intend distinct accounts 2 of retention (in Chapter 10) and remembrance (in Chapter 19)? Despite the mismatch, the two chapters tell the same story about remembering, an account distinct from what Locke says about consciousness of past thoughts and actions. Chapter 19, the later of the two presentations, is about remembrance, and its framework is Locke’s distinction between ideas of sense and of reflection, along with their origins. Ideas of sense are of sensible qualities that originate in response to impressions made by sensible objects on our bodies. Seeing a cloudless sky gives rise to a distinct idea of blue. The idea’s origins make it a sensation: its immediate occasion is an impression made by sensible objects on the senses. Ideas of reflection, by contrast, are of mental operations originating in response to impressions made on our minds by those operations. When someone reflects on how she solves a puzzle, for example, she may form a distinct idea of reasoning. Again, what makes this idea one of reflection is its origin—from an impression made on the mind by the mental activity reflected upon. All of our ideas have their origin either in sensation or in reflection (Locke 1975: 104-106; 118-119). Once an idea of sense has emerged from an impression—say the sensation of blue while admiring the afternoon sky—such an idea can be formed again without help from any sensible objects or impressions. I may have the idea of blue without any blue things affecting my senses. Likewise with ideas of reflection: ideas about reasoning, once originated, no longer need puzzles to stimulate them. This ability—to form an idea of sensation or reflection without the impressions and objects to which these ideas originally responded—is what Locke calls remembrance (Locke 1975: 226).2 Locke’s taxonomy in Chapter 19 classifies several types of remembrance by degree of activity. Recollection, contemplation, attention, and study are the more active forms of remembrance. The more passive forms include dreaming, reverie, and ‘extasy’ (Locke 1975: 227-228). Recollection is a success term for a voluntary effort to form an idea, like trying to recall the face of an old friend, and accomplishing it. One type of contemplation (reverie is the other) is also voluntary. Ideas are elusive—fleeting, successive, and non-continuous. In order to be well contemplated, an idea must be “held…long under attentive consideration”—as when one considers the idea of a triangle by way of grasping the Pythagorean theorem. Attention is also a form of remembrance, whereby an idea is noticed “and, as it were, registered.” Registering ideas enhances remembering: it strengthens the ability to form ideas in the absence of impressions. Particular acts of remembrance—recollection, attention, and contemplation—reinforce remembrance in general. The most active remembrance is study. Locke also calls it ‘intention’, emphasizing the mind’s persistent engagement in a voluntary effort that “will not be called off by the ordinary solicitation of other ideas.” When studying “with great earnestness, and of choice,” the mind considers an idea “on all sides,” while noticing its “relations and circumstances; and views every part so nicely that it shuts out all other thoughts and takes no notice of the ordinary impressions made then on the senses, which at another season would produce very sensible impressions.” Even for adults, the world is often a blooming, buzzing confusion. But in study, the mind fixes on an idea, freed for a moment from the the inexorable succession of ideas suggested by the 3 senses. Like attention and contemplation, study focuses on ideas voluntarily. The price is less attention to and recall for the ideas of sense that we might have registered had we not been in intense study. Reverie is another type of contemplation—in one way the opposite of study, though like it in another. Study is willed and active, reverie is passive and involuntary: we lapse into reverie. Like study, however, reverie effaces ideas of sense and reflection that might otherwise command attention. Worries and fantasies, ideas replaying and repeating willy-nilly: these are distractions, blocking what might be noticed in other circumstances. Ecstasy falls between reverie and dreaming, and Locke has little to say about it. He calls it ‘daydreaming,’ leaving it “to be examined” whether “dreaming with eyes open” is just a metaphor. The contents of dreams are the clearest case of ideas formed without the impressions and objects from which they originated. Dreams are disconnected from sense and reflection, or nearly so, and so they are disconnected from the world. In dreams, ideas come and go involuntarily, unprovoked by impressions. Dreamers are “retired as it were from the senses…,” able to “sleep out whole stormy nights, without hearing the thunder, or seeing the lightening, or feeling the shaking of the house.” Because dreams are sequences of ideas—confused, indistinct, dim, and obscure though they may be—dreaming is a form of thinking, of perceiving in Locke’s vocabulary. The succession of ideas stops only in dreamless sleep, which “closes the scene quite and, puts an end to all appearances.” While Descartes holds that thinking is the principal attribute of a mental substance, Locke claims that the mind need not always think. The variety of different types of remembrance—from earnest study to impassive dreaming—shows that thinking is an activity or operation, not an essence: activities come in degrees; essences do not. Locke’s taxonomy of remembrance is strange in one striking way. Except for recollection, no type of remembrance is actually about the past, at least not explicitly. We may contemplate, attend, study, ruminate, daydream, and dream about the past, but we need not. Often, we contemplate problems that needs solving, attend to things before us, study absorbing stories, ruminate on what we need to do, daydream about the future, and dream fantastical worlds. We may turn to the past to contemplate, attend, study, ruminate, daydream, or dream. But present problems need contemplation; many things need attention right now; vexed issues can be studied; constant worries are fodder for rumination; future fantasies are today’s daydreams, nightmares to follow; in dreams begin tomorrow’s responsibilities. Remembrance is neither directed towards, nor principally about the past. Yet remembrance needs past experience. In particular, every act of remembrance, no matter the type, requires an idea previously had from a sensory impression or from an impression of reflection. This requirement is a version of the Previous Awareness Condition (PCA), developed and examined by Sydney Shoemaker among others, particularly in relation to episodic memory: memories that are constrained by the necessary condition that the person remembering was witness or agent to what is remembered (Shoemaker 1970; Parfit 1985; Malcom 1977). Episodic memories are often contrasted with semantic memories, such as remembering that Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. The PAC that holds for episodic memory does not constrain semantic memory: those who never witnessed Earhart’s 4 flight, remember (not just know) that Emilia Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. Semantic memories, nonetheless, are subject to a different PAC. Remembering that Earhart made the first solo Atlantic flight requires previous knowledge of this fact. Absent that previous knowledge, a belief that Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic would not be a memory.3 Locke’s forms of remembrance also have a PAC: each type of remembrance consists in having an idea formed previously in response to impressions of sense or reflection. In other words, ideas had by contemplating, attending, studying, ruminating, daydreaming, and dreaming must be ideas had already, in the past, formed from an original impression (Locke 1975: 227-228; 153). This PAC is necessary but insufficient for remembrance, which needs something else: that in contemplation, attention, study, and so on, ideas may be present when the impressions that originated them are absent. Such ideas need not be initiated or sustained by impressions of the kind that first produced them. In fact, no impression at all needs to be present, even if remembrance occurs while various impressions occur all around them. Many objects and events surround a person deep in study, making impressions on the senses, yet the studious train of ideas, if it is studious, holds itself apart from those all-too-present impressions. In dreams, there are no present impressions at all. Remembrance lost in dreams is “retired as it were from the senses,” in a flood of ideas severed entirely from sense and reflection (Locke 1975: 227-228). Putting the two conditions together: remembrance is (1) having ideas formed previously in response to impressions and (2) having them independently of the impressions that were originally there when forming them. Along with the power to form ideas of sense or reflection in response to impressions comes the power to form such ideas again—with or without the originating impressions. Since these impressions precede any remembrance of the ideas in question, the remembering mind, while receiving various present impressions, needs—for a remembrance that may not be about the past—past experiences (Locke 1975: 227-228). Remembrance has a past and needs a past, but it need not be about the past. The earlier discussion of memory in Locke’s Book II, in the chapter “Of Retention,” presents a similar account of remembering with a different taxonomy. Here too, awareness of the past is not required for remembering; remembering requires ideas already acquired, but no longer needs the impressions that originally produced them. In this chapter, Locke studies two types of retention: contemplation and memory. Contemplation—also described in Locke’s first taxonomy—is more or less familiar: it sustains an idea of sensation or reflection by voluntary effort, even after the initiating impression has vanished, sunk in the stream of transient impressions whose flow never stops (Locke 1975: 149155). The second type of retention—memory—is more elusive. Locke introduces memory with two comparisons, both strictly metaphorical. First, memory is a storehouse of ideas, “a repository” where the mind “lay[s] up those ideas, which at another time it might have use of.” But ideas are impermanent, and their flow is inexorable: except in dreamless sleep, they keep coming, one after another, though each is transitory; contemplation may keep them at hand longer, but only briefly. And ideas, as particulars, can originate only 5 once. Since they “cease to be anything, when there is no perception of them…,” they cannot really be put into storage, and once they “cease to be anything”, they cannot come back into existence. The impermanence and particularity of ideas puts a new constraint on remembering: remembering is not having the very same token idea twice or more; remembering is having a new and distinct idea which is a token of the same type as an old idea: in this way a token idea, new and in the present, can have a past—the past of its type—without referring to the past (Locke 1975: 150). To keep his storehouse metaphorical, Locke claims that “this laying up of our ideas in the repository of the memory, signifies no more but this, that the mind has a power, in many cases, to revive perceptions, which it once had, with this additional perception annexed to them, that it has had them before” (Locke 1975: 150, emphasis added). Memory is an activity that the mind performs, not a container located in it, spatially or otherwise. That much is clear. But the contents of this metaphorical container (1) have been had before and (2) are had now as having been had before. Since the difference between (1) and (2) is not a token/type distinction, that relation cannot explain these requirements. On the other hand, Locke may not be committed to the position that memory requires two ideas—a past idea and a present idea of that idea as past. Following the storehouse metaphor comes a second metaphor, this time about painting: memory is now “an ability in the mind, when it will, to revive [ideas] again…and as it were paint them anew on itself, though some with more, some with less difficulty; some more lively, and others more obscurely.” Memory is an artist, making new ideas out of familiar materials: old ideas already had. Taken literally, the artist needs two ideas to make memory: the freshly painted idea and the old idea newly revived. But the painter is a metaphor, from which Locke moves to a more abstract comparison: remembering is like seeing. The ability to remember brings “into sight” objects now unseen by any sense. Once again, an idea, had in the past, acts in the present while severed from its past. And thus it is, by the assistance of this faculty [memory], that we are said to have all those ideas in our understandings, which though we do not actually contemplate, yet we can bring into sight, and make appear again, and be the objects of our thoughts, without the help of those sensible qualities, which first imprinted them there (Locke 9175: 150). Locke’s brief encounter with the painter suggests that there may be more to memory than the past possession of one idea and the forming of a new one without help from the originating impressions. Consider this: walking down the street, I have an idea of a flavor but no present impressions of taste. Long ago, I had another such idea, though I do not realize it now: the taste of an unusual brand of toothpaste made a strong impression on me—an impression now vanished. But the color of a passing car is exactly the color of the long-forgotten toothpaste: the color revives the idea of its particular flavor. Why I have this idea I do not know, nor do I recognize it as an idea I have enjoyed in the past. This seems less like remembering than having an idea out of the blue. Even though I had a related idea long ago, the new idea is not at all familiar. 6 Locke counters unfamiliarity with familiarity. The painter’s idea is new, but it captures something recognized as past. Having ideas of the same kind, and having them without their originating impressions, is not enough. The mind must also take “notice of them, as of a former impression, and renew its acquaintance with them, as with ideas it had known before” (Locke 1975: 153). Having two ideas—one idea, and then another idea about having had that idea before—is not the point. Instead, an original idea formed in response to impressions is an apprehension. This apprehension makes it possible—by grounding a power or ability—to form an idea of the same kind as the past idea but with or without its originating impression, thereby renewing an acquaintance with what was previously apprehended. Acquaintance comes in degrees. The sensible objects surrounding us and the mental operations on which we reflect are more or less familiar (Locke 1975: 150-152). We renew and strengthen acquaintance with things not only through repeated impressions but also by remembering, which gradually makes the world familiar. Without remembering—reacquainting ourselves with things previously experienced, even in their absence—we would be trapped in a specious present. Things would press on us again and again, and each idea formed in response would be new and strange, giving us no purchase on the world. Without memory, endless impressions would be mere chaos. Memory, therefore, “is necessary in the next degree to perception. It is of so great moment, that where it is wanting, all the rest of our faculties are in great measure useless: and we in our thoughts, reasonings, and knowledge, could not proceed beyond present objects…” (Locke 1975: 153). The most familiar ideas are those “oftenest refreshed”—those most important for renewing our acquaintance with the world. They include “the original qualities of bodies, viz. solidity, extension, figure, motion, and rest,” along with secondary qualities such “as heat and cold.” Also crucial are our basic mental operations and the most general “affections of all kinds of being” such as existence, duration, and number. Remembering makes the world familiar and us at home in it. So what does Locke mean by remembering? He means that remembered ideas are ideas of the the same kind as ideas previously had, but the remembered ideas are had independently of the impressions from which the original ideas were formed, so that remembered ideas renew acquaintance with what was apprehended when the corresponding ideas were formed originally. Remembering navigates a present world stocked with familiar objects, making us easy with the workings of our own minds and helping us plan a future. When Locke’s treatment of memory comes up, the usual problem is personal identity. Locke’s story about that inspired the Memory Theory (MT) of personal identity, which equates personal identity with memory: sameness of episodic memory is necessary and sufficient for sameness of persons. Here I am not concerned with theories of personal identity—neither Locke’s, nor the MT (see Chapter 14 of the present volume). I am concerned with the activity on which Locke claims personal identity depends: “that consciousness, which is inseparable from thinking…by [which] everyone is to himself, that which he calls self…” Is this consciousness the same as remembering or different? 7 Consciousness—the activity that constitutes identity— can only be about the present, according to Locke: consciousness is “always as to our present sensations and perceptions” (Locke 1975: 115; 335-336). This secures the present identity of persons, what makes “self to itself now” (emphasis added). And this identity may persist, as long as the activity responsible for it— consciousness—persists. Consciousness persisting over time ensures persistence of persons. Yet consciousness is not remembering: in the first instance, consciousness is aware of present thought and actions, present sensations and perceptions. These present ideas need not have been had before. From a first encounter with a strange thing comes an impression from which a new idea emerges. Consciousness, for a time, attends the new idea. But remembering works on old ideas and renews acquaintance with the world. Consciousness and memory both serve purposes essential to thinking, but the purposes they serve are different. Locke describes consciousness as “extending backwards,” however, to past thoughts and actions. Is consciousness not confined to the present? Are we conscious of past thoughts, actions, sensations, and perceptions? That would surely be remembering. What else could it be? But the consciousness that “extends backwards” need not be about past sensations, perceptions, thoughts, or actions. Alternatively, consciousness can only be present, but a possible object of present consciousness is an idea that renews acquaintance with something apprehended in the past. Consciousness needs remembering to “unite existences” into the same person. When ideas are remembered, they become conscious presently, but they are the same in kind as ideas had previously, ideas present to conscious at some past moment. Remembering joins present consciousness with past consciousness. But remembering is not consciousness of the past. And consciousness as such does not require remembering. Because we remember, however, acquaintance with things apprehended consciously in the past may be renewed in present consciousness, thereby joining one consciousness with another and uniting “remote existences into the same person…” (Locke 1975: 340-345). Without remembering, there could be no re-acquaintance with objects of past consciousness, which would put the continued existence of persons at risk. But this does not make consciousness the same as remembering. 3 Reid on Memory It is by memory that we have an immediate knowledge of things past: The senses give us information of things only as they exist in the present moment; and this information, if it were not preserved by memory, would vanish instantly, and leave us ignorant as if it had never been. Reid Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man Essay III ‘Of Memory’, Chapter 1 We move now almost one hundred years to a different account of memory, inspired in opposition to a picture of the mind its author identified with Locke. Thomas Reid called this picture he opposed, ‘the ideal theory,’ or the ‘theory of ideas.’ At its core is the Lockean position that the immediate objects of perception are ideas (Locke 1975: 134). By contrast, Reid argues that the mind is directed in the first instance not to itself or its own ideas, but to the world. Accordingly, 8 he presents a direct realist theory of memory: when we remember, the mind is directed not towards ideas—be they ideas experienced in the past, or ideas of past experiences—but to the events we experienced in the past. The interpretation on which Locke’s remarks on personal identity should be read as a kind of Memory Theory (MT), despite his claim that personal identity consists in consciousness, is not new. In the Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), Reid complains that “it is impossible to understand the meaning of this, unless by consciousness be meant memory…” (Reid 2002: 277). Reid is famous for his Brave Officer objection to MT (Reid 2002: 276). However, the objection is not original to Reid. It appears in Berkeley’s Alciphron: or, the Minute Philosopher (1732) and Reid himself attributes the example to George Campbell.4 Reid’s criticism of MT is that it confuses truisms about the evidential relationship between memory and personal identity with metaphysical conclusions about what makes a person identical with herself over time. But even this insight is not new with Reid; it evokes the discussion in Butler’s influential dissertation “Of Personal Identity,” (1736). What is original to Reid is his own positive account of memory, and we may investigate this independently of questions concerning personal identity.5 Though Reid constructs his account of memory in opposition to the theory of ideas, and though he views Locke as a leading proponent of that theory, he shares with Locke the position that remembering renews our acquaintance with things we apprehended in the past. It is an activity that renders things familiar by reestablishing our connections to the things previously experienced. Things remembered must be things formerly perceived or known. I remember the transit of Venus over the sun in the year 1769. I must therefore have perceived it at the time it happened, otherwise I could not now remember it. Our first acquaintance with any object of thought cannot be by remembrance. Memory can only produce a continuance or renewal of a former acquaintance with the things remembered (Reid 2002: 255). Reid is interested primarily in episodic memory: the sort of memory whose PAC is that a person (episodically) remembers an event only if she was witness or agent to the event remembered. Reid could not have remembered the transit of Venus over the sun in the year 1769 unless he had witnessed it. I cannot remember the transit of Venus in 1769 because I was not witness to it, not having been born yet. I may have a semantic memory of the transit of Venus; I remember that Venus crossed the sun in 1769. I learned this fact from reading Reid’s account of the event. My semantic memory that Venus crossed the sun in 1769 is grounded in my previous awareness of this fact. But I have no previous awareness of the event itself—Venus crossing the sun in 1769— and so I cannot remember the 1769 transit of Venus. The PAC on episodic memory is a necessary but insufficient condition: if I have an experience as of having witnessed the transit of Venus in 1769 but I was not in fact witness to the event (having been born in 1971), then such an experience is not an episodic memory. On the other hand, I have been agent or witness to many events of which I have no episodic memory. I witnessed the Perseid Meteor Shower in 1980, though I do not episodically remember the event. 9 I remember that I saw the Perseid Meteor Shower in 1980—my family tells me I was there—but I do not remember the meteor shower itself. So central for Reid is the the kind of remembering that requires previous awareness of the events remembered that he does not count semantic memory as a form of remembering, properly speaking (Reid 2002: 264). When I remember that Venus crossed the sun in 1769, I have a belief or knowledge, rather than a memory. Reid distinguishes such beliefs from the phenomenon of remembering because even when they are true and justified, they do not play a role in preserving past apprehension of events. By contrast, Reid remembers not only the transit of Venus in 1769 but also that Venus crossed the sun in in 1769. Unlike my belief that Venus crossed the sun in 1769, Reid’s belief that Venus crossed the sun in 1769 preserves his past apprehension of the event itself. Though expressed propositionally, his belief that Venus crossed the sun in 1769 does not report a semantic memory. It reports his previous awareness of the transit of Venus and preserves his past apprehension of the event; it reports an episodic memory. According to Reid, remembering preserves past apprehension of events to which we were agent or witness. Remembering is not a current apprehension. It is not a current apprehension of a past experience, nor is it a current apprehension of a past event. We remember events, not experiences of events. And we do not remember events by re-apprehending them. Rather, a past apprehension is itself preserved in remembering. According to Reid, it is impossible to apprehend events in the past: apprehension is confined to the present (Reid 2002: 23; 253). Acts of apprehension establish a direct relation to a present event (or object, or mental operation). The direct relation established by apprehension is then preserved by acts of remembering the event apprehended. Remembering is directed not towards past apprehension, but to what was presented in the past apprehension: namely, the event itself (Reid 1997: 28). Remembering preserves past apprehension by conceiving of an event previously apprehended and believing, of this event, that it happened to me. This belief is unlike the beliefs that express semantic memories. This belief is a constituent of the act of remembering. According to Reid, memory consists in a conception of a past event and a belief about that past event, that it happened to the person who is represented in that memory as agent or witness (Reid 2002: 228, 232, 254, 257). This conception-belief structure mirrors the structure of other complex mental operations that are directed at objects, such as perception, which is directed at things presently before me, and consciousness, which is directed at my own mental operations. Each of these operations consist in a conception and belief; the operations differ from one another because the objects conceived differ, as do the beliefs about those objects (Reid 1997: 197). The conception that is a constituent of memory is of an event previously apprehended. The other constituent of memory is a belief, of the event conceived, that it happened. In particular, it is a belief that the event happened to me (or was witnessed by me), where the ‘me’ is indexed to the person who is represented in the memory as agent or witness to the event. Reid’s direct realist theory of remembering joins his direct realist theory of perception. Memory, like perception, is directed towards the world rather than our experiences of the world. When I perceive, I do not perceive my own ideas or experiences; I perceive things in the world. When I remember, I do not remember my past experiences; I remember the events I experienced in the past. In remembering those events, I do not currently apprehend them. Memory is time-travel 10 only metaphorically. Rather, because I apprehended events in the past, I have the ability to preserve a direct relation to these events, by now conceiving of them as having happened to me. In remembering such events, I have access to more than what I presently perceive. Remembering presupposes past apprehensions but is not directed towards them. Rather, it is directed towards the world, a world with which I am able to reconnect by remembering the events that happened there, because I was there. We experience the world by perceiving it and remembering our path through it. 4 Conclusion Locke and Reid hold that remembering renews acquaintance with the world by preserving our relation to the things of which we were aware in the past. In remembering, we renew our acquaintance with what we formerly apprehended. Remembering requires us to have a past, but its role in our mental economy is firmly rooted in the present and future. By it, we navigate a world in which we are increasingly at home. Were we unable to remember, we would ever be to the world as strangers in a strange land.6 References Berkeley, G. (2008) Philosophical Writings, D.M. Clarke (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butler, J. (2006) The Works of Bishop Butler, D.E. White (ed.), Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Copenhaver, R. (2006) “Thomas Reid’s Theory of Memory,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 23(2): 171-187. Copenhaver, R. (2014) “Reid on Memory and Personal Identity,” in E.N. Zalta (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/reid-memory-identity/>. James, W. (1890) The Principles of Psychology, New York: Henry Holt. Locke, J. (1975) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, P.H. Nidditch (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Malcolm, N. (1977) Memory and Mind, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Parfit, D. (1985) Reasons and Persons, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Reid, T. (2002) Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, D.R. Brookes (ed.), University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Reid, T. (1997) Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, D.R. Brookes (ed.), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 11 Shoemaker, S. (1970) “Persons and their Pasts,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 7(4): 269– 285; reprinted in Shoemaker, S. (1984), Identity, Cause and Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19–48. Van Cleve, J. (2015) Problems from Reid, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Further Reading Hamilton, A. (2003) “Scottish Commonsense About Memory: A Defence of Thomas Reid’s Direct Knowledge Account,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81(2): 229-245. Lännström, A. (2007) “Locke’s Account of Personal Identity: Memory as Fallible Evidence,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 24(1): 39-56. Owens, D. (1996) “A Lockean Theory of Memory Experience,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 56(2): 319-332. Van Woudenberg, R. (2004) “Reid on Memory and the Identity of Persons,” in T. Cuneo and R. Van Woudenberg (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weinberg, S. “The Metaphysical Fact of Consciousness in Locke’s Theory of Personal Identity,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 50(3): 387-415. Biographical Note Rebecca Copenhaver is a Professor of Philosophy at Lewis & Clark College, where she has taught since 2001. Her research interests are in modern philosophy and philosophy of mind. She is writing a book on Thomas Reid’s science of mind. 1 I have modernized spelling and capitalization but not punctuation in quotations from Locke’s Essay. 2 In Book II, Chapter 19, Locke presents remembrance in terms of ideas of sense only, though it is clear from the remainder of the chapter that remembrance includes ideas of reflection as well. 3 I am grateful to Sydney Shoemaker for this insight. 4 See (Van Cleve 2015: 258, n20). 5 For a similar but more extensive treatment of Reid’s theory of memory, see (Copenhaver 2006; Copenhaver 2014). 6 I thank Shaun Nichols and Brian P. Copenhaver for comments and suggestions on earlier drafts. 12