Epistemology of Memory

There are many important dimensions of epistemic evaluation, one of which is justification. We don’t just evaluate beliefs for truth, reliability, accuracy, and knowledge, but also for justification. However, in the epistemological literature, there is much disagreement about the nature of justification and how it should be understood. One of the controversies that has separated the contemporary epistemological discourse into two opposing camps has to do with the internalism-externalism distinction. Whereas internalists defend certain core assumptions about justification from the pre-Gettier tradition, externalists generally think that the traditional conception is untenable and should be replaced.

In this compilation thesis, I argue for, defend, and develop a particular brand of internalism, both in general and with respect to specific sources of justification. In papers 1 and 2, I defend a couple of well-known arguments for mentalism and accessibilism. Moreover, I also point out how prominent versions of these theses are vulnerable to serious problems (e.g., about over-intellectualization and vicious regresses). Part of my goal in the first couple of papers is to figure out what commitments the internalist should take on in order to avoid the externalist's objections, while at the same time receiving support from considerations that have motivated internalism in the past. In papers 3 and 4, I start from the assumption that mentalism is true and attempt to answer the following questions: 1) which non-factive mental states can play a justification-conferring role with respect to empirical belief? And 2) why does this set of states play the epistemic role it does? In response to question 1, I argue that all and only one's beliefs and perceptual experiences have justificatory relevance. In response to question 2, I argue that one's beliefs and perceptual experiences are one's strongly representational states, and that strongly representational states necessarily provide support to certain empirical propositions. Having done so, I then defend mentalism about scientific evidence from a couple of prominent objections in the recent literature. Lastly, in papers 5 and 6, I argue for a particular brand of internalism about testimonial and memorial justification and show how that position has a dialectical advantage over its main competitors.

Philosophers and psychologists often distinguish episodic or personal memory from propositional or semantic memory. A vexed issue concerns the role, if any, of memory “impressions” or “seemings” within the latter. According to an important family of approaches, seemings play a fundamental epistemological role vis-à-vis propositional memory judgments: it is one’s memory seeming that Caesar was murdered, say, that justifi es one’s judgment that he was murdered. Yet, it has been convincingly argued that these approaches lead to insurmountable problems and that memory seemings are not well suited to play this justifying role. As a result, many contemporary accounts of propositional memory dispense with these seemings altogether. Is the idea that memory seemings play a key role in propositional memory really the result of bad theorizing? My aim is to shed light on this issue, which I will approach as follows.
In Section 1, I contrast episodic memory with propositional memory so as to clarify the nature of the latter. According to the account I put forward, episodic memory consists in the preservation of acquaintance with objects and events, whereas propositional memory consists in the preservation of thought contents. In Section 2, I turn my attention to the contrast between propositional memory contents and propositional memory as an attitude. I argue that they play different roles. Memory contents satisfy a past awareness constraint and a causal constraint; the attitude of remembering explains why we are inclined to endorse these contents. This distinction leads me to explore the attitude of remembering, and I argue, in Section 3, that the most appealing account of this attitude is in terms of feelings of familiarity. In Section 4, I turn my attention to the epistemology of propositional memory and revisit the claim that propositional memory judgments are justified by memory seemings. In so doing, I contend that the attitude of remembering plays an exclusively explanatory role and does not contribute to the epistemology of propositional memory judgments. I conclude by drawing a more general lesson regarding the respective roles of attitudes and contents.

Our beliefs often exhibit a kind of self-perpetuation. That is, once we have formed a belief, we have a tendency to maintain it beyond what our evidence alone seems sufficient to explain. This tendency manifests in a number of different ways. It is harder, often much harder, to change the mind of someone who has already come to an opinion about something than to prevent them from forming that opinion in the first place. Minor influxes of evidence against our settled views rarely dislodge them, even when our original reasons were only marginally sufficient to justify those views, and we often continue to hold our beliefs even once we have lost track of those reasons. When presented with previously unconsidered alternatives to what we believe, we are inclined towards our original position even though we may be unable to articulate why that position is superior. 1

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.

The philosophical case for extended cognition is often made with reference to ‘extended-memory cases’ (e.g. Clark & Chalmers 1998); though, unfortunately, proponents of the hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC) as well as their adversaries have failed to appreciate the kinds of epistemological problems extended-memory cases pose for mainstream thinking in the epistemology of memory. It is time to give these problems a closer look. Our plan is as follows: in §1, we argue that an epistemological theory remains compatible with HEC only if its epistemic assessments do not violate what we call ‘the epistemic parity principle’. In §2, we show how the constraint of respecting the epistemic parity principle stands in what appears to be a prima facie intractable tension with mainstream thinking about cases of propositional memory. We then outline and evaluate in §3 several lines of response.

Sur deux principes épistémologiques :

(A) Si S sait que P et sait que P implique Q, alors (en assumant que S accepte Q comme résultant de ce savoir) S sait que Q.

(B) Si sait que P, alors (étant donné la satisfaction de certaines conditions relatives à la sincérité de S, la volonté de la part de celui ou de celle qui écoute S d'accepter ce que dit S comme étant l'expression honnête de ce qu'il sait) S peut amener ses auditeurs à savoir que P (il peut les informer que P) en leur disant que P.

Our understanding of what exactly needs protected against in order to safeguard a plausible construal of our 'freedom of thought' is changing. And this is because the recent influx of cogni-tive offloading and outsourcing-and the fast-evolving technologies that enable this-generate radical new possibilities for freedom-of-thought violating thought manipulation. This paper does three main things. First, I briefly overview how recent thinking in the philosophy of mind and cogni-tive science recognises-contrary to traditional Cartesian 'internalist' assumptions-ways in which our cognitive faculties, and even our beliefs, can be materially realised by as well as stored non-biologically and extracranially. Second, and taking brain-computer interface technologies (BCIs) and the associated possibility of 'extended' beliefs as a reference point, I propose and defend a sufficient condition on freedom-of-thought violating (extended) thought manipulation. On the view proposed, the right not to have one's thoughts or opinions manipulated is violated if one is (i) caused to acquire non-autonomous propositional attitudes (acquisition manipulation) or (ii) caused to have otherwise autonomous propositional attitudes non-autonomously eradicated (eradication manipulation). The implications of this view are then illustrated through four thought experiments, which map on to four distinct ways-what I call Type 1-Type 4 manipulation-in which, and with reference to the view defended, one's freedom of thought is plausibly violated.