the intentionality of memory

THE INTENTIONALITY OF MEMORY

Jordi Fernandez

Memory differs from both introspection and perception in scope. One can onlyintrospect one’s own mental states and one can only perceive events in theexternal world. However, one can remember events in the world as well as one’s

own perceptual experiences of them. An interesting phenomenological factabout memory is that those two kinds of memories come together. You can’tapparently remember a fact without apparently remember having perceived it.

And you can’t apparently remember what perceiving a certain fact was likewithout apparently remembering the fact in question. Why is that? The projectin this essay is to try to explain this by appealing to the content that memory

experiences have.

I. Introduction

The purpose of this essay is to determine how we should construe the contentof memories or, in other words, to determine what the intentional objects ofmemory are.1 The issue that will concern us is, then, analogous to thetraditional philosophical question of whether perception directly puts us incognitive contact with entities in the world or with entities in our own minds.As we shall see, there are some interesting aspects of the phenomenology andthe epistemology of memory, and I shall aim at a specification of the contentof memories that is in accordance with those aspects of them.

Section II will be devoted to delimiting the project. First, I will elaborateon what I mean by the content, or object, of an intentional state by appealingto the notion of truth-conditions. Next, I will say something on what I takethe general form of a specification of the content of a memory to be. I willthen make explicit the kind of memories that I will be focusing on, which Ishall refer to as ‘episodic’ memories. Finally, I shall highlight two pheno-menological features and an epistemological feature of episodic memoriesthat will constrain our project of finding out what they are about. The twophenomenological features have to do with the idea that memory gives uscognitive access to the past by linking our awareness of the past state of theworld to our awareness of our own past states of mind. I will consider it to bea virtue of any specification of the content of memories that it sheds somelight on that fact. The epistemological feature of episodic memories concerns

1I shall use the following locutions equivalently: ‘S is about p’, ‘the fact that p is the object of S’, and ‘thecontent of S is that p’ where ‘S’ stands for an intentional state and ‘p’ for an event.

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

Vol. 84, No. 1, pp. 39 – 57; March 2006

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

ISSN 0004-8402 print/ISSN 1470-6828 online � 2006 Australasian Association of Philosophy

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/00048400600571695

the non-inferential kind of epistemic justification that episodic memory-based beliefs enjoy. I will require any reasonable specification of the contentof memories to be consistent with that epistemological feature of memory aswell.

The purpose of Section III is to illustrate that a specification of the contentof a memory should attribute just the right amount of information to it. By‘attributing the right amount of information’ I simply mean the following. Ifit is the case that, according to our pre-theoretic intuitions about memory, agiven memory is true of a certain possible situation, then our theory shouldattribute to it such truth-conditions that the memory turns out to be true ofthat situation. Conversely, if it is the case that, according to our pre-theoreticintuitions about memory, a certain memory is false of a given possiblesituation, then our theory should attribute to it such truth-conditions that thememory turns out to be false of that situation. I will be exploring twodifferent attempts to specify the content of memories. First, I will discuss aview advocated by John Searle that is reminiscent of ‘token-reflexive’accounts of the semantics of indexicals [Reichenbach 1947; Perry 1999]. I willargue that, if this view is correct, then memories carry too much information.Then, I will consider a view advocated, among others, by Alexius Meinong.I will argue that, if this view is correct, then memories carry too little infor-mation. However, both views share a certain element that I find attractive,namely, they take past perceptual experiences of a subject to be constitutiveelements of the content of her subsequent memories.

Section IV is concerned with a positive proposal about the content ofmemories. I will start by briefly looking at some remarks by Michael Martinon the relation between perception and memory. I will distinguish tworeadings of those remarks and I will describe an alternative view on the inten-tionality of memory that one of those two readings suggests. I will motivatethis view by highlighting that it is phenomenologically more accurate thanMeinong’s view, to which it is closely related. I will also point out that thecontent that this view attributes to memory seems to have the right amountof detail. And, finally, I will argue that this view can account for the pheno-menological aspects of memory that we will be considering while respectingthe aspect of its epistemology that we will be concerned with. My conclusionwill be that this view appropriately captures the kind of content that weshould attribute to memories.

A note on terminology is in order. In what follows, I shall use expressions ofthe form ‘S remembers that p’ and ‘S has a memory that p’ to refer to a subjectbeing in a state wherein she veridically remembers a certain fact. With thelocutions ‘S apparently remembers that p’, ‘S has an apparent memory that p’,and ‘S has a memory experience that p’, I will refer to a subject being in a statewherein she either veridically remembers or misremembers a certain fact.

II. Intentionality, Phenomenology, and Epistemology

A pre-theoretic intuition that we share about memory is that memorieshave content. A subject represents the world in a certain way in virtue of

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having a memory, in the minimal sense that memory is the kind of state thatcan be evaluated as true or false. For each memory, there are conditionsunder which it is true and conditions under which it is false. Thus, it isnatural to think that, if you want to know what the content of a givenmemory is, you should ask yourself what it would take for that memory tobe true. For the purposes of this discussion, it will be convenient torepresent the truth-conditions of memories by means of certain abstractobjects, namely, propositions. I will construe propositions as orderedpairs of properties and objects, though nothing in this discussion shouldhang on a Russellian view about the nature of propositions. Thus, I willconstrue the proposition that captures the truth-conditions of a certainmemory M as an ordered pair of an object o and a property P, which Ishall refer to with an expression of the form ‘5P, o4’, where o havingP is meant to be what it takes for M to be true. The issue that willconcern us is, in those terms, what sort of objects and properties are theconstituents of those propositions that capture the truth-conditions ofmemories.

The scope of this project will be quite restricted in that it will only concerna very specific sort of memory state. There are various forms of remember-ing. There is, at the very least, memory for events (remembering that), forabilities (remembering how), and for objects. Here I will only be concernedwith memory for events. As a matter of fact, I shall focus on a specific formof memory for events, which is sometimes referred to as ‘episodic’ or‘experiential’ memory.

Suppose that, when I was a child, my parents took me to the zoo and Isaw that there was an albino gorilla sleeping there. There are two differentsenses in which I can now be said to remember that an albino gorilla wassleeping at the zoo. The first sense involves the fact that I am in anintentional state wherein a certain event appears to me to have been thecase. This, in turn, is presumably due to the fact that the content of thatstate relates, in some systematic way yet to be specified, to the content ofan earlier intentional state of mine, namely, a perceptual state of the eventin question. Typically, the intentional state in which I am when Iremember something in this sense involves some imagery of the event andit elicits in me some awareness of my being in that state. But, in addition,there is a different sense in which I may be said to remember that analbino gorilla was sleeping at the zoo. This is the sense in which, sometime in the past, I acquired the belief that the albino gorilla wassleeping there, I now believe that he was sleeping there, and thereis some relation between the two beliefs in virtue of which the factthat I had the former belief is ultimately responsible for my having thelatter.

I shall refer to the first sort of cognitive achievement as ‘episodicallyremembering’ and to the second sort as ‘semantically remembering’. Accord-ingly, for any subject who remembers a given event episodically, I will call theintentional state in which that subject is an ‘episodic memory’ of the eventand, for any subject who remembers a given event semantically, I will refer tothe subject’s belief that the event happened as a ‘semantic memory’ of it

Intentionality of Memory 41

[Tulving 1972]. We may draw the distinction between episodic and semanticmemory for events more precisely as follows:

Semantic memory

For any subject S and proposition p, if S remembers that p, then:

S semantically remembers that p if, had she not believed that p some time inthe past, S would not remember that p now.

Episodic memory

For any subject S and proposition p, if S remembers that p, then:

S episodically remembers that p if S would now remember that p even if she

had never believed that p before.

The focus of this essay is episodic memory. In what follows, I will bereferring to episodically remembering an event when I speak of rememberingan event, unless otherwise specified. (Likewise, I will be referring to anepisodic memory of an event when I speak of a memory that a certain eventhappened.) The question that I am concerned with is what those peculiarmemories are about or, in other words, what kinds of entities determine thetruth-conditions of that unique sort of memories. Episodic memories have acertain phenomenology associated with them. Also, a given episodic memorythat such-and-such was the case provides its subject with grounds forbelieving that such-and-such was the case. I shall be seeking a way ofconstruing the content of episodic memories that is in accordance with thoseaspects of episodic memory. On the one hand, it should ideally shed somelight on two phenomenological facts that characterize episodic memory and,on the other hand, it should be consistent with the kind of justificationenjoyed by those beliefs about the past that episodic memories ground. Letme elaborate on those constraints.

There are a number of interesting phenomenological features of episodicmemory. For the purposes of this discussion, I shall concentrate on thefollowing two, which I will respectively label the ‘transparency’ and the‘awareness of previous awareness’ features of memory. The first featureconcerns our memory of our own past perceptual experiences whereas thesecond one concerns our memory of events in the world.

Let us consider transparency first. This property of episodic memoriessimply amounts to the following. If one apparently remembers whatperceptually experiencing a certain event was like, then one will apparentlyremember the event in question. Thus, if I try to remember what perceivingthe albino gorilla was like (if I try to focus my attention on the qualities ofthat past perceptual state of mine) and I come to apparently remember whathaving that perceptual experience was like, then I will be occupying a statewhereby I apparently remember the albino gorilla sleeping at the zoo.Perceptual experiences are transparent to memory in that, even if we just try

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to remember what perceiving a certain event was like, it is impossible toapparently remember what perceiving that event was like and yet not toapparently remember the event itself. We can summarize this fact inthe following principle of transparency of perceptual experience to memory(or, for short, ‘TRANS’):

TRANS

For any given subject S and proposition p:

If S apparently remembers what perceiving that p was like, then S willapparently remember that p.

Let us now turn to the awareness of past awareness in episodicmemory.Whenyou remember a given event, you are aware of it as perceptually experienced.That is, its having been perceptually experienced is part of what you are beingpresented with in your memory of that event. We can express this idea in thefollowing principle of awareness of previous awareness (or, simply, ‘APA’):

APA

For any given subject S and proposition p regarding the external world:2

If S apparently remembers that p, then S is thereby aware that she seemed toperceive that p.

The basic idea in APA is that a subject’s episodic memories about events outthere, in the world, appear to her as coming from her own past perceptions,as opposed to testimony or reasoning [Aristotle 1972: 69; Locke 1975: 83;James 1890: 648 – 52]. Once I appear to be remembering a certain eventepisodically, the question whether or not I seem to have perceived that eventis no longer open. Thus, if I seem to remember an albino gorilla at the zoo,then the way in which the gorilla is presented to me in virtue of my being inthat state is such that I thereby seem to have perceived that gorilla in the past.

Notice that, if APA were false, I simply would not be able to tell, in theabsence of collateral information derived from testimony or reasoning, thosememories of mine that appear to be episodic from those memories thatappear to be semantic. This is not to say that judgements about which of ourmemories are episodic are infallible. It is often the case that a state in which Iam, which seems to me to be an episodic memory, turns out not to have itsorigin in a perception of the apparently remembered event but in externaltestimony. (Thus, my parents could one day reveal to me that my seeminglyepisodic memory of the gorilla turns out to trace back to my brother’stestimony, who, unlike me, was at the zoo that day.) But the fact remains that

2The reason why I am restricting the quantification is that the fact that APA is meant to describe is a factabout the phenomenology of our memories of events taking place in the world only. I am grateful to ananonymous referee for pointing out the problem that arises if we do not restrict that quantification. For thesake of convenience, though, I will leave that restriction implicit when I refer to APA in the rest of thediscussion.


we do not need to appeal to reasoning or testimony to decide which of ourmemories appear to be episodic. There is a phenomenological mark that weuse, whether or not it is totally reliable. APA tries to capture that mark.

An interesting picture of the relation between perception and memoryemerges from principles TRANS and APA. If, on the one hand, we try tofocus our memory on objective events that took place in the past, then ourmemories also put us in cognitive contact with our past perceptual experi-ences of those events. If, on the other hand, we try to focus our memory onour own past perceptual experiences, then we come to apparently rememberobjective events that took place in the past. It will be an important virtue ofany theory about the nature of mnemonic content that it can shed some lighton the fact that the sort of cognitive contact with the past that memory allowsfor links our awareness of our own perceptual experiences to our awarenessof objective states of affairs.

However, not just any proposal about the content of memories thatilluminates TRANS and APA will do. It must also be consistent with thefollowing fact about the epistemology of memory-based beliefs. In normalcircumstances, seeming to remember a certain event entitles us to believe thatthe event in question occurred. Thus, if you seem to remember that, say, youhad fish for lunch, then you are entitled to think that you had fish for lunch(provided that you form that belief on the basis of your memory experience).This means that our justification for memory-based beliefs about the pastdoes not depend on a process of reasoning. Thus, in the just mentionedexample, it is not necessary that you believe that you remember that you hadfish for lunch in order for you to be entitled to believe that you did. Neither isit necessary that you believe that you can trust your memory. For you do notneed to use those beliefs as premises in an inference to a conclusion aboutwhat your lunch was. It is just necessary that you seem to remember yourlunch and you form your belief on the basis of such a memory experience.

Notice that the rejection of this view would commit us to the thesis thatour memory-based beliefs about the past are justified only in so far as theyare arrived at through an appropriate process of inference, which is highlyimplausible. Consider what sort of inference that could be. It wouldpresumably be an inference from partly introspective data to a conclusionabout the past along the following lines:

(a) I am aware of the fact that p by being in a state with such-and-such

phenomenological characteristics.

(b) It is usually the case that: Those events that I am aware of by being in stateswith such-and-suchphenomenological characteristics happened in the past.

Therefore,

(c) The fact that p happened in the past.

Now, in order for the conclusion of any inference to be warranted, itspremises should be warranted as well. But consider what the premises in

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inferences of this sort are ultimately grounded on. It seems that theseinferences will always make use of some premises that are themselvesgrounded on memory. (How, if not partly by memory, do you know thatpremise (b) in the inference above is correct?) The upshot is that the thesisthat memory-based beliefs about the past are justified inferentially generatesa regress problem, as a result of which none of our memory-based beliefsabout the past turns out to be warranted. I take this to be a reductio of theview that memory-based beliefs are justified inferentially. Let us summarizethe upshot of this argument in the following principle of justification formemory-based beliefs (or simply ‘JUST’):

JUST

For any subject S and proposition p:

In normal circumstances, S is entitled to believe that p if she apparently

remembers that p and S’s belief is based on her apparently rememberingthat p.

Our project is, then, to find a specification of the truth-conditions ofepisodic memories that, on the one hand, accounts for APA and TRANS,and, on the other hand, it is consistent with JUST. A word on how the firstdesideratum constrains the form that our specification of truth-conditionsmay take: It is reasonable to think that, if we want to specify the content of amental state that involves some kind of sensuous phenomenology, then thetruth-conditions for it should be given in a way that reveals how thatcontent is presented to the subject.3 In memory, things are presented to thesubject as having been in a certain way. Shouldn’t we, then, give the truth-conditions of memories in a way that describes how things are presented tothe subject? It is worth keeping in mind that we are trying to account forhow things are presented to the subject by appealing to what things are beingpresented to the subject. In order to specify what is being presented, I willdiscuss some propositions that are constituted by some objects andproperties that are presumably involved in making memories true. But,for the purposes of explaining APA and TRANS, it is not necessary todescribe those objects and properties in the same way as the subject herselfwould describe them. In fact, it may preferable to avoid doing it. Otherwise,the danger is that we end up building some phenomenological aspect of howthings are being presented to the subject into the truth-conditions of thesubject’s memories. And this might threaten to make the explanation ofAPA and TRANS in terms of what is being remembered trivial. In whatfollows, when I claim that a certain proposition 5P, o4 captures the truth-conditions of a memory experience M that a subject S has, I will not requirethat S is, in virtue of having M, disposed to claim that object o had propertyP in the past. This is why I shall, for instance, avoid using indexicals in thedescriptions of the relevant object and property.

3I am grateful to an anonymous referee for bringing this point up.


III. How much Information do Memories Carry? Perception in Memory:

Rich Content and Poor Content

I wish to pursue a certain approach in the philosophical literature on memorythat emphasizes the role of perception in memory for events. There are anumber of theories of memory that require that a perceptual experience of anevent appear in, or be part of, the content of a later memory of that event. Letus call this cluster of theories the ‘reflexive approach’ to memory. Thischaracterization is quite vague, since there are various ways in which anintentional state can ‘appear in’ or ‘be part of’ the proposition that capturesthe truth-conditions of an intentional state. Rather different theories aboutthe proper characterization of the content of memories will therefore countas reflexive theories. In this section, I shall discuss two such views, namely, aposition that I will refer to as the ‘causally self-referential’ theory of memory,and a view that I will call the ‘neutral’ theory of memory. In the next section,I shall propose an alternative reflexive view that, I shall argue, successfullyexplains TRANS and APA while being consistent with JUST.

The first reflexive theory I wish to discuss is the theory according to whichthe content of a given memory should be construed as the instantiation of acertain causal relation. The relata of it are the following. On the one hand,there is the fact that the event reported as being remembered caused thesubject to have a perception of it. And, on the other hand, there is the eventthat consists in the subject having a certain memory experience, namely, thevery experience of which this complex causal relation is the content. Thus,the idea is that, in memory for objective events, a subject is in cognitivecontact with the causal history of the very memory that she is having, whichoriginates in a certain event. That is how she is in the sort of cognitivecontact with that event that counts as remembering it.

This is the view that John Searle seems to have in mind when he claims thatmemory is causally self-referential. Searle introduces the notion of causal self-referentiality as a feature of the intentionality of perception. Commenting onthe satisfaction conditions of a visual experience, he claims the following:

It is part of the conditions of satisfaction (in the sense of requirement) of the

visual experience that the visual experience must itself be caused by the rest ofthe conditions of satisfaction (in the sense of things required) of that visualexperience. Thus, for example, if I see the yellow station wagon, I have a certainvisual experience. But the Intentional content of the visual experience, which

requires that there be a yellow station wagon in front of me in order that it besatisfied, also requires that the fact that there is a yellow station wagon in frontof me must be the cause of that very visual experience. Thus, the Intentional

content of the visual experience requires as part of the conditions of satisfactionthat the visual experience be caused by the rest of its conditions of satisfaction,that is, by the state of affairs perceived. . . . The intentional content of the visual

experience therefore has to be made explicit in the following form:

I have a visual experience (that there is a yellow station wagon there and that

there is a yellow station wagon there is causing this visual experience).[1983: 48]

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According to Searle, this is not only a feature of the intentionality ofperception but it is a feature of other forms of intentionality as well, such asmemory [ibid.: 52]. Searle does not really elaborate on this point, but he tellsus this much about memory:

The memory of seeing the flower represents both the visual experience and theflower and is self-referential in the sense that, unless the memory was caused bythe visual experience which in turn was caused by the presence of (and features

of) the flower, I didn’t really remember seeing the flower.[1983: 95]

This passage, together with the previous remarks on the causal self-referentiality of perception, suggests the following ‘causally self-referential’view of memory:

The causally self-referential view

For every subject S, memory experience M and proposition p:

If S has a memory experience M that she would express by saying that sheremembers that p, then the content of M is the proposition

5Being caused by a perceptual experience of p that was caused by p, M4

The content of a given memory is, on the causally self-referential view,extremely rich. To begin with, each memory experience is a constituent ofthe proposition that captures its truth-conditions. Also, the propertyattributed to that experience involves both a past perceptual experience ofan objective event and that event. Finally, the proposition capturing thetruth-conditions of a given memory experience makes reference to a causalchain involving the three mentioned elements, namely, the memory experi-ence, a past perceptual experience and, finally, an objective event.

By building so much into the content of a memory experience, thecausally self-referential view can easily explain APA and JUST. ConsiderJUST first. Let us call the memory experience that I would express byuttering ‘I remember an albino gorilla sleeping at the zoo’ M*. According tothis view, when I have M*, I am in cognitive contact with several things,namely, my own memory experience, my past perceptual experience of analbino gorilla sleeping, the gorilla sleeping at the zoo, and the chain ofcausal relations that link those three elements. Thus, I am non-inferentiallyjustified in believing, on the basis of M*, several things. Among them, I amjustified in believing that I seem to remember an albino gorilla sleeping, thatI seemed to perceive it in the past, and, importantly for JUST, that an albinogorilla was sleeping at the zoo. In addition, the causally self-referential viewcan explain why APA is true. According to the view, when I have M*, I amin cognitive contact not only with the fact that an albino gorilla was sleepingat the zoo, but also with the fact that I seemed to perceive it (among severalother facts, including my having M* as well as the instantiation of severalcausal relations). It is not surprising, then, that I am aware of my having


seemed to perceive the gorilla when I have M*. For that is part of M*’scontent and, thus, part of what I am remembering.

It is not clear that the causally self-referential view can account forTRANS, though. Presumably, the causally self-referential theorist will claimthat, when I seem to remember what having a perceptual experience of analbino gorilla was like, the content of the memory experience that I have (letus call it M**) is captured by the proposition 5Being caused by a percep-tual experience of an albino gorilla, M**4. But that content is totally silenton whether an albino gorilla was actually sleeping at the zoo. Thus, it is hardto see how the causally self-referential theorist will explain that, when I haveM**, I thereby seem to remember an albino gorilla sleeping at the zoo.

The causally self-referential view has, then, some significant explanatorypower. But it comes at a cost. For the content that it attributes to memoriesis too rich for it to square with our intuitions about the truth-conditions ofmemories. Recall the situation I referred to above, where I am standing at acertain spot in the zoo, looking at an albino gorilla from a certain point ofview. Let us call this situation W1, and let us call the perceptual experience Ihave in it P1. Consider the memory that, in W1, I have of the gorilla a fewyears later. Call it M1. Consider, furthermore, a possible situation W2 thatis, let us stipulate, exactly like W1 except for the fact that, in W2, I am notparticularly interested in the gorilla so I forget about him just a few secondsafter looking at him. Now, according to the truth-conditions that thecausally self-referential view attributes to M1, M1 turns out to be false ofW2. For what it takes for any situation W to make M1 true is that M1 has acertain causal history in W. And, in W2, I never have memory M1 so M1has no causal history whatsoever. Our intuitions, though, are that M1 is trueof W2. W2 is, intuitively enough, one of the situations that memory M1represents accurately. After all, the gorilla is lying exactly in the sameposition as he was in W1, looking exactly as he was in W1, and I amstanding at precisely the same spot as I was in W1, looking at him. Yet thecausally self-referential view establishes that memory M1 is false of thatsituation. So it seems that the causally self-referential view will not sit easilywith our intuitions about the truth-conditions of memories.

According to a weaker reflexive view, the objects of our memories are ourperceptions of past events, not those events themselves. This view seems tohave been held, among others, by Alexius Meinong and Wolfgang VonLeyden:

Almost everybody would be willing to admit that I cannot remembersomething that I have not experienced; similarly, most people would also agreethat I really cannot experience what takes place outside of me, but only what

goes on within me. Thus we have admitted that we can actually and directlyremember only the data of the mental life . . .

[Meinong 1973: 256]

It is also true that our memories, veridical and non-veridical alike, alwaysappear to be about some objective past event or fact, not about our past

perceptions. . . . The best way to convince ourselves of the fact that our

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recollections concern our perceptions of past events, not those eventsthemselves, is to take the case of a distorted or delusive perception of acertain past event and ask ourselves in what sense, if any, any subsequent

memory purporting to have this event as its object is mistaken.[Von Leyden 1961: 61]

The version of the reflexive view that emerges from those two passages isthe following ‘neutral reflexive’ view:

The neutral view



5Having had a perceptual experience of p, S4

The first thing worth noticing about the neutral view is that, in astraightforward sense, the kind of content that it attributes to memories isquite poor. According to the neutral view, the truth-conditions of ourmemory experiences do not concern whether the perceived events that wereport to remember happened or not. The truth-values of our memoryexperiences are, strictly speaking, sensitive to whether we had the appropri-ate perceptual experience in the past, not to whether the seemingly perceivedevent actually took place. For this reason, the neutral view also has troubleaccommodating our intuitions about the truth-conditions of memories.Ironically enough, Von Leyden’s test in the passage above illustrates thispoint quite nicely.

Let us follow Von Leyden’s suggestion and suppose that, in a possiblesituation W3, I have a false perceptual experience of, once again, an albinogorilla sleeping at the zoo. Call it P3. Consider the subsequentmemory experience whereby, in W3, it seems to me that there was analbino gorilla sleeping at the zoo. Call it M3. Let us now ask ourselveswhether M3 is false of W3 or not. Von Leyden thinks that this sort ofexperience only ‘purports’, or ‘appears’, to have an objective event as itsobject, so his position would surely be that M3 is not mistaken. Hisfollowing passage [1961: 62] seems to confirm that:

If we learn or discover that a previous perception of ours which we nowrecollect was mistaken, there is no change in what we remember of the originalscene after the discovery as compared with our recollection of it before the

discovery. The only change affecting our recollection is that, as a result of thediscovery, we have now become aware of the fact that our memory has allalong been concerned with our past perception of the scene in question, rather

than with the scene itself.

This is extremely odd. If I seemed to perceive a gorilla but it so happens thatI was actually looking at a polar bear, then the memory experience whereby


it now seems to me that there was an albino gorilla sleeping at the zoo is,intuitively, just as wrong as my past perceptual experience.4 According tothe neutral view, though, all it takes for a given situation W to make thatmemory experience true is that I seemed to perceive a gorilla in W. This isthe sense in which the kind of content that the neutral view attributes tomemories is too poor.

A significant epistemological consequence of this feature of the neutralview is that, due to that feature, the view flies in the face of JUST. Supposethat you seem to remember an albino gorilla sleeping at the zoo. On theneutral view, this means that your memory state is putting you in cognitivecontact with a past perceptual experience of an albino gorilla. Thus, yourmemory experience warrants the belief that you seemed to perceive thatthere was an albino gorilla sleeping at the zoo. But the belief that thereactually was such a gorilla sleeping there is, strictly speaking, not warrantedby your memory experience. The reason is that no particular truth aboutpast objective events follows from your memory experience being correct.Thus, if the neutral view is correct, then, when you remember a gorilla sleep-ing at the zoo and you come to believe that there was such a gorilla sleepingat the zoo, you actually need to have arrived at that belief through inferencein order for it to be justified. You need to have inferred that the gorilla wasthere from the belief that you seemed to perceive him and the belief that,usually, your perceptual experiences are trustworthy. But, as we have seen,there are serious difficulties with the view that our memory-based beliefsabout the past are justified inferentially.

A further consequence is that, due to the little information it attributes tomemories, the view cannot account for APA and TRANS. As a matter offact, TRANS has to be treated, within the neutral view, as describing acertain illusion that we experience in memory. The neutral theorist mustclaim that, when I recall what perceiving a gorilla was like, it appears to meas if I also remembered a gorilla, but I do not. I just remember my pastperceptual experience. So there is no difference between my memoryexperience of a gorilla and my memory experience of what perceiving thegorilla was like. But it seems to me that there is such difference, and this iswhy it may appear to me as if TRANS is true. In fact, the neutral theoristwill claim, TRANS is false. Thus, the neutral view does not even treatTRANS as a phenomenological feature of memory that requires explana-tion. Rather, it explains it away. Likewise, the neutral theorist will need toclaim that even if, sometimes, it appears to us as if we remember an eventout there, in the world, we actually remember our perceptual experience ofthat event only. However, it mistakenly seems to us as if there is a differencebetween those two sorts of memories. And this is why it may seem to us as ifAPA is true when, in fact, it is false. Once again, the neutral view does notreally account for APA. Rather, it explains APA away as a phenomen-ological illusion.

4Von Leyden’s intuition may be due to the fact that he raises the question whether memory malfunctioned inthe scenario we are considering. Clearly, memory did not malfunction. But the faculty of memory need not beat fault for a given memory to be false. The W3 scenario is, so to speak, a case of inheritance of a mistake, nota case of a mistake in inheritance.

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The upshot is that neither Searle’s causally self-referential view norMeinong and Von Leyden’s neutral view is satisfactory. And the source ofthe problems for both theories has to do with how much information theyattribute to memory experiences. The sort of content that the former attri-butes to memories is too rich whereas the kind of content that the latterattributes to them is too poor. At this point, one might feel tempted to rejectthe reflexive approach altogether. Why shouldn’t we simply represent thetruth-conditions of the memory that I would express by saying, for instance,that I remember that Jim was at the office by using 5being at the office,Jim4? The reason is that this view does not give us any hope of explainingeither APA or TRANS. In fact, something stronger may even be the case,namely, that, if the view we are considering is correct, then the content that agiven memory has does not throw any light on any aspect of what having thatmemory is like. If you think that phenomenological facts should be explainedby appealing to intentional facts, then you should reject the view that thetruth-conditions of my memory of Jim being at the office are captured by5being at the office, Jim4. For that kind of content does not help us explainAPA and it does not help us explain TRANS either. I believe that we shouldnot give up on the reflexive approach yet. For this approach is, essentially, onthe right track. In fact, just a few adjustments to the central idea in it may beenough to solve our problem.

IV. The Veridical View

A small twist on the neutral view might give us a more promising candidateto explain TRANS and APA. Consider Michael Martin’s remark in thefollowing passage (my emphasis):

When one recalls an episode, on the current account, one recalls the originalepisode of apprehension. That episode has as its object events which one

perceived, or of which one was an agent. . . . In recalling such an episode, theobjects of that episode are recalled as the objects apprehended at that earliertime. Although an episode of recall has as its object the initial experience whichwas the apprehending of the event, it has thereby as a proper part of its content

what was then apprehended.[Martin 2001: 278]

It is not clear whether Martin is endorsing the neutral view here. On the onehand, he seems to hold that the object of a memory episode is a pastperceptual episode, which strongly suggests the neutral view. On the otherhand, he explicitly claims that, when that happens, the content of that pastperceptual episode constitutes a ‘proper part’ of the content of the memoryepisode, which is not part of the neutral view at all.

The main difficulty while trying to evaluate these remarks is to make senseof the idea that contents can be the relata of the parthood relation. Thereare, at least, two readings of the claim that the content of an intentionalstate has as a part the content of a different state. On one reading of it,Martin’s claim that the content of a past perceptual state is part of


the content of a present memory state when the latter has the former as itsobject takes us back to the neutral view. However, there is a differentreading of the ‘has as a part’ locution that suggests a more powerful reflexiveview. Let us consider both readings of the claim that the content of a givenintentional state S1 is part of the content of a different state S2:

Syntactic inclusion

The content of S1 is a part of the content of S2 if and only if:

(i) There is a proposition p such that p is the content of S1.

(ii) There is a different proposition q such that q is the content of S2.

(iii) One of the propositional constituents of q is the proposition that p.

Semantic inclusion

The content of S1 is a part of the content of S2 if and only if:

(i) There is a proposition p such that p is the content of S1.

(ii) There is a different proposition q such that q is the content of S2.

(iii) The proposition that q entails the proposition that p.

The basic intuition behind the syntactic reading of the claim that the contentof a given state S1 is part of the content of a different state S2 is that a fullspecification of the content of S2 needs to mention the content of S1. This isa reasonable sense in which the content of S1 may be said to be part of thecontent of S2. The relation of syntactic inclusion above is aimed at capturingthis idea. By contrast, the basic intuition behind the semantic reading of theclaim that the content of a given state S1 is part of the content of a differentstate S2 is that the set of those propositions that follow from the content ofS1 is included into the set of those propositions that follow from the contentof S2. This is a natural sense in which the content of S1 may be said to bepart of the content of S2 as well. The relation of semantic inclusion above istrying to capture that different reading of the ‘has as a part’ locution.

Notice that the relations of syntactic and semantic inclusion for contentsare independent. Let S2 be, for instance, the belief that Jones is at the beachif it is sunny. And let S1 be the belief that it is sunny. The content of S1 is, inthat case, a part of the content of S2 syntactically but not semantically. Forone needs to mention the proposition that it is sunny in order to fully specifythe content of S2. Yet, the set of logical consequences of the propositionthat it is sunny is not included into the set of logical consequences of theproposition that Jones is at the beach if it is sunny. Conversely, suppose thatS2 is my belief that it is raining and it is not raining and S1 is, say, my hopethat David Beckham misses a certain penalty kick. Then, the content ofstate S1 is part of the content of S2 semantically since, in this case, the

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proposition that I believe entails anything. But it is not part of the content ofS2 syntactically, since Beckham does not need to be mentioned at all inorder to specify the content of my belief.

Now, if the content of a certain memory state M is that its subject was in agiven perceptual state P in the past, then the content of the latter becomespart of the content of the former in the syntactic sense at least. If the contentof P is proposition p, then p is a component of the proposition that capturesthe truth-conditions of M, namely, the proposition that the subjectapparently perceived that p. This is a clear sense in which the content of apast perceptual experience is part of the content of a memory experience ifthe latter takes the former as its object.

However, on the syntactic way of understanding the parthood relation,the view that the object of a memory is that the subject had a certainperceptual experience and, nonetheless, the content of the latter is a properpart of the content of the former seems to come down to the neutral theory.For this view suggests that, in memory of perceivable events, those objectiveevents are part of what we are aware of but only in a derivative sense, that is,as the objects of our past perceptual experiences. Basically, the sense inwhich a certain memory that one would express by uttering ‘I remember thatp’ gives one cognitive access to the objective event that p is simply thefollowing: One needs to grasp the proposition that p in order to grasp theproposition that one, strictly speaking, is really remembering, namely, thatone had a perceptual experience that p in the past. This is why, when weunderstand the parthood relation in the syntactic way, the view thatmemories take past perceptions as their objects and yet the contents of thoseperceptions are parts of the contents of the relevant memories does notreally add anything to the neutral theory. For the weak sort of cognitiveaccess to objective events that the view in question allows for is not strongerthan the kind of access that the neutral theory grants us. And, as we haveseen, a view that just allows for that weak sort of cognitive access toobjective events in memory does not square with our intuitions about thetruth-conditions of memory experiences, APA, TRANS, and the epistemol-ogy of memory-based beliefs.

Consider, by contrast, the view that the content of a perceptual experienceP is, semantically, part of the content of a memory experience M when Mtakes P as its object. This view is not compatible with the neutral theory.According to the neutral theory, if M takes P as its object and it so happensthat the subject did have P but P was false, then M is correct. Which meansthat the content of M does not entail the content of P. If the neutral theoryis correct, then, the object of a memory is a perceptual experience but thisdoes not mean that the content of the latter is, semantically, a part of thecontent of the former. So the neutral theory does not leave room for asemantic reading of the ‘has as a part’ locution in the claim that the contentof a memory has as a proper part of it the content of a perceptual state whenit takes that perceptual state as its object.

However, the idea that the content of a perceptual state may be part of thecontent of a memory semantically suggests a different reflexive theory ofmemory. If the content of a certain memory stateM is that its subject was in a


given veridical perceptual state P in the past, then the content of P becomespart of the content of M in the semantic sense: If proposition p is the contentof P, then p, and not only the subject’s being in P, must have been the case inorder for M to be true. If a memory experience takes a veridical perception asits object, then whatever proposition constitutes the content of the percep-tion must have obtained in order for that memory experience to be true.

This stronger reading of the ‘has as a proper part’ locution suggests thefollowing version of the reflexive approach:5

The veridical view



5Having had a veridical perception that p, S4

According to the veridical view, our past perceptual experiences are, inmemory, always presented to us as veridical. This tenet of the veridical viewmakes it more phenomenologically accurate than the neutral view. For theway in which a past event is presented to us in virtue of having a memory ofit is certainly not neutral on whether that event happened or not. Inmemory, past events are not merely presented to us as having perceptuallyappeared to us to be the case. The phenomenology of memory is, so tospeak, more opinionated than that. Remembered events are presented to usas having been the case, whether they were the case or not.

A different way of getting at the same point is the following. Nobody willbe surprised by the observation that it is impossible for us to distinguish pastepisodes of hallucination from past episodes of veridical perception bysimply recalling what being in the relevant state was like. Whether Iveridically perceived an albino gorilla or I experienced a visual hallucinationof an albino gorilla in the past, the memory states that I will come to occupywhen I apparently remember what being in each perceptual state was likeare phenomenologically indistinguishable. But notice that this is not becausethe veridical perception is presented to me as nothing more than aperceptual experience that may or may not have been veridical. It is becausethe past hallucinatory experience is presented to me as having been veridical.If I cannot tell a past hallucination of a gorilla from a past perception of oneby trying to remember what being in each state was like is not becauseneither state is presented to me as having been veridical. It is because both ofthem are. The phenomenology of memory is, in that sense, assertive (unlike

5The veridical view only constitutes a version of the reflexive approach under the following assumption:Having a veridical perception of a certain fact requires having a perceptual experience of that fact, where thelatter is understood to be common to episodes of misperception and hallucination as well as episodes ofveridical perception. This is a plausible yet controversial assumption [Snowdon 1988; McDowell 1988].Nevertheless, as far as I can see, not much on what the correct understanding of mnemonic content is hangson whether the veridical and neutral views are actually versions of the same approach or not. Thus, I will bemaking the just-mentioned assumption for the purposes of this discussion.

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that of imagination). And the veridical view attributes a sort of content tomemories that easily accommodates that feature of it.

In addition, the content that the veridical view attributes to memoriesseems to have just the right amount of detail. For it is rich enough to squarewith those intuitions that the neutral theory had trouble with. But it is notrich enough to conflict with those intuitions that the causally self-referentialtheory had trouble with. On the veridical view, the truth-value of a memoryexperience is sensitive to whether the subject had the appropriate perceptualexperience in the past as well as to whether that perceptual experience wasveridical. Recall the memory experience M3 that I have in situation W3described above. This memory turns out to be, according to the veridicalview, false of W3. If I did not really perceive a gorilla sleeping at the zoo,then the memory experience in virtue of which it seems to me that there wasan albino gorilla sleeping at the zoo becomes, on the veridical view, false ofthat situation. (Just like it intuitively seems that it should be.) Furthermore,on the veridical view, the truth-value of a memory experience is not sensitiveto whether, in the situation relative to which the memory experience is to beevaluated, the subject actually had the memory experience in question.Recall the memory experience M1 that, in the example above, I have insituation W1. This memory turns out to be, according to the veridical view,true of situation W2 since I veridically perceived an albino gorilla in W2. If Ihave a certain memory experience in the actual situation, then the fact that Ihave that memory experience in a different possible situation is not, on theveridical view, part of what it takes for that situation to be accuratelyrepresented by the memory experience that I actually have. (Just like itintuitively seems that it should not be.)

There is a popular picture of memory according to which memory differsfrom both perception and introspection in that it has a wider scope than bothfaculties. Perception can only be directed at the world and introspection canonly be directed at one’s own mind. Memory is supposed to differ from theformer in that it can be directed at one’s own mental states, and it is supposedto differ from the latter in that it can be directed at the world. So memory has,according to this picture, a kind of scope not unlike that of imagination.However, on the picture of memory that the veridical view suggests, memoryis closer to introspection. It does not really allow for two different sorts ofcognitive access to the past, one of them reaching for one’s own mental lifeand the other one reaching for the world. On the picture of memory that theveridical view suggests, there is only one kind of cognitive access to the pastthat episodic memory allows for, namely, access to our own past perceptualexperiences. What happens is that those perceptual experiences are alwayspresented to us as being veridical. The former point allows the veridical viewto explain APA whereas the latter allows it to explain TRANS.

Consider APA first. Why are episodically remembered events presented tous as having been perceived? As I just mentioned, the veridical view is astrongly reflexive view. It claims that the only kind of cognitive contact withthe past that episodic memory allows for is the awareness of one’s own pastperceptual experiences. Thus, if the veridical view is correct, one cannotremember a perceivable event but by seeming to have veridically perceived


it. This means that any cognitive contact with a past perceivable event thatmemory may provide one with is mediated by an awareness of one’s ownperceptual experiences. It is not surprising, then, that remembered eventsappear to have been experienced. After all, my past perceptual experiencesof the events that I remember are always presented to me in a certain way inmemory (namely, as being veridical).

Let us revisit the transparency of perceptual experience to memory now.When a subject apparently remembers what perceiving a certain fact was like,she apparently remembers the fact in question. How does the veridical viewaccount for this phenomenon? If, in memory, our past perceptual experiencesare presented to us as veridical, then it is not at all surprising that we appearto remember a certain fact when we apparently remember what perceiving itwas like. For the veridical view suggests that having a memory of whatperceiving an event was like amounts to being in a certain state the content ofwhich is that we veridically perceived that event and, therefore, that the eventdid happen. In fact, it seems that perceptual experiences could not have beenopaque to memory if, as the veridical view contends, episodic memory alwayspresents one’s own past perceptual experiences to oneself as being veridical.

To conclude, the veridical view is consistent with JUST. One’s positionregarding why JUST is true is likely to differ depending on whether oneendorses an internalist or externalist approach to epistemic justification. Thebasic idea of internalism regarding epistemic justification is that the pro-perties of a belief that determine whether it is justified are, in an epistemicsense, internal to the cognizer. (That is, they are such that the cognizer couldbe aware of them in some epistemically privileged way.) By contrast, theexternalist holds that the epistemic justification of a given belief depends onproperties of it to which the cognizer need not have any sort of epistemicaccess at all. To appreciate that the veridical view is consistent with JUST, letus take a brief look at a particular version of externalism and see how, withinthat framework, JUST actually follows from the veridical view of memory.6

Perhaps the most paradigmatic version of externalism is reliabilism, thatis, the view according to which a belief is justified to the degree that isgenerated by a reliable mechanism of belief production [Goldman 1994].The veridical view of memory allows for a natural explanation of JUST inreliabilist terms. According to JUST, in normal circumstances, if you seemto remember that you had fish for lunch, then you are entitled to think thatyou had fish for lunch, provided that you form that belief on the basis ofyour memory experience. There is no set of beliefs that you need to have inorder to derive from them, through inference, the belief that you had fish forlunch. Why is that? According to the veridical view, the reason is that sometruths about past objective events follow from the fact that those memoryexperiences that we report as being about objective events are correct. Quitesimply, on the veridical view (unlike the neutral view), there is a correlation

6I do not mean to suggest that this is the only approach to epistemic justification within which the veridicalview is consistent with JUST. There is nothing in the veridical view that would prevent an internalist whorejects that memory-based beliefs are justified inferentially, such as John Pollock [1986], from endorsing thatview of memory. However, pointing out that JUST follows from the veridical view within a certainexternalist theory of epistemic justification should suffice for the purposes of showing that JUST is consistentwith the veridical view.

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between a certain class of your memory experiences being correct and theappropriately related objective events taking place. As a result, formingbeliefs about the past on the basis of your apparent memories is, in normalcircumstances, a reliable process of belief formation. It tends to maximizethe chances that your memory-based beliefs about the past are true. For, innormal circumstances, your memory experiences are correct and proposi-tions about past objective states of affairs follow from your memoryexperiences being correct. This is why, within a reliabilist framework, beliefsformed on the basis of memory are justified. For instance, in normalcircumstances, forming your belief that you had fish for lunch on the basisof your seeming to remember that this was so entitles you to that beliefbecause it maximizes the chances of your belief being true. And the reasonwhy it does is that your memory experiences tend to be correct in normalcircumstances and, on the veridical view, there is a correlation between yourmemory experiences being correct and certain objective events taking place.7

Macquarie University Received: September 2004

References

Aristotle 1972. De Memoria, in Aristotle On Memory, ed. Richard Sorabji, London: Duckworth: 47 – 60.Goldman, Alvin I. 1994. What is Justified Belief?, in Naturalizing Epistemology, ed. H. Kornblith, Cambridge

MA: MIT Press: 105 – 30James, William 1890. The Principles of Psychology, London: Macmillan.Locke, J. 1975 (1690). Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon Press.Martin, M. G. F. 2001. Out of the Past: Episodic Recall as Retained Acquaintance, in Time and Memory:

Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, ed. C. Hoerl and T. McCormack, Oxford: Clarendon Press:257 – 84.

McDowell, John 1988. Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge, in Perceptual Knowledge, ed. J. Dancy,New York: Oxford University Press: 209 – 20.

Meinong, Alexius 1973. Toward an Epistemological Assessment of Memory, in Empirical Knowledge:Readings from Contemporary Sources, ed. R. M. Chisholm and R. J. Swartz, Englewood Cliffs NJ:Prentice Hall: 253 – 71.

Perry, John 1999. Indexicals and Demonstratives, in A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, ed. B. Haleand C. Wright, Oxford: Blackwell: 586 – 613.

Pollock, John 1986. Contemporary Theories of Knowledge, Totowa NJ: Rowman and Littlefield.Reichenbach, Hans 1947. Elements of Symbolic Logic, New York: Free Press.Searle, John 1983. Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.Snowdon, P. 1988. Perception, Vision, and Causation, in Perceptual Knowledge, ed. J. Dancy, New York:

Oxford University Press: 192 – 209.Tulving, Endel 1972. Episodic and Semantic Memory, in Organization of Memory, ed. W. Donaldson and

E. Tulving, New York: Academic Press: 381 – 403.Von Leyden, Wolfgang 1961. Remembering: A Philosophical Problem, London: Duckworth.

7For helpful discussions, I am very grateful to: Tim Bayne, David Braddon-Mitchell, David Chalmers, AndyClark, Tim Crane, Jerome Dokic, Manuel Garcıa-Carpintero, Dan Lopez de Sa, Josep Macia, MichaelMartin, Peter Menzies, David Pineda, Huw Price, Daniel Stoljar, Matthew Stuart, John Sutton, and IgnacioVicario. For helpful comments on an earlier draft, I am very grateful to two anonymous referees for thisjournal.


the intentionality of memory

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