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Remembering and relearning: against exclusionism

Today's post is by Juan F. Álvarez (Université Grenoble Alpes) on his recent paper "Remembering and relearning: against exclusionism" (Philosophical Studies, 2024).

Juan F. Álvarez

Distinguishing remembering from other related cognitive processes, such as imagining and relearning, occupies a central place in the philosophy of memory. While the remembering-imagining distinction is a topic of heated debate, philosophers tend to agree that no instance of relearning qualifies as a case of remembering. In this paper, I argue that this view, which I call “exclusionism”, requires closer examination because it does not follow from leading naturalistic theories of remembering. The theories in question are simulationism (Michaelian 2016), distributed causalism (Sutton and O’Brien 2023), and trace minimalism (Werning 2020). 

Relearning occurs when a subject acquires information about an event through experience, forgets about the event, reacquires information about the same event from an external source, forgets the episode of information reacquisition, and then forms an apparent memory of the event in question. The main support for exclusionism comes from an appeal to intuition. It is claimed to be self-evident that remembering and relearning are fundamentally distinct ways of representing the personal past. However, if the aforementioned theories are correct, there is reason to abandon exclusionism. 

Simulationism holds that for a subject to remember a past event, the subject’s representation of the event must be produced by a reliable episodic construction system. According to this theory, an important feature of the system is that it can rely on post-event testimonial information without compromising reliability. Because cases of relearning can involve a reliable system, they can qualify as instances of remembering. The particularity of these cases is that the system relies exclusively on post-event testimonial information to construct a memory of a past event.  

Distributed causalism holds that for a subject to remember a past event, a causal connection must exist between his current representation and his past experience of the event, sustained by a distributed memory trace. According to this theory, distributed traces can result from multiple experiences and cause the remembering of multiple events. If this is the case, instances of relearning can be among the experiences that produce the traces underpinning remembering. Thus, remembering does not exclude relearning. 

Trace minimalism holds that for a subject to remember a past event, a causal connection must exist between his current representation and his past vicarious or non-vicarious experience of the event, sustained by a minimal memory trace originating in that experience. Traces are “minimal” in that they are not supposed to carry representational content. Vicarious experiences occur when a subject uses sensorimotor simulations to understand detailed verbal reports. According to this theory, traces originating from such experiences can later cause remembering. Since nothing prevents a relearning subject from having a vicarious experience when reacquiring information about an event and forming a trace on the basis of that experience, these traces can subsequently cause remembering. 

Advocates of these theories might propose additional conditions to accommodate exclusionism, but intuition appears to be the only reason for doing so. Neither the fundamental components of the theories nor the empirical evidence on which they are based provide support for exclusionism. While one might doubt that there is any role for the exclusionist intuition in naturalistic philosophy of memory, further metaphilosophical research is required to justify this doubt. After all, the exclusionist intuition might help uncover assumptions in naturalistic theorizing about remembering, such as the idea that memory retains first-hand information and that remembering involves accurate source attributions.

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