A Virtue Theory of Memory (Error)

Today's post is by Kourken Michaelian (Centre for Philosophy of Memory, Université Grenoble Alpes).

Kourken Michaelian

With her 2016 article on misremembering, Sarah Robins drew the attention of philosophers of memory to the need to provide an account not only of successful remembering but also of unsuccessful remembering—an account of memory errors such as confabulation, to which William Hirstein had previously devoted a book but which had been neglected in subsequent discussions in the field.

The debate triggered by Robins’ article continues to unfold, with Robins herself defending an approach to memory errors inspired by the causal theory of memory in articles in 2019 and 2020, Sven Bernecker defending a similar causalist approach in an article in 2017, and myself defending an approach based on the simulation theory of memory in articles in 2016 and 2020. There are other approaches that merit discussion; André Sant’Anna, for example, argues in a forthcoming article that relationalist approaches to memory have difficulty accommodating unsuccessful remembering.

But the debate so far has unfolded primarily between causalists and simulationists, with the former holding that unsuccessful remembering is characterized by the lack of an appropriate causal connection between the apparent memory and the apparently remembered event and simulationists holding that it is characterized not by lack of appropriate causation but rather by the unreliability of the memory process.

 

Robins’ and Bernecker’s recent articles both develop versions of the causalist approach and attack the simulationist approach, and, in my article forthcoming in Synthese—“Imagining the past reliably and unreliably: Towards a virtue theory of memory”—I respond to these attacks. But I also argue that, for reasons internal to simulationism, existing versions of the simulationist approach are inadequate. I argue, in particular, that they fail to fully acknowledge the involvement of a form of mnemic luck in many instances of unsuccessful remembering.

Mnemic luck is broadly analogous to the form of epistemic luck involved in Gettier cases, and the paper sketches a potential analogy between the development of the family of externalist epistemologies and the development of the family of (post)causal theories of memory of which simulationism is a member. Simplifying greatly, we might say that the limitations of the causal theory of knowledge led to the emergence of the process reliabilist theory of knowledge and that the limitations of process reliabilism led reliabilists to move to the virtue reliabilist theory of knowledge. Similarly, the limitations of the causal theory of memory led to the emergence of the simulation theory of memory (modelled on process reliabilism), and the limitations of simulationism suggest that simulationists move to a virtue reliability theory of memory.

The paper therefore proposes a new form of simulationism, a virtue theory of memory modelled not on process reliabilism but instead on virtue reliabilism and intended to handle mnemic luck in a manner roughly analogous to that in which virtue reliabilism handles epistemic luck. The paper argues that this new theory grounds a more adequate approach to unsuccessful remembering.