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Factivity Variation in Episodic Memory Reports

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New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (JSAI-isAI 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13856))

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Abstract

Recent work in experimental semantics has found that some memory reports fail to give rise to theoretically predicted factivity-inferences (see, e.g., White and Rawlins; de Marneffe et al.). Our paper accounts for one domain of such failures, viz. factivity variation in episodic memory reports. The latter are reports like John remembers a woman dancing that require the agent’s personal experience of a past event or scene. We argue that, in episodic memory reports, the factivity inference is not triggered by the presupposition of the verb remember or its complement, but by the veridicality of the underlying experience: if the experience is veridical (as is often the case in perception), the factivity inference arises. If the experience is counterfactual (as is the case in hallucination and dreaming), the inference does not arise. We give a compositional semantics for episodic memory reports that captures this dependence.

The paper has profited from discussions with Kyle Blumberg, Justin D’Ambrosio, Chungmin Lee, and Thomas Ede Zimmermann. Kristina Liefke’s contribution is sup- ported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, BMBF (through the WISNA program) and by the German Research Foundation, DFG, as part of the research unit FOR 2812: Constructing Scenarios of the Past (grant 397530566, joint with Markus Werning). Markus Werning’s contribution is furthermore supported by FOR 2812 grants no. 419038924, 419040015, and 397530566.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In [48], such inferences are called veridicality inferences. We prefer the name factivity inferences since it takes seriously the ‘backgrounding’ of these inferences (for a similar argument, see [14]) and since it allows us to reserve the name veridicality for a different (though related) property (see Sect. 4.2).

  2. 2.

    Since know and think do not accept gerundive complements, we only consider the remember-case of (4) in (8), and replace think in the ‘vacuous’ case with imagine.

  3. 3.

    We will show below that the factivity inference can also vary with the report’s linguistic context. This is the case when the complement contains a fictional predicate (e.g. dream(ing); see (26) and Sect. 3) or when the embedded content is saliently counterfactual (as in the case of singing hippos or squared circles).

  4. 4.

    These two alternatives are given – and rejected – as explanatory options in [8].

  5. 5.

    This dependency motivates the name experiential remembering (see, e.g., [4, 25]). In psychology and cognitive science, experiential remembering is often called episodic remembering, following the work of Endel Tulving (see e.g. [10, 43]).

  6. 6.

    An analogous observation holds w.r.t. and (9a) and (26).

  7. 7.

    To keep our semantics as simple as possible, we assume that the ‘past-directnedness’ of remembering (i.e. that the point in time at which the experience event \(e'\) occurred precedes the point in time of the remembering event e, i.e. \(t_{e'} \prec t_{e}\)) is built into exp.

  8. 8.

    Following [24, p. 659], we assume that a situation, \(s_{1}\), includes a situation \(s_{2}\), i.e. \(s_{2} \le \) \(s_{1})\), if the location \(l_{1}\) and time \(t_{1}\) of the world-part about which \(s_{1}\) contains contextually salient information includes the location \(l_{2}\) and time \(t_{2}\) of the world-part about which \(s_{2}\) contains contextually salient information (s.t. \(l_{1}\) maintains or expands the perimeters of \(l_{2}\) and \(t_{1}\) starts before or simultaneously with \(t_{2}\) and ends after or simultaneously with \(t_{2}\).

  9. 9.

    In the final compositional step in (39), we introduce existential closure over the remembering event e, as is common in Neo-Davidsonian semantics (see e.g. [9]).

  10. 10.

    Much of the contemporary semantics literature treats fiction verbs like imagine and dream as anti-veridical (or anti-factive) predicates (see e.g. [11, 44]). The latter are predicates that entail (resp. presuppose) the falsity of their complement (see (\(\,\dagger \,\))):

    figure af

    Since non-veridicality is a weaker property than anti-veridicality, we here treat dream as a non-veridical predicate.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy II, Ruhr University Bochum, 44780, Bochum, Germany

    Kristina Liefke & Markus Werning

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  1. Kristina Liefke
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Correspondence to Kristina Liefke .

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  1. Kansai University, Suita, Japan

    Katsutoshi Yada

  2. Tokyo Metropolitan University, Tokyo, Japan

    Yasufumi Takama

  3. Keio University, Tokyo, Japan

    Koji Mineshima

  4. National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan

    Ken Satoh

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Liefke, K., Werning, M. (2023). Factivity Variation in Episodic Memory Reports. In: Yada, K., Takama, Y., Mineshima, K., Satoh, K. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13856. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36190-6_8

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