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Remembering is not a kind of knowing

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Abstract

This paper purports to disprove an orthodox view in contemporary epistemology that I call ‘the epistemic conception of memory’, which sees remembering as a kind of epistemic success, in particular, a kind of knowing. This conception is embodied in a cluster of platitudes in epistemology, including ‘remembering entails knowing’, ‘remembering is a way of knowing’, and ‘remembering is sufficiently analogous to knowing’. I will argue that this epistemic conception of memory, as a whole, should be rejected insofar as we take into account some putative necessary conditions for knowledge. It will be illustrated that while many maintain that knowing must be (1) anti-luck and (2) an achievement, the two conditions do not apply to remembering. I will provide cases where the subject successfully remembers that p but lacks knowledge that p for failing to meet the two putative conditions for knowledge. Therefore, remembering is not a kind of knowing but a sui generis cognitive activity.

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Notes

  1. Sect. 3 will discuss Bernecker’s arguments in more detail.

  2. For a much longer list of proponents of ETM, see James (2017: 122, note 2).

  3. Recent years have seen more and more psychologists and philosophers arguing that memory can be a generative epistemic source (see Roediger & McDermott 1995; Lackey 2005; Schacter & Addis 2007; Matthen 2010; Michaelian 2011; Tucker 2017; Fernández 2019; etc.). However, this should not affect the wide acceptance of ETM’s central idea that remembering implies knowing, at least at t2.

  4. I will spell out this standard conception in Sect. 2.

  5. It might be prima facie natural for some people to generalise this view. For example, they might also grant that ‘remembering a person is a kind of knowing-who’, ‘remembering how to do something is a kind of knowing-how’, etc. Even though I am sceptical about this generalised version of ECM, this paper will leave open this issue.

  6. The version of virtue epistemology that Michaelian invokes is a reliabilist virtue theory, prominently proposed by Ernest Sosa.

  7. This object/meta distinction of memory is analogous to Sosa’s distinction of animal/reflective knowledge.

  8. Some have proposed an epistemic account of confabulation as ill-grounded or unjustified memory (cf. Hirstein, 2005: ch. 8; Michaelian 2016a: 5–7).

  9. Note that different members of ECM can have graded membership in terms of the strength of their support to ECM’s credo: remembering is a kind of knowing. The more convincingly and directly a view can demonstrate how remembering is a kind of knowing, the stronger and more paradigmatic the view is qua a member of ECM. Generally speaking, in order to lend support to the credo of ECM, a view has to exhibit resemblances between remembering and knowing. The closer the resemblance is, the stronger the view as an ECM member is. Correspondingly, the stronger a member of the ECM-family is refuted, the more severely my argument undermines ECM. One might worry that there are other ECM-constituent-claims that are much weaker than any variant mentioned here. I cannot rule out this logical possibility. But I would also doubt whether claims weak like that can be recognised as significant members of ECM worthy of a detailed refutation.

  10. There are other types of epistemic luck that are not knowledge-undermining. For example, content luck (e.g., the fact that Donald won the lottery, as a lucky event, can nevertheless be known), and evidential luck (e.g., Joe can gain knowledge by overhearing the news that Donald won the lottery).

  11. Recently, Pritchard has turned towards what he calls anti-risk epistemology (see Pritchard 2016; 2020), which suggests that the safety principle implies that knowledge cannot by risky (the unwanted outcome could have easily occurred) rather than lucky (the wanted outcome could have easily not occurred). If anti-risk epistemology is right in that knowledge cannot be risky, then we have another way to demonstrate the asymmetry between remembering and knowing in that the former can be risky. Readers are welcomed to apply my argument in this section to anti-risk epistemology.

  12. For other similar but subtly different accounts, see Engel (1992); Vahid (2001); Greco (2010); Goldberg (2015); etc. The nuances of those formulations will not affect my main argument.

  13. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this objection.

  14. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this objection.

  15. I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this problem. However, some might also have an impression that Michaelian’s reliabilist theory of memory, compared with causalism, seems to show a closer affinity to the reliabilist theory of knowledge. Bernecker (2017) even accuses Michaelian’s reliabilist simulationism of amounting to an epistemic theory. I am sympathetic to this impression. Nevertheless, I also find it respectably reasonable to claim that Michaelian’s simulationism, strictly speaking, is not a kind of ETM (although I categorise his VTM as an instance of ECM, a notion that is more inclusive than ETM). That is because Michaelian (2020; 2021) himself have carefully demarcated his reliabilist theory from an epistemic one. For instance, he remarks that: ‘Simulationism, in contrast, treats confabulating as unreliable. Because reliability is not an epistemic concept, the simulationist is not committed to an epistemic theory of memory’ (Michaelian, 2021: 19). I would like to accept his self-clarification. However, again, it does not conflict with the impression that his simulationism is more closely related to (albeit not equal to) ETM than causalism is.

  16. I am grateful to a reviewer for raising this point.

  17. James holds that these two extra conditions will introduce epistemic or at least normative elements into causalism, so defects of non-epistemic theories are fundamentally epistemic. It is controversial whether a theory (e.g., Michaelian’s simulationism) endorsing these two conditions will automatically become an epistemic one. See Michaelian (2021) for a disagreement.

  18. An anonymous reviewer points out that what is said to be ‘remembered’ here is a present state of affairs rather than a past one. I acknowledge that this distinction might be worth making here. However, I just borrow this case from James’ discussion where he uses this case to defend ETM. Hence, granting that this distinction constitutes a problem, it might not be a problem just for me.

  19. It is still open to debate how to characterise this ‘because of’ (or ‘attribution’) relation. For example, Pritchard (2012; 2015) and Bogardus & Perrin (2020) give ‘because of’ an explanatory reading; Sosa (2009; 2015) and Turri (2011) interpret ‘because of’ in terms of the manifestation relation; while Greco (2012) accounts for the attribution relation in a pragmatic way.

  20. Admittedly, many epistemologists, especially robust virtue epistemologists, disagree on this (see Greco 2010; Sosa, 2015; Zhao, 2021; etc.). For them, to ensure that one’s true belief is produced by one’s cognitive abilities suffices to eliminate epistemic luck. Hence, an independent anti-luck condition is redundant. This dispute does not affect my main argument. That is because the disagreement mainly lies on whether the anti-luck intuition and the ability intuition are two distinct desiderata for a full account of knowledge, rather than whether they are two important (no matter interreducible or not) desiderata.

  21. For exceptions, see Hudson (2014) and Beddor & Pavese (2020).

  22. Of course, this is not to say that a causalist reading of Temp’s mnemic success is indefensible or unwelcomed. I shall remain neutral on the causalism/simulationism debate in this paper.

  23. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this problem.

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This work was supported by Shanghai Pujiang Program [grant number 21PJC081]

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  1. Department of Philosophy, School of Humanities, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Room 305B, No. 800, Dongchuan Road, Minhang District, Shanghai, China

    Changsheng Lai

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Lai, C. Remembering is not a kind of knowing. Synthese 200, 333 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03814-8

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