Good Memory
Matthew Frise (Milwaukee School of Engineering)
Lined up with other ways of knowing, memory is the clear worst of the lot. That’s a theme in the history of the philosophy of memory. It sheltered comfortably in the 20th century. And some mornings we find its tracks in the present one. Memory can do the general kind of thing that perception, testimony, intuition, and the rest do: it can help us know. It’s just that memory is much worse at it.
Why and how is memory worse? The proposals are many, but alike. A common one is that memory cannot come up with epistemic goods of its own. Sure, it can help us know, by providing reason or epistemic justification for believing this or that. But that justification came from somewhere else, such as perception, testimony, or the other self-actualized suppliers of epistemic goods. They are original sources of the goods. Memory, however, is a mere trust-fundee, an heiress, a Mr. Magoo, propped up by its associates.
This idea, we’re told, applies in cases of forgetting, especially when what’s forgotten is counterevidence. You may have heard just as much for thesis X as you’ve heard against it. Maybe you’ve even heard more against it. But forgetting all that counterevidence cannot result in your having overall reason to believe X, even when you’ve kept your evidence for X. Here we hear different metaphors for memory that isolate a similar feature.
Memory is a meat-grinder. Memory is a container. It’s a garbage in, garbage out sort of thing. Or, if the metaphor’s merchant is fortified with wine, you might catch a shit in, shit out instead. Memory can’t make things better, not in epistemology, not elsewhere, and definitely not by forgetting.
These metaphors, this accusation of memory having special limits, fall on less sympathetic ears today. It’s more common than ever to suppose – and to argue! – that memory can come up with epistemic goods of its own, that it can improve your overall reason for believing something, even by forgetting. But one specific criticism of memory has still seen no specific countermeasure.
The criticism takes inspiration from the great Roderick Chisholm (1989: 69): “But it would seem to be clear, in general, that we should assign a lower degree of evidence to the deliverances of memory [than to the deliverances of perception]”.1 Memory is more likely to sully or deceive than other ways of knowing, such as perception. Memory’s epistemic goods, original or not, are second-rate.
Why? The diagnosis seems simple: memory can err in more ways than (say) perception can. You seem to see that a cat is on the roof. Either a cat is on the roof, or not. If one is, your experience is right. If none is, your experience is wrong. Now take memory of your visual experience. If you remember seeing that a cat is on the roof, and you had that visual experience when one was indeed there, then good for memory. If you remember seeing one there, but you actually saw that a squirrel is on the roof, then memory errs. But then the rub: memory can faithfully report your past misperceptions. You remember seeing that a cat is on the roof, and you did seem to see that, but it was really a squirrel. Here memory, functioning well, inherits its partner’s error.
Memory gets your past experience right but the past world wrong. And we judge memory by these errors. But what if memory corrects an error?
You visually experience that a cat is on the roof, but it’s really a squirrel. Misremembering your experience, you recall seeing that a squirrel is on the roof. Here, memory gets your past experience wrong but the past world right. But keep the champagne corked. Memory is still letting us down. For one, it corrupted what it received, even if it by accident (that Mr. Magoo!) it happened to get the world right in doing so. For another, when it corrects an error, memory is not helping you know. This “happy failure” connects you to the past world in the wrong way, a way at odds with your knowing how the world was.
Perception in comparison has fewer ways of polluting our minds. Any way perception can get things wrong, memory can too, by handing us perception’s counterfeit goods. And then memory can introduce its own mistakes. So whatever you do, take memory less seriously than its friends. It’s not just garbage in, garbage out. Sometimes it’s also goods in, garbage out.
There’s something to this Chisholm-inspired charge against memory. Memory has more ways of messing up. Still, that shouldn’t lead us to believe that evidence from memory is in general inferior. More ways of messing up by itself does not guarantee – and is poor evidence of – a greater potential for messing up.
We connect with the world only indirectly – or, at least, many think we do. And the veil of memory is thicker than the veil of perception. After all, perception is part of the veil between memory and the world. But what of it? The veil of perception is itself unevenly thick, but we should not rate its evidence accordingly.
Sometimes having more intermediaries makes no difference. By traveling through a clear window, light does not thereby corrupt the visual experience it causes. And sometimes having more intermediaries makes a difference, but for the better.
Your visual experience is sometimes more accurate or informative because the light that causes it travels through your prescription glasses.
Memory bends what it receives from the past as glasses bend light. Often it bends for the better – and not by mere “happy failure”. It’s not trying to correct past misperceptions specifically. But, like a good editor, it works toward coherence and cutting the fluff. At any rate, learning that memory can go wrong in extra ways does not in general undermine its evidence. We’d also have to learn something like: when it bends it’s usually for the worse. And we have not.
As for garbage in, garbage out? Whoever coined that wasn’t a gardener. And why suppose memory is more a meat grinder than an orderly soil bed anyway?
Chisholm R. 1989. Theory of Knowledge. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Very much enjoyed this Matthew. At last we’re considering that perception is no epistemic slam dunk, and that perception and memory are very much intertwined…