The Butcher on the Bus
Christoph Hoerl (University of Warwick)
The other day I was in the car with my children when they saw one of their school teachers walking down the pavement. To me, there didn’t seem to be anything special about the incident, but to them it was a source of great deal of hilarity – the sight was so familiar, yet so strange: Mr Cope, spotted away from his natural habitat! The very idea that teachers could have an existence outside school seemed exotic.
The psychologist George Mandler describes a somewhat similar occurrence in his 1980 article entitled ‘Recognizing: The judgement of previous occurrence’:
“Consider seeing a man on a bus whom you are sure that you have seen before; you ‘know’ him in that sense. Such a recognition is usually followed by a search process asking, in effect, Where could I know him from? Who is he? The search process generates likely contexts (Do I know him from work; is he a movie star, a TV commentator, the milkman?). Eventually the search may end with the insight, That’s the butcher from the supermarket!” (Mandler, 1980, pp. 252f.)
It has become common to refer to Mandler’s example as ‘the butcher on the bus’. (The phrase always reminds me ever so slightly of the title of a low-budget horror movie.) It is a key example in the psychological literature on memory, where it is still widely cited.
I will get to one of the main ideas Mandler sought to illustrate with the story towards the end of this piece. First, though, here is one reason why I like the example of the butcher on the bus, independently of what one goes on to make of it:
No doubt Mandler’s story would not have been so influential if it had not resonated with other researchers, who recognized the experience described in it. As such, it can be seen as part of a tradition of psychological writing about memory and related phenomena which puts questions about phenomenology centre stage. Endel Tulving, another key figure belonging to this tradition, even described the subjective experience of remembering as “the ultimate object of interest” in studies of memory (Tulving, 1983, p. 184).
Having said that, the fact that the experience described by Mandler is so easy to relate to also brings with it the danger that it might set us off in the wrong direction. Or so I think.
For there seems to be a perennial temptation in theorizing about memory to treat memories themselves as things we come across in somewhat like the manner one comes across the butcher on the bus.
Thus, Mandler’s example is often seen to serve as a paradigm illustration of the idea of a ‘feeling of familiarity’. That very phrase, however, is also sometimes used to describe what is taken to be a key ingredient in the very capacity to remember the past, or what is commonly referred to as episodic memory.
Very roughly speaking, the view of episodic memory I have in mind goes like this. When one remembers a past event, this involves a combination of two things: (1) one has before one’s mind an image of a certain sort, and (2) one also has a certain feeling accompanying that image, and it is in virtue of that feeling that one takes the image to represent an event one experienced in the past. As it is sometimes put, the feeling acts as a ‘memory indicator’ or a ‘phenomenological marker’ that one is remembering.
An influential version of the view that appeals specifically to the idea a ‘feeling of familiarity’ in this context was put forward by Bertrand Russell. But there are also more recent examples. I have offered some reasons to be sceptical of this approach elsewhere. They also emerge, I think, when we take a closer look at the butcher on the bus.
How exactly should we describe the experience involved in seeing the butcher on the bus? What I want to suggest is that, on closer inspection, there are plausibly several different feelings in play in the example to which the label ‘feeling of familiarity’ might be applied. Once each of them is clearly spelled out, though, none of them seems to be a good candidate for the kind of role envisaged by Russell and others, who have used the term to describe a purported ingredient in episodic memory.
(1) An aspect of the experience of seeing the butcher on the bus that Mandler’s description brings out particularly well is the characteristic way in which it captures one’s attention. Arguably, one factor that is responsible for this is also present in the example I started with, of my children spotting their teacher out in town. What makes both experiences very salient is the incongruity between the item and the context in which it is encountered. This makes the person spotted stand out as familiar (in a way in which this is not normally the case), because they are encountered out of context.
(2) There was no question that my children knew where they had seen the person they spotted from the car before – he was Mr Cope, whom they saw in their classes at school. Mandler’s example is different in this respect, and this adds a second phenomenological layer to it. As Mandler points out, the sight of the butcher prompts a series of attempts to figure out who he is. The feeling – and it can be quite a maddening one – is one of having the right information at one’s fingertips, but not being able to access it, akin to what happens in the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.
(3) Alongside these first two ingredients, it is plausible that there is also a less prominent, ‘base-level’, feeling of recognition involved in the experience of seeing the butcher on the bus. Indeed, it might be thought that this is what triggers the other two ingredients. Whilst there is still a fair amount of dispute over the details, one promising line of research has associated the idea of such a feeling with the fluency with which information – here the visual experience of seeing the butcher – is being processed, and with mechanisms monitoring this fluency.
The experience described by Mandler thus comprises quite a complex combination of factors, and there may well be more than the ones I mentioned. Yet, we must not lose out of sight the basic point Mandler intended the example to illustrate: He takes it to show that there is a clear difference between familiarity, as illustrated by this example, on the one hand, and recollection, on the other. Indeed, the idea of such a difference has sparked a whole programme of research on dual-process accounts of recognition.
For our purposes, the main point is this:
The phenomenology at issue in the example of the butcher on the bus is associated precisely with failing to retrieve an episodic memory of where one has encountered the person seen on the bus before. As such, it looks like it does not provide a model on which episodic memory, too, could be understood.
In a recent discussion of the idea of a feeling of familiarity, Amy Kind, too, stresses its “multi-layered and multi-dimensional” nature, and says that “it can stem from different factors all at once”. She draws from this the conclusion that existing accounts of episodic memory invoking this idea “may have been working at too coarse a phenomenological level”. As she goes on to say, though,
“If we were able to tease apart the different layers and dimensions of the feeling of familiarity, it’s possible that we could hit upon one such layer or dimension that is proprietary to memory” (Kind, 2022, p. 9).
This suggests one way of accounting for the failure, from at least Hume onwards, of attempts to find a ‘phenomenological marker’ of memory. Kind lays it at the door of our expressive faculties: If only we could find a fine enough grain at which to describe the different facets of the feeling of familiarity, we might be able to hit upon the one that is germane to episodic memory.
The alternative, more pessimistic, hypothesis is that the whole project of looking for a ‘phenomenological maker’ of memory, conceived of in this way, is based on a mistake. It is premised on a picture of the relationship in which we stand to our own memories that is tempting and yet deeply misleading – that we come across them in something like the manner we come across the butcher on the bus, or Mr Cope from school walking down the pavement.
