Further thoughts on memory: replies to Schechtman, Adams, and Goldberg

Sven Bernecker 0 1 0 S. Bernecker (&) Department of Philosophy, University of California , Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697-4555, USA 1 Abstract This is a response to three critical discussions of my book Memory: A Philosophical Study (Oxford University Press 2010): Marya Schechtman , ''Memory and Identity'', Fred Adams, ''Husker Du?'', and Sanford Goldberg ''The Metase- mantics of Memory'' The book argues that the dependence of memory on personal identity is of a contingent rather than a logical kind. Memory presupposes personal identity only when the memory content involves an indexical reference to the rememberer. The verdicality constraint on remembering demands that the bearer of a memory with reflexive content is the same as the bearer of the corresponding past representation. Extroversive memories in the third-person mode, however, don't refer back to the rememberer and hence leave open the issue of the personal identity of the rememberer. Here interpersonal memory transfer is, in principle, possible. Since memory doesn't logically presuppose personal identity, it is possible to define - personal identity in terms of memory. Contrary to popular belief, memory-based accounts of personal identity are not circular. Memory is a sub-species of quasi-memory. Quasi-memory is like ordinary memory in all phenomenal and causal respects, except that it is not restricted to experiences of ones own past. Quasi-memory doesnt presuppose that the bearer of the past experience is co-personal with the bearer of the present state of seeming to remember having had that experience. Marya Schechtmans paper Memory and Identity is a rich and sophisticated defense of the logical dependence of memory and personal identity. On her view which I label constitutive holism, the content of memories depends at least in part on their place in a broader psychological context, and so that some content will necessarily be lost when a memory is transplanted into an alien psychology (Schechtman 2011, Sect. 2). Instead of constitutive holism, I adopt content externalism, that is, the view that the individuation of mental contents depends on systematic relations that the subject bears with certain conditions of his physical and social environment. More on content externalism in my reply to Sanford Goldberg. The book (pp. 5255) raises a number of concerns about constitutive holism. It points out that cases of amnesia and multiple personality disorder cast doubt on the empirical plausibility of constitutive holism. Moreover, it argues that the possibility of Parfit-type fission cases suggests that it is possible to quasi-remember another persons experiences. Regarding the latter point, Schechtman (2011, Sect. 2) explains that, according to my own theory, not all memories are transferable via fission. When introversive memory and extroversive memory in the first-person mode are reproduced in fission they dont count as quasi-memories because they violate the veridicality constraint. This point is well taken. I am also inclined to agree with Schechtman that it is difficult to draw any kind of firm conclusions from wildly hypothetical cases like fission. At the same time I doubt that there is a principled way of distinguishing between those thought experiments in the personal identity debate that are informative and those that are not. Schechtman defends constitutive holism against the charge of empirical implausibility by drawing a distinction between kinds of memories. She concedes that there are memories that are logically independent of personal identity and that may be transferred as quasi-memories. Yet these are not the memories in terms of which personal identity is defined, namely autobiographical experience memories (Schechtman 2011, Sect. 2). By distinguishing between identity-dependent autobiographical experience memories and identity-independent extroversive memories in the third-person mode Schechtman attempts to acknowledge the empirical data in favor of quasi-memory while holding on to the claim that a memory-based theory of personal identity cannot escape circularity. It seems to me that Schechtman doesnt fully appreciate the force of the empirical data in support of quasi-memory. Some of the studies suggest that also autobiographical experience memories are logically independent of personal identity. Consider, for example, the case of R.B., a 48 year old male who suffered a serious head injury in a car accident. Almost immediately following his accident, he was able to remember events from the past, yet his recollection of those events was compromisedhe could not remember the events as having been personally experienced. His memory of these events was no different from what it would have been had they happened to someone else. While his memories from before the injury had no sense of personal ownership, the memories from after the injury were normal. This is how R.B. describes what it is like to remember personal events without the experience to be mine What I realized was that I did not own any memories that came before my injury. I knew things that came before my injury. In fact, it seemed that my memory was just fine for things that happened going back years in the past. I could answer any question about where I lived at different times in my life, who my friends were, where I went to school, activities I enjoyed, etc. But none of it was me. It was the same sort of knowledge I might have about how my parents met or the history of the Civil War or something like that (Klein 2011, Sect. 2). What happened over the coming months was interesting: Every once in a while, I would suddenly think about something in my past and I would own it. That was indeed something I had done and experienced. Over time, one by one I would come to own different memories. Eventually, after perhaps eight months or so, it seemed as if it was all owned. As if once enough individual memories were owned, it was all owned (Klein 2011, Sect. 2). To be sure, these findings and other like them (Bernecker 2010, pp. 5354) dont prove that memory is a sub-class of quasi-memory. But they do seem to cast doubt on Schechtmans claim that the kinds of memories that are constitutive of personal identity logically presuppose personal identity. The case against memory-based accounts of personal identity doesnt seem to be empirically realistic. Next Schechtman argues that there is a tension between my cautious approval of the connectionist model of memory traces (Bernecker 2010, pp. 135137, 194) and my defense of the possibility of interpersonal memory transfers. Given that memory traces consist in a distributed weighting of synaptic connections and that many different memories can be stored on the same set of connections, it doesnt seem possible to transplant a small number of traces. Schechtman calls this the engineering version of the argument from constitutive holism (2011, Sect. 3). Two comments in response. First, if or wh (...truncated)