Actualizations of a capacity to know, or to remember, can indeed be construed as acts of representing the known or remembered object (or proposition). — Pierre-Normand

I'm going to stay with my simple-minded question, because I genuinely don't understand what this means. When an image of my bedroom as a 5-year-old comes to mind, is this a representation? It certainly fits the criteria most of us would use for "mental image". Is this what you're calling "an actualization of a capacity . . . to remember"? If it is that, does that mean it isn't a mental image? If it's only "construed" as an act of representing the remembered object, what would be another way of construing such an image?

These aren't meant to be objections, really. I'm just trying to get clear on your terminology, and how it compares with our more common language.

A memory has to have some sort of independent presence/existence/ontological status/process of verification [IPEOSPoV] to it. — Fire Ologist

That's what I want to say too, intuitively. And what this thread is showing is that this idea encounters (at least) two major problems:

1. Whatever the IPEOSPoV is, it can't depend on the memory's being accurate. What we verify is that the memory purports to be one; it presents itself as one; not that it's accurate.

2. The IPEOSPoV is a lot to ask, unless it happens very much below the surface.

This is really interesting. Could I ask a simple-minded question? When you say:

I tend to construe "the memory that P" not as inspecting an inner representation, but as the persistent ability to know that P — Pierre-Normand

are you denying that there is any mental representation at all? Or only that inspecting such a representation couldn't result in recognizing "the memory that P"?

Rhetoric aside, and sorry for mine, this comes down to how you think of racism. If "objective racism" means "espouses/acts on consciously held racist views," then I might estimate this to be true of 50% of US people. But systemic racism is where the "racist assumptions" really play out, and here it would be difficult to find anyone, myself included, who is immune. The Implicit Association Test is one interesting indicator, and there are similar tests involving faces and racial traits.

But more generally, the US is constantly finding surrogates for explicitly racist policies, most recently the moves against immigrants. Our policing and justice system is of much longer duration. I have no hesitation in calling the belief that the US criminal system is fair and equitable a "racist assumption." It is impossible to believe this without ignoring the reasons why -- just to pick one feature -- people of color have less effective legal representation than white people. This is the systemic part. To say, "But that's not because of their race, it's because of ____ (usually some version of poverty or lack of education)" is to avoid the question, "But how did that come about? Why is this group poorer/less educated?" etc. The racist assumption here would be that, somehow or other, there is a racially neutral explanation of this.

All that said, there are many ways of using the word "racism" and I don't mean to dispute your right to use it differently. I'm just trying to explain what my comment meant.

the act of remembering involves an implicit self-awareness that “this is something from my past,” — Number2018

I like Gallagher's perspective, and what you write in your post is reasonable and interesting. It falls under the category that both @Srap Tasmaner (I think) and I would call psychology rather than philosophy. In the quoted phrase above, it's the "implicit self-awareness" that I'm trying to bracket and focus on. Is there anything more that can be said about it, as an experience? I'm reluctant to accept that it's merely definitional of "the act of remembering."

Emotions are thoughts and constructed like all thoughts. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, I've seen some research about this. Apparently the physical or somatic experience of "this emotion" is much more general than we think. The same physical experience, for instance, can be read as either anger or fear, depending on the rest of the story we're telling at the moment. Even joy and terror, I've heard, may be identical below the level of consciousness. It's all "arousal."

Is this like memories? Are we telling a little contextual story, when an image comes to mind?

So I think in a way there is an answer to "Why do I think this particular thought I was just having is a memory?" and the answer is because your mind said it was, or some perhaps much more subtle and noncommittal equivalent — Srap Tasmaner

Here I worry that bringing in "your mind" is one entity too many. Is this the picture?: An image occurs, my mind says it is a memory, and then some other item called "I" identifies it as a memory? Or when you say, "My mind said it was," does this just mean that I said it was?

This kind of question does help us see how hard it is to work with a term like "mind". Do I want to identify "mind" with some psychological account of how images et al. get generated? Or would it be better to make "mind" equivalent to the "I", the self? Or is it this third activity that can mediate between the first two conceptions?

I actually think your "much more subtle and noncommittal equivalent" is closer to how it is.

We all know that memory is pretty much always confabulation — Srap Tasmaner

We do? I guess you're thinking of narrative accounts where there's a lot of filling-in. But surely image-memories are reliable, by and large? Or is there evidence that this is not so? Well, the fallibility of witness testimony, I suppose -- but here too there's a story involved.

I think there's a middle way. — Srap Tasmaner

. We feel one way about a thought if we think of it as a memory, and another if we think of it as fancy. Even though those two toys came out of the same bin. — Srap Tasmaner

Sure, this sounds like a good inquiry -- why does it matter so much which is which?

I doubt there's anything worth chasing that would turn out to be the "genuine experience" of memory rather than imagination, because I doubt there's any such thing. Still, we behave as if there is, and that feeds back into our mental lives quite powerfully. — Srap Tasmaner

Well, that's the question that grounds the OP. I think your suggestion is that we behave as if there is because the outcome matters quite powerfully to us. If it didn't, we might be content with a hazier borderline between memory and imagination. Quite possibly. And yet . . . the plausibility of this account lessens for me when I try to use it to describe what I've been calling unbidden mental images. I persist in believing that, in this context, there is a crucial difference between my experience of a purported memory image and my experience of a fancied image. What is that difference? Quite simply, the different recognitions involved. Yes, the "mental content" is the same, if you like, but I am not aware of adding anything to that content in the process of recognition. The experience of seeing image X and recognizing image X as, say, a memory, is simultaneous, and thus makes the experience different from recognizing image Y as a fancy. I'm not adding anything to some unlabeled or unrecognized image; it's all of a piece.

Of course, as you say, this is how it seems, and this is how we behave. That doesn't mean it's true.

Your posts overlap nicely, and are both extremely interesting. I'll just select a few things to highlight.

Now if what you're doing is "associating" (or something), situations might occur in which it becomes relevant whether the content of the association "really occured, was experienced, etc." or not. And it's going to be hard to figure this out precisely because the psychological functions of imagination and memory are both going to be involved to some degree or other. Embellished memory? Memory-inspired vision? — Dawnstorm

Yes, and this is what you'd expect to be the rule rather than the exception. But this topic puzzles me because in fact we find the opposite, most of the time: If I suddenly get an image of my grandfather walking beside me in Manhattan, I know it's a purported memory. And if I get an image of a snark, I'm quite sure it isn't. At the risk of repeating myself, I ask again: How do I know these things? (And see below for some explication about what I mean by "how".) Of course we can make a mistake, and of course a purported memory may be inaccurate to a greater or lesser degree, but that's an outcome that's subsequent to the problem I'm raising: How am I even able to make the "mistake" in the first place? Or to put it differently: What is it about a purported memory that is, evidently, the same to us, regardless of whether the memory is accurate or not? Why does it get recognized as "purported memory" at all? We agree that its accuracy can't be the reason -- so what is it?

A common example would be a composer composing a piece of music and then finding out it sounds like something else. — Dawnstorm

I like this. As a musician myself, I know that subconscious stealing happens all the time. (And yes, if a court convicts you of using a chromatic scale that "belongs" to someone else, we're all in trouble!) I agree that, when a meretricious theft occurs, and assuming it isn't a deliberate rip-off, then something like a confusion of memory with imagination is taking place. Does this tell against my assertion that we almost always know the difference? It might, if the composer had genuinely attended to his musical phrase as he wrote it, and was still in the dark. But we know this isn't how composition works. It's much more rapid and subconscious, and then once it's done we grow attached to it. I'm afraid a certain degree of self-deception and wishful thinking is involved when a composer doesn't identify a musical "memory." The solution, of course, is to play it for somebody else who knows the repertoire.

we don't consciously decide whether the content in our awareness is remembered or imagined; in some sense, yes, there's a decision being made about what it is, very much so, but I think that "decision" is mostly made without your conscious involvement. Obviously there will be exceptions. — Srap Tasmaner

That might be true, so let's say it is. Would we want to also say that, because of the subconscious quality of the "decision," it has no phenomenological character at all? That isn't "isn't like anything"? (I don't mean to press a particular meaning of "phenomenological" on you. Whatever term you'd choose to describe attending to our conscious experiences is fine, and will be what I mean here.) I'm not disputing that, in fact I think it more and more likely. But I need to be convinced that we really have done our "bracketing" as carefully as we can, and really considered what the experience is -- or isn't! -- like, apart from what we think it must be like, based on some psychological theory.

Roughly speaking, I think none of this is any of philosophy's business. In the 18th century, before we could do the sort of research we can do now, it may have been acceptable to speculate about how the mind works and how we distinguish perceptions from memories and so on, but it's rather foolish in the 21st century — Srap Tasmaner

I'm sympathetic to curbing philosophy's enthusiasms, but I think this goes too far. Or perhaps I still haven't made clear what I mean. I'm really not interested at all in "how the mind works." (Not in this thread, that is.). Asking, "How do I know that a mental image is a purported memory?" is not a "how-the-mind-works" question. It's a question about my relation to, my experience of, how the mind works.

Now you'd suggested earlier that this is a false distinction -- that "my experience," even if up one level from the content of that experience, so to speak -- is still a question about how the mind works. And a hardcore believer in scientism can construe it that way. But I don't think you replied to my objection to that: Are you saying, then, that there is no question we can ask that separates phenomenology from psychology? Earlier, you talked about "what's that like, for something to be present to the mind as a memory? Fine, and that's headed back toward phenomenology. (What we do, rather than how)" -- so I assume you do think some distinction is valid. Indeed, when you say "what rather than how," that's very close to my own dubiety about "how". So why may I not draw the distinction as I do, leaving first-level "how" questions to psychology? Phenomenology has to start somewhere!

In any case, if my use of "how" has misled you, I'm sorry. I mean the "how" to translate as "by virtue of what experience".

I'm just riffing here, but maybe it links back to Nietzsche too. — Stuart Roberts

Kubrick undoubtedly knew that the music he selected for the monolith's appearance was from "Also Sprach Zarathustra", Strauss's tone-poem based on Nietzsche. I'm sure the connection was deliberate.

Yes, the law of identity (a=a) is a logical principle—a tautology that belongs to the structure of thought and language. It tells us something about the consistency of our terms, but not about the ontological self-sufficiency of particulars. To read it as a statement about the intrinsic metaphysical identity of beings is to conflate logic with ontology. — Wayfarer

Exactly.

The modern statement “A is A” or “x = x” comes from a much later tradition, shaped by formal logic and set theory, not Aristotle’s ontology of substance and form. To read Aristotle as if he were simply asserting the self-contained identity of particulars is to read him through a modern lens that doesn’t fit. — Wayfarer

And this.

"A = A" can tell us nothing about what we ought to substitute for A. It's not about being or ontology at all.

Thanks for going into all this. You're a good writer and you make it vivid and understandable.

I think (and thought so even before I heard of aphantasia) that successful communication is better understood in terms of situational compatibility of individual meanings than in terms of similarity of the individual meanings involved — Dawnstorm

Yes, good observation.

This is a pretty dogmatic response, stating that the reason we can write such equations at all is that their effectiveness is dependent on or justified by the logic of identity, that accepting your argument would be tantamount to claiming that identity signs in physics are ambiguous and equivocal. Pretty harsh. My response to ↪J suffered from something like this, and perhaps Tim might say something similar. Are physical equations really that precise? — Banno

Yeah, that was the direction of my wondering, but I'm definitely out of my depth when it comes to how chemists and mathematicians regard questions of identity, so I'll continue to follow your discussion with @Richard B.

we do it on purpose, some of the time, and automatically, almost all the time, and we never stop. That's "remembering", not "becoming aware of a thought and labeling it a memory". If that happens at all, it's probably rare, unusual at least. A thought, if it's a memory, comes to us as a memory, period. — Srap Tasmaner

This is fascinating, because it's so contrary to my own experience. Yes, I'm familiar with the idea of a conscious "remembering" when we try to remember something, on purpose, or else it comes to us automatically because we're in a context where we expect a memory. I agree that presents a different, if overlapping, set of problems. But I am constantly being bombarded with unbidden mental images, randomly, and often triggered by things I'm barely aware of. Far from unusual, it's much more common for me than deliberately seeking out some memory, or expecting one.

So there we are. I suppose you've had this happen sometimes, at least? My question would then be, When it happens, are you instantaneously aware, as best you can tell, that the thought/image is a purported memory? And if so, how?

what reasons could you muster to judge a thought to be a memory? What could you possibly rely upon as you worked out the inference that this indeed is a memory? — Srap Tasmaner

Well, exactly. "Reasons" doesn't sound right, nor does "inference," and yet we make the identification. You want to say that this is a kind of reductio of the idea that we do anything when we recognize a memory: "It is the fundamental form of knowledge." And so it may turn out to be, but I'm not yet sure. Or are you perhaps wanting to say that when we recognize a sensual perception as such, it is also a fundamental form of knowledge?

Now, if you want to ask, what's that like, for something to be present to the mind as a memory? Fine, and that's headed back toward phenomenology. — Srap Tasmaner

I think phenomenology can also handle what I believe is a previous question, namely whether something occurs for us between the image and the identification. I'm asking, What's it like for something to be present to the mind before it is recognized as a purported memory? I hope you can agree that, at least sometimes -- rarely for you, frequently for me -- that is a thing that happens.

But what we can't do is go looking for criteria that we consciously use to identify memories or distinguish them from other thoughts. — Srap Tasmaner

This is quite possibly right. I rather doubt the process is conscious, which is part of why I raise the question in a phenomenological, "what's-it-like" context. We may decide it's like nothing at all.

Pretty clear that ⟨Ek⟩=2/3kBT is an equivalence. The "=" bit. — Banno

Pardon my math deficiencies, but I assume this means we can isolate T on the right side of the equation, giving a description of temperature in terms of kinetic energy?

. . . the "Epistemic Stances . . . " thread. I thought those two philosophers did an excellent job making big issues clear within a smaller, manageable discussion. Would you be willing to read them, perhaps guided by some of the comments in the thread?

That makes sense. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Great. I'll watch for any comments you may post to that thread.

truth is primarily in the intellect. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't really understand that. It's a metaphor, yes? So, truth is "in" the intellect, in the same way that ___ is in ____? Could you fill it out? Also, sorry, but what is "the intellect"? Faculty of reason, perhaps?

"If a Truly True sentence is supposed to be one that is uttered without a context, I don't know what that would be." - J

We might ask, what is the "context" you refer to? A "game?" A formal system? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think "game" is overused, and can be misleading, but interpreting it charitably, then yes, a game could be a context, and so could a formal system. Really, though, I mean "context" in the good old-fashioned way. Sentences are spoken or written. This has to occur somewhere, done by somebody, in some sort of intersubjective discourse, etc. That's the context. Can you write a sentence for me that is free of context?

the Borges story, the Library of Babel — Count Timothy von Icarus

Glad to know you're a Borges fan! His story, "Funes the Memorious" would be very pertinent to the ongoing thread about memory. And "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" may be the best philosophical short story ever written.

Fair enough. The difference I'm seeing between "yellow," on the one hand, and "self" or "past" or "true event" may not be genuine. But shouldn't the fact that "yellow" results from a direct sensual perception/interaction make it different from the others, which do not, but rather rely on constructs of some sort? (Maybe not "self" -- or maybe so!)

a sense of recollection — Outlander

OK. If there is a "sense" of recollection, though, the philosophical/phenomenological part would be: What is it? What does this actually mean, experientially?

I thought I was just slow. It never occured to me that others might just have visual experience to go along with the narration. — Dawnstorm

Wow. You describe this very well. If you don't mind my asking into it some more: Has this created problems for you in your interactions with people, or does your brain come up with workarounds that facilitate communication?

What if the problem was your perception in that moment: that is, it's not your memory that's wrong - as it's accurate to what you've experienced - but it's your experience that wasn't accurate to the moment. — Dawnstorm

Yes. It's like the puzzle about what happens when our taste in coffee changes. (I think this is attributable to Dennett?). We used to like Folgers, now we like Bustello and find Folgers bitter. So . . . remembering how Folgers used to taste to us, are we remembering accurately? Or was Folgers a bitter-tasting coffee even then, only we misperceived it?

I wonder if he'll have the massed missile launchers and tanks, like his comrade, Putin. — Wayfarer

He unquestionably will. And I'll bet good money that he'll have the parade route lined with large portraits of himself (held by "private individuals," of course). They are already up on walls, four stories high, and in front of public buildings, in Washington DC, paid for by . . .? https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/05/22/trump-lincoln-national-mall-usda/

the deceptiveness of memory — Wayfarer

Yes. This is part of why I find the OP question interesting. It would be one thing if memories were 100% reliable, such that to recognize one was to recognize its accuracy as a memory. But since that's not the case, I'm left wondering what it is that allows the "purported memory" identification. As I wrote, the only thing I can liken it to is our ability to utter a sentence without asserting it. We can recognize that sentence as a truth-apt utterance without claiming that it is true.

Very good. You're right to press me on this. Let me see if I can respond.

here I am, here comes the mental item, here's me identifying it (seemingly instantly) as a purported memory.
— J

Convince me that's either (a) not already a theory about how mental life works, or (b) it's a good theory, a reasonable theory. — Srap Tasmaner

My question here would be: If this is already a theory, could there ever be a phenomenological reduction? What would you propose in its place, granting phenomenology?

you seem to have the idea that the "mental item" might have causes, and those fall within the purview of psychology, but your identifying the mental item as a memory (or a fancy or a perception) does not, is not itself another sort of mental item, and does not fall within the purview of psychology. I can't imagine why you would think that. Surely identifying a thought as a memory is as much a psychological event as the thought so identified. — Srap Tasmaner

A subtle point. Yes, the act of identifying a thought as a memory is a mental item, a psychological event; it occurs at T1 and is presumably caused, as much as any other mental event is caused. But we're in the habit of making a discrimination here. "Here comes the mental item" is meant to appeal to a cause understood as not within my conscious control. (Again, a reminder that this whole example refers to unbidden images coming to mind.) When we ask for a cause or an explanation, we need to invoke psychology, at least to some degree: Why are memories formed? How and why do they emerge into consciousness? What reliability must they possess? What correlations with brain activity are important? etc.

But the "Why?" of "Why do I identify an image as a (purported) memory?" is different -- unless we are thoroughgoing physicalists. We believe, generally, that an explanation here is going to involve some reference to reasons, to conscious activity. We aren't dealing with a brute fact about neuronal activity, though arguably the reasons must supervene on such activity. Here we're asking, "How is it the case that my experience is what it is?" No doubt there will always be a psychological, causal story that can also be told about this, but it doesn't answer the same question.

This is really a version of my response to your first objection. If there is such a thing as phenomenology, then it must be separated from psychology in some meaningful way. Perhaps there is not. In which case all mental items are indeed on a par, and we shouldn't try to find alternate descriptions of them beyond the physical.

Is this a complete response to the points you raise? I don't think so. But tell me where you see the weaknesses.

The point is that we assume that there are real things, and that the thing's identity, i.e. what the thing is, inheres within the thing itself, not in our descriptions or interpretations of the thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

But that's just what I'm questioning. It's precisely our interpretation of what "Jill" is going to encompass that will tell us what the "real thing" is. I assume you're not saying that there is some correct construal of "Jill" that is independent of interpretation. But in any case, I'm glad to see you backing off from the idea that identity has to include "all properties, essential and accidental".

All true. And this kind of discussion really does help to make the border between psychology and phenomenology a little less fuzzy. Ideally, I'd want any description I gave of what it's like to identify a mental item as a purported memory to be consistent with several psychological theories about how memories are formed, stored, etc. The description itself is meant to be "bracketed" in the classical sense. Just examine the phenomena: here I am, here comes the mental item, here's me identifying it (seemingly instantly) as a purported memory. What has happened, or what have I caused to happen, to me? (Not so much "What has happened to cause this mental event?"). What must be the case about experience in order for me to do this?

Hence the suggestion of moving to temperature, which is less ambiguous. — Banno

Good. Should we say that temperature is (brute identity) molecular energy? Or better to say that temperature measures that energy? I don't know how a chemist would respond. As a philosopher, I'm slightly inclined to say that this is not a type of supervenience. But that raises a larger question -- what does the concept of "measure" involve? Is the measurement of a distance simply that distance, full stop? Something both right and wrong about that. After all, we can speak about a distance we haven't measured -- just not very precisely. And if this is a supervenience relationship, we'd need to specify what grounds what. I guess the (unmeasured) distance grounds the measurement of that distance, in that you can't have the latter without the former, but beyond that I'm not sure what to say. A measurement just doesn't seem like a feature or a property that can supervene . . . too "added-on" somehow.

Here's my hypothesis: When I'm saving a present event in my neuronal network, the stored event gets a timestamp and a "true event"-mark. — Quk

Maybe there are certain qualia that accompany such marks. — Quk

That's a good filling-out of my "feature" idea. I wish I could identify the qualia, though. The problem is that I know what I'm talking about when I refer to a "yellow quale" (controversial though this may be), but I really don't know what the "self-quale" is. Do you have any idea?

Thank you, very good article. I hope we can use it as a touchstone on TPF to ground discussions of positivistic metaphysics, as it's very fair. Looking at the six "enduring influences," at least two -- #1 and #5 -- seem like a good thing to me, on balance. That is, more likely to do good than harm, in their normal uses. My main gripe, personally, is with scientism. I love science, and hate to see it misunderstood in the way that scientism does.

The law of identity refers to the thing, not its parts. — Metaphysician Undercover

OK, but this again is assuming that what constitutes "thing" and "parts" is uncontroversial and obvious. Do you want to say that Jill is a different "thing" if a couple of the microbes in her biome die between T1 and T2? What would make such an interpretation of "thing" attractive? The point is that we have to interpret it, because nothing in "A = A" will tell us how to do it.

I haven't read the Malcolm essays. Does he suggest "supervenience" as another possible way of cashing out the notion of "identity"? Probably not, since I'm not sure the term was current at the time. But it's a good alternative to both "brute identity" and mere "correlation." On this view, heat would be the experience we humans (usually) have when coming into contact with the specified molecular activity. The heat experience depends on the molecular activity, it isn't only correlated with it. And it's also distinct, in that we can meaningfully talk about the molecular situation without having to claim that something is hot.

When Kripke talks about "the statement 'Heat is the motion of molecules'" and says, "First, science is supposed to have discovered this," I wonder how strictly he means this. Stipulating an identity is, I agree, not something science can do. My suggestion is that, in this case, philosophers shouldn't do it either, but instead opt for something like the more common-sensical "supervenience."

I don't think anyone here has denied that there are true sentences.

Certainly not I.

@J? — Banno

Yes, there are true sentences. They are true because we have a context in which they appear. I think what bothers some people is that "true in a context" is seen as some inferior species of being Truly True. It's hard, perhaps, to take on board the idea that context is what allows a sentence to be true at all. If a Truly True sentence is supposed to be one that is uttered without a context, I don't know what that would be.

I'm trying to decide if I have anything helpful to add here. I quite understand that if you think in terms of "theoretical reason (truth)," it's going to make a pluralist perspective hard to engage with. Do you see that the very question under consideration is whether theoretical reason is truth?

This may have no appeal for you, but I was quite pleased with the papers cited (by Chakravartty and Pincock) in the "Epistemic Stances . . . " thread. I thought those two philosophers did an excellent job making big issues clear within a smaller, manageable discussion. Would you be willing to read them, perhaps guided by some of the comments in the thread? At the very least, you'd see that the "either it's foundationally true or it's merely useful" binary is not the only stance available.

I apologize, but I just don't know how to make the larger case that these perspectives are worth understanding. As you know, I don't think the argumentative back-and-forth on such large questions does much good, since the problem is rarely one of bad argument. My preference has always been to adduce the pros and cons of a position by seeing how it works with an actual philosophical question -- such as whether there can be voluntary epistemic stances if you're a scientific realist.

This may be no consolation, but our difficulty finding common ground is helping me quite a bit in something I'm trying to write, concerning the persistence of fundamental disagreement as a characteristic of philosophy! I suspect we would each describe the reasons in this case quite differently, and that is part of (I shall argue) why it's so hard to overcome. Finding agreement about how to describe a disagreement is itself often elusive.

By the law of identity, "same" means having all the same properties, essential and accidental. — Metaphysician Undercover

(I stopped following this carefully, so if what I'm saying has already been addressed, please ignore)

About the "law of identity": You do realize you're begging the question of what the entity is that's supposed to be "the same"? If you understand "Jill" to refer to every single component and property of the person designated as Jill -- "all properties, essential and accidental" -- at the time of designation, T1, then yes, anything that isn't that "Jill" will not be "the same." But that isn't in any way a proof that there are no other ways to understand what "Jill" refers to. You can't say this is true "by the law of identity." And indeed, this extreme version -- molecule-to-molecule identity -- is most unlikely to be invoked in any ordinary discourse I can think of.

I think you've been seduced by the apparent simplicity of the Law of Identity (capitalized, to indicate its usual formulation) that says only "A = A" without any further indication of what can count as an A.
It's up to us; the so-called Law is neutral on the subject. The problem is that, depending on the context, what counts as an A in good standing will vary quite a bit. With persons, the variation is enormous, though as you know, I think Kripke got the right handle on it with his idea of what a proper name may be said to name.

On the one hand: Yes, the memory is independent of the prompt. But if I don't have the prompt, how will I access the memory? — BC

Yes, and even more concerning: if the prompt is a photograph, will I come to substitute the face that is pictured for my memory of the beloved's actual face?

Fortunately, the memory is of the imagining, not an actual kidnapping. — Patterner

I was moved by your story, and appreciate your telling it to us. Beyond that, you raise a point that is often overlooked about memory. What makes something memorable -- indeed, what is really the point or subject of the memory -- may be what we thought or felt about X, not X itself. In your case, the image of the blond-haired boy was quite unimportant, quite unmemorable. But you vividly recall the chain of imaginings and associations that came with that image, so it's become indelible. My guess is that, in some rough categorization of memories, you'd file this under "Time I had a horrible bout of fearful imagining" rather than "Time I saw a blond-haired boy in van."

for all the Americans, Happy Memorial Day! — Fire Ologist

I've known happier, but thank you. Our new Dear Leader is planning a YUGE military parade on his upcoming birthday, the largest for more than 40 years. That's the sort of memorial we're meant to celebrate now, God help us.

I think you'd see, rereading, that this isn't accurate.

How so? I'm genuinely confused here? What exactly would be your explanation of why relativism and pluralism re truth is wrong? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ah, I think I see the misunderstanding. You're using "pluralism" and "relativism" interchangeably and synonymously, where I'm drawing a distinction. Do you think I shouldn't do so? Pluralism, as I understand it, allows different epistemological perspectives, with different conceptions of what is true within those perspectives. It also encourages discussion between perspectives, including how conceptions of truth may or may not converge. Relativism (about truth) would deny even this perspectival account as incoherent. (A very broad-brush picture of a hugely complicated subject, of course.)

What is your own theory of memory recall or memory recognition? — Leontiskos

I don't think I have one. Certainly not a psychological one, as that's not my field. The phenomenological question I'm posing might lend itself to a theoretical underpinning, if given a convincing answer, but I can barely formulate the question sharply, much less answer it. Hence this helpful discussion.

If I go by memory alone, there were long stretches of time when I didn't shop for groceries, did not do laundry, and never swept the floor. There were no servants doing the work, so I must have. — BC

I'm fond of this conundrum too. Daniel Dennett, in "Are Dreams Experiences?", (tm70n6786.pdf) lays out the difference between four possible answers to the question "Do you remember whether X was there in the room?":

1. No.
2. I can't recall his being there.
3. I distinctly remember that he was not there.
4. I remember noticing at the time that he was not there.

I'm willing to say that the last two are memories, the first two are not. What do you think?

This is a great citation. I'd been looking at another Malcolm piece, in fact, the one about sleeping and dreaming, to see if I could find his overall position on memory, so thank you.

Many of Malcolm's (rhetorical?) questions pertain to my own worry that trying to find a "feature" of a memory that identifies it as such, is multiplying items unnecessarily. Yet, as @Fire Ologist points out, my OP question comes in at a slightly different angle than Malcolm. I'm happy to agree with most of what Malcolm wants to say about the brute-factness of how memories allow us to do the things we do. But:

[J is] just looking at what something like “connections between past experience and our memory responses“ really means, or how that “brute fact” phenomenological moment of recalling a memory might be better understood. — Fire Ologist

I would amend that slightly to say "'brute fact' phenomenological moment of experiencing a mental event that I identify as a memory." I'm trying to slow down and re-examine my own experience of "having a memory" to see if there is some moment of perception or recognition that it is, purportedly, a memory. I think Malcolm would say that there is not, don't you?

So:

The memory theorist makes a useless movement. He invents a memory process to fill what he thinks is an explanatory gap; but his own explanation creates its own explanatory gap." — Richard B

My "gap" is a different one. Malcolm's analysis assumes that the remembering subject is already in a position to know the content of his mental experience -- that is, an allegedly veridical moment of past personal experience -- whereas I'm asking how this happens in the first place. If I could converse with Malcolm, I think I'd start by trying to see just what he conceived a memory to be, and whether I was using the word the same way. That might show why our "spades turn" at different points.

Yes, welcome to Wittgenstein's therapy and watch your philosophical problems dissolve away. — Richard B

Indeed! If only. And the therapy can work, on certain puzzles. I'm not yet sure this is one of them.

Like a spider's web, if you pull on one thread the whole thing starts to move, because it is a part of an integrated whole. We know what it's like to pull on that sort of thing as opposed to pulling on the silk thread of a larvae. It's different. — Leontiskos

Yes. My only objection here would be to ask whether this happens fast enough to constitute the complete explanation of recognizing a memory. But as @T Clark and I were discussing, this stuff can happen very quickly beneath conscious awareness.

If you see two photographs of two different Christmas parties, and you are not allowed to survey anything other than the two photographs, then it will not be possible to determine whether you were at one of the parties. Only if you are allowed to contextually inform the photographs will you be able to recognize one or both. — Leontiskos

I think I agree with this, but let me clarify: "not allowed to survey anything [else]" means you could look at the photographs but, per impossibile, not allow any associations to form in your mind? And "contextually inform" means respond as we normally do, with a fully functioning mind? If so, then yes, this seems right.

When you recall something, you are consciously trying NOT to imagine, but trying to find what was already the case. You purposely want to be stuck with what you recall and can’t change, — Fire Ologist

This is a different aspect of the memory question, but worth dwelling on, because it suggests to me the "pastness" that @fdrake mentioned. What is past cannot be changed, at least not under the same description -- could this somehow be reflected or captured in the experience of a memory? When I identify X as a memory, am I identifying something about X that is necessarily past, in the sense of unchangeable? Whereas with an imagining or an image, I don't "see" the same intransigence. I dunno . . . I'm still concerned that I'm inventing "features" in a somewhat ad hoc manner.

the tradition is what gives context for understanding why a philosopher is responding how they are and whom, — Moliere

Yes, I greatly appreciated this aspect of his thought -- which he shared with its other leading exponent, Gadamer, and much interesting work has been done comparing the two.

I'm assuming there is some misunderstanding here — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure. I wonder whether you'd be willing to look back over my post and notice the different uses of "relativism" and "pluralism," and the ways in which I tried not to make blanket assertions about things like "the whole of logic, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and the philosophy of nature."

Just as a for-instance:

to the question of where relativism applies you say that this itself is subject to relativism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think you'd see, rereading, that this isn't accurate. Here's the exchange:

Is "which truths are pluralistic, context-dependent truths?" a question for which the answers are themselves "pluralistic, context-dependent truths?"
— Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, generally. — J

I think it's worth noting that this is a very specialized question, at least if what I say ↪here is correct (namely that "memories don't generally arrive unannounced" and unelicited). — Leontiskos

Yes, it's hard to know what is typical here. Perhaps I'm given to daydreaming! For whatever reason, the "unannounced or contextless memory" phenomenon is common for me, which is probably why I got curious in the first place about how we recognize a memory.

Well, to continue with the "strand in a spider's web" metaphor, I think it is recognizable. I think a strand-within-a-web is recognized as different from a strand-without-a-web. — Leontiskos

Or another metaphor: Let's say a memory is situated within its causal nexus in the same way as a rock that has been thrown. There it sits, on the ground, having been thrown. Another rock, nearby, is so situated as a result of having been excavated around. So, different causal stories and contexts, but we couldn't tell which was the case just by looking at the rock, or at least not readily. That's the question I was raising -- would the memory (rock #1) still be recognized as a memory if the only thing that differentiated it from an image (rock #2) was its causal context?

Not sure which of these metaphors is more like how it is with memories, especially the unbidden variety . . .

Is "which truths are pluralistic, context-dependent truths?" a question for which the answers are themselves "pluralistic, context-dependent truths?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, generally.

A "mistake." Are you saying it would be wrong to affirm this? Curious. Would this be another of those "non-serious" philosophies that we can dismiss? — Count Timothy von Icarus

You seem to have me confused with someone else. :smile: I am not a relativist about truth or, in most contexts, values. I do, however, believe that relativism can't be dismissed by pointing to the standard problems of self-reference. Nor do I think that acknowledging "pluralistic, context-dependent truths" makes someone a relativist. Anyway, being doubtful about "real" isn't at all the same as being doubtful about "true," at least not for me.

would truths about which philosophies are "wrong," "mistakes," or "unserious" be "pluralistic, context-dependent truths?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

Of course, so much so that I'd hesitate to talk about "truths" here at all. Or maybe I don't understand what a non-context-dependent truth about a philosophy would be.

Second, what separates a pluralism that sees assertions of non-pluralism as mistakes from the "crude pluralism" discussed earlier? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not sure I understand this. Are you referring back to a characterization I gave of "crude relativism"?

@Count Timothy von Icarus often has interesting things to say about him.

Lively and interesting replies, thanks! A few general responses:

This is one of those questions -- as so often with phenomenology -- that sits on the borderline with psychology. Much of what everyone has written about the brain, about memory processing, about the quickness of interpretation, etc., is undoubtedly true. And where there are aspects we don't understand, that too may be a matter for scientific research, not philosophy.

I think we can still isolate the phenomenological question. I'm asking about the experience of having a memory come to mind. (To keep it manageable, let's say it's an unbidden mental performance that comes up at random, as I go through the day.) It appears to be the case that we can usually identify this mental item as a (purported) memory. My question is, how? By virtue of what aspect of the experience itself? I think my question rules out causal explanations of how memories are formed, though I'm not sure -- unless that causal explanation leaves some experiential imprint on the mental item (as some of you are suggesting?). It may also rule out contextual explanations, such as:

Memories are contextually situated, probably within a causal nexus, and this is what differentiates them from a mere mental image. — Leontiskos

This is probably true, but is the kind of differentiation such that it would be recognizable in experience? I'd like to see more discussion of this.

The gaps in what I'm not paying attention to are literally blank when imagining something; they don't come with a sense of "forgetting" - they come with a sense of "filling in". — Dawnstorm

This is particularly interesting, and seems to fit a phenomenological account of the difference between remembering and imagining. I'm fascinated, and rather appalled, by what it must be like to be an aphantasiac. Is it a bit like being asked to translate something into a language you don't speak?

Maybe I can sum this up by saying there is nothing creative about a memory.

Whereas when we imagine, we manipulate mental images much like memories, but not by recalling but by some creative function. — Fire Ologist

I'm going to think more about this, and the rest of your post. Lots there.