James Openshaw

Recollections of our personal past are often impressionistic, not so much for lack of detail but for a certain generality of subject matter. If you’ve made a journey many times, you may ‘relive’ it through memory without reliving any specific occasion. I offer an account of this phenomenon—often labelled ‘general event memory’—that treats it as fundamentally semantic. It is, at least across many instances, the construction of an event representation that is temporally imprecise in virtue of referential indeterminacy. I present an account of indeterminacy for memory, one that allows us to explain generalised remembering while preserving its particularity, its past-directedness, and the possibility of unmediated recollective awareness. It also affords a formal account of accuracy conditions. Finally, it captures psychological continuities between generalised and event-specific recollection. I motivate the account in part by showing that even systems-oriented approaches (namely, those positing an episodic system specialised in encoding event-specific details) cannot shelve generalised remembering as an afterthought. It is one face of the very phenomenon—remembering—we have long tried to explain.

La filosofía de la memoria ha crecido rápida y significativamente en la última década. En este comentario, nos basamos en observaciones críticas que hemos articulado individualmente en trabajos previos para sugerir que la investigación futura en el área se beneficiaría de (i) hacer más explícitas las diferencias entre los proyectos teóricos, revelando diversas suposiciones y compromisos metodológicos, y de (ii) identificar dónde los desacuerdos a este nivel han sido erróneamente tomados como disputas unívocas y de primer orden sobre “la naturaleza del recuerdo”. Ampliar la perspectiva en esta etapa de la filosofía de la memoria nos dará una idea más clara de dónde estamos, cuánto hemos avanzado y hacia dónde deberíamos dirigirnos.

What is involved in having a singular thought about an ordinary object? On the leading epistemic view, one has this capacity if and only if one has belief-forming dispositions which would reliably enable one to get its properties right (Dickie, 2015). I first argue that Dickie’s official view entails surprising and unpalatable claims about either rationality or singular thought, before offering a precisification. Once we have reached that level of abstraction, it becomes difficult to see what is distinctively epistemic about the framework. If we are to tease out the delicate connection between singular thought and knowledge, we should suspend the assumption that there is a homogeneous core, present in all cases of such thought, and that it is from there that its (univocal) epistemic character derives.