Liyu Zhang

This paper develops a radical enactive account of memory errors. We first outline the radical enactive approach to memory, which rejects explaining remembering as a way of representing the past, and formulate three necessary conditions for successful remembering. We then identify five potential candidates of memory errors that any comprehensive theory must address: misremembering, false confabulation, veridical confabulation, the lost in the mall case and relearning. Using this framework, we classify various memory errors based on which conditions they satisfy or fail to satisfy. Our analysis shows that the radical enactive account can accommodate acknowledged memory errors (misremembering, false confabulation and veridical confabulation) while providing new insights into controversial cases: the implanted memory and relearning. We argue that the implanted memory cases should be classified as false confabulation and suggest that relearning should not be considered a distinct type of memory error but rather encompasses various possibilities depending on which conditions are met, ranging from successful remembering and misremembering to different types of confabulations. Additionally, our formulation makes room for logically possible cases: experience-involved confabulation, coincidental confabulation, non-experiential accurate memory error and non-experiential inaccurate memory error.