Against overconfidence: arguing for the accessibility of memorial justification

Abstract

In this article, I argue that access internalism should replace preservationism, which has been called "a received view" in the epistemology of memory, as the standard position about memorial justification. My strategy for doing so is two-pronged. First, I argue that the considerations which motivate preservationism also support access internalism. Preservationism is mainly motivated by its ability to answer the explanatory challenges posed by the problem of stored belief and the problem of forgotten evidence. However, as I will demonstrate, access internalism also has the resources to provide plausible solutions to those problems. Second, I argue that preservationism faces a couple of problems which access internalism avoids. Doing so, I present a new scenario which, on the one hand, functions as a counterexample to preservationism, and, on the other hand, provides intuitive support for access internalism. Moreover, I also demonstrate how preservationism, in light of recent research in cognitive psychology, is vulnerable to skepticism about memorial justification, whereas access internalism remains unthreatened. Keywords Memory • Memorial justification • Access internalism • Reliabilism • Preservationism 1 Memorial justification Many, if not most, of our beliefs are justified by memory. Consider your belief (whether occurrent or dispositional) that Mercury is the smallest planet in our solar system, that Fermat's Last Theorem has been proved to be true, or that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo.

Dispensing with experiential acquaintance

“…The feeling of certainty (or, indubitability) about them does not derive from understanding 13 An anonymous reviewer asks about the relation between my treatment of acquaintance and accessibilism. To the extent that accessibilism concerns access to our evidence for a proposition (as in Smithies, 2019) or involves memory (as in Egeland, 2021) we should say that the arguments for accessibilism do not apply to internalists' foundational propositions, which are not supposed to be based on evidence or memory. We can, of course, ask the question whether we are in a position to know that we have epistemic justification for foundational propositions.…”