Aristotle on Memory

Sorabji, Richard

doi:10.5040/9781472598110

Cited by 185 publications

(25 citation statements)

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“…However, at this stage, discussion was mostly incidental to debates concerning ‘more weighty’ matters, such as the nature of reality and the soul . The first systematic treatment of memory, per se , traces to Aristotle's De memoria …”

Section: Memory: a Present Mental State Felt As Pastmentioning

confidence: 99%

What memory is

Klein

2014

WIRES Cognitive Science

110

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I argue that our current practice of ascribing the term 'memory' to mental states and processes lacks epistemic warrant. Memory, according to the 'received view', is any state or process that results from the sequential stages of encoding, storage, and retrieval. By these criteria, memory, or its footprint, can be seen in virtually every mental state we are capable of having. This, I argue, stretches the term to the breaking point. I draw on phenomenological, historical, and conceptual considerations to make the case that an act of memory entails a direct, non-inferential feeling of reacquaintance with one's past. It does so by linking content retrieved from storage with autonoetic awareness during retrieval. On this view, memory is not the content of experience, but the manner in which that content is experienced. I discuss some theoretical and practical implications and advantages of adopting this more circumscribed view of memory.

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Section: Memory: a Present Mental State Felt As Pastmentioning

confidence: 99%

What memory is

Klein

2014

WIRES Cognitive Science

110

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“…In his Theogony, Hesiod contends that the ability to transcend objective time is made possible by the faculty of human memory. An opposing view, voiced by Aristotle (384–322 BC) in his classic study of memory, De Memoria, makes it clear that ‘the object of memory is the past’ (cited in Ref 17, p. 13). The future, by contrast, is not known by memory but rather by acts of anticipation.…”

Section: Review Of Research On Fmttmentioning

confidence: 99%

The complex act of projecting oneself into the future

Klein

2012

WIRES Cognitive Science

122

152

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Research on future-oriented mental time travel (FMTT) is highly active yet somewhat unruly. I believe this is due, in large part, to the complexity of both the tasks used to test FMTT and the concepts involved. Extraordinary care is a necessity when grappling with such complex and perplexing metaphysical constructs as self and time and their co-instantiation in memory. In this review, I first discuss the relation between future mental time travel and types of memory (episodic and semantic). I then examine the nature of both the types of self-knowledge assumed to be projected into the future and the types of temporalities that constitute projective temporal experience. Finally, I argue that a person lacking episodic memory should nonetheless be able to imagine a personal future by virtue of (1) the fact that semantic, as well as episodic, memory can be self-referential, (2) autonoetic awareness is not a prerequisite for FMTT, and (3) semantic memory does, in fact, enable certain forms of personally oriented FMTT.

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“…An additional implication of this work is that it questions the validity of associationist accounts of episodic memory. Associationism has a long and venerable history in psychology, being prominent in Artistotle's accounts of learning and memory (see Sorabji, 2004), an integral part of the empiricist philosophies of Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Hartley and others (see Hearnshaw, 1987), and arguably a central feature of modern connectionist models of cognition (see, for example, Rumelhart & McClelland, 1987;Elman et al, 1996;McClelland et al, 2010). An associationist account of episodic memory, roughly speaking, posits that observed stimuli activate representations, which in turn activate associated representations through a process of spreading activation (see, for example, Anderson, 1983;Neely, 1977), and the eventual distribution of activation is the memory representation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Bayesian Account of Memory for Text

Andrews¹

2019

Preprint

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The study of memory for texts has had an long tradition of research in psychology. According to most general accounts, the recognition or recall of items in a text is based on querying a memory representation that is built up on the basis of background knowledge. The objective of this paper is to describe and thoroughly test a Bayesian model of these general accounts. In particular, we present a model that describes how we use our background knowledge to form memories in terms of Bayesian inference of statistical patterns in the text, followed by posterior predictive inference of the words that are typical of those inferred patterns. This provides us with precise predictions about which words will be remembered, whether veridically or erroneously, from any given text. We tested these predictions using behavioural data from a memory experiment using a large sample of randomly chosen texts from a representative corpus of British English. The results show that the probability of remembering any given word in the text, whether falsely or veridically, is well predicted by the Bayesian model. Moreover, compared to nontrivial alternative models of text memory, by every measure used in the analyses, the predictions of the Bayesian model were superior, often overwhelmingly so. We conclude that these results provide strong evidence in favour of the Bayesian account of text memory that we have presented in this paper.

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Aristotle on Memory

Cited by 185 publications

References 0 publications

What memory is

What memory is

The complex act of projecting oneself into the future

A Bayesian Account of Memory for Text

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