MEMOBJECT · Objectual Memory: Remembering Objects by Simulating the Past
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2021-09-27 → 2024-07-31
- EU contribution
- €184,708
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Objectual Memory: Remembering Objects by Simulating the Past
The project identifies and corrects for a systematic oversight in the theoretical literature on declarative (or person-level) memory. The influential distinction between episodic and semantic memory *systems*, and the informal characterisation of those systems as concerned with events and facts, respectively, has led to many theorists and philosophers to be concerned only with conscious/experiential remembering where it involves the representation of an *event* in the subject’s personal past. However, underlying systems and the memory phenomena to be explained are not related one-one. In particular, systems interact to produce a diversity of outputs with various characteristics. Instances of remembering may result from the activity of both episodic and semantic systems, and when they do they may not be about specific events, accompanied with the phenomenology of ‘reliving’ an episode, and involving imagery as of a particular scene with a point of view. The Core Hypothesis of MEMOBJECT was that many phenomena of memory to be explained cannot be related straightforwardly to the activity of one memory system. In particular, what I called objectual memory requires a more nuanced account and raises new philosophical issues which must be addressed if we are to have a full picture of memory. The project’s work is therefore important for aspects of society which depend on our understanding of memory, its implications on personal identity, the self, and moral responsibility, and also overlooked ways in which memory as a faculty may break down in ageing or dysfunctions such as Capgras delusion (which would appear to involve peculiar deficits objectual memory). The overarching objectives of the project were to (i) provide a framework for understanding objectual memory and its distinction from other forms/outputs of memory; (ii) consider the implications of this issue for causalist versus simulationist approaches to remembering more generally; (iii) argue that the nature of memory experience in cases of objectual memory is compatible with relationist theories of awareness.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Much attention in our theorizing about the mind has been devoted to episodic memory. In episodic memory, a subject remembers an event from their personal past in a way accompanied by conscious imagery, typically from the first-person perspective, through which they 're-live' the experience. Other species of memory are no less significant to our mental lives, however. We remember objectsfor example, one's first car, or one's childhood family dogand we do so in ways which may outstrip our memory of events in which those objects featured. It is possible, for example, to remember a face while having no sense of where in one's past one's memory of it derives. While we presently lack a philosophical account distinctive of what I will call 'objectual memory', the raw materials are there for the taking. This project will use state of the art, 'simulationist' approaches to memory in order to address this lacuna, establishing the following core hypothesis: Objectual memory is not a mere form of episodic or semantic memory (Work Package 1). We can best understand it, in harmony with broadly simulationist approaches to remembering, as a kind of epistemically informed imagination (Work Package 2). Though broadly simulationist in character, this view is compatible with experiences of objectual memory constituting a direct relation to the past (Work Package 3). This project has immediate implications for philosophy of mind and epistemology, but it also generates questions for the sciences. If objectual memory is to be considered a product of the so-called 'episodic' memory system, it is misleading to think of this system as a means of constructing temporally structured episodes from ones past. For the system also produces occasions for the awareness of past objectsthings which lack an essentially temporal structure. Alternatively, if the episodic memory system is confined to the awareness of events, objectual memory must be the product of another system.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITE GRENOBLE ALPES · GrenobleCoordinatorFrance
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union