Abstract
What fixes the referents of episodic memories? While developed theories are lacking, it is generally assumed that the causal production of a memory, via memory traces, determines its referent. Recently, it has been pointed out that the “promiscuity” of memory traces poses a problem for this approach. Proposed solutions focus on finding some nonpromiscuous causal link. In this paper, I refine the problem posed by promiscuous memory traces and show that these solutions fail. By developing the question of mnemonic episodic reference within the framework of informational signs, I argue that no pure “producer-side” theory of reference will work. The only solution, I argue, is to abandon pure producer-side theories for theories which appeal to consumer-side factors, i.e., factors concerning how referring signs are used. Once it is admitted that mnemonic episodic reference depends on consumer-side factors, the natural question is whether producer-side factors (i.e., causal production) play any role at all in mnemonic episodic reference. I conclude by outlining two possible pure consumer-side theories for mnemonic episodic reference, one based on the work of Imogen Dickie and one based on the work of Ruth Millikan. Both theories explain how the referents of episodic memories are fixed without any appeal to a causal link, and, hence, are compatible with “post-causal” theories of memory, like simulationism.
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Notes
I will use the term “memory” to refer to mental states tokened when recalling, i.e., remembering, an event, and not to refer to any latent storage of past information, e.g., a memory trace. Presumably the same memory can be tokened on different occasions, albeit with changes due to information addition and loss.
The relevant description perhaps includes not just what’s described explicitly, but also descriptive content implied by context, or associated in my mind with the linguistic description.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting this approach.
I do not intend the above as a knock-down refutation of a description theory of mnemonic episodic reference. It’s just meant to point out that a description theory is not an obvious choice. For a recent critique of description theories of reference for public language terms, see Gómez-Torrente (2019).
Andonovski (2020) turns these worries about promiscuity, along with other lines of attack, into an argument against the very idea, presupposed by this paper, that episodic memories are referentially singular, i.e., refer to particular past-perceived events.
Raatikainen (2020) provides a broad discussion of challenges to the causal theory of reference and the debate between it and the description theory.
Both the notion of a sign and the notion of information have been the subject of rich theoretical development, including by the aforementioned philosophers and continuing today (e.g., Fresco et al., 2020). In my explication here, I aim to be precise about what I mean, without any pretension that I’m giving a complete account of either signs or information which fully engages with all the concerns in this theoretical literature. Further, I do not want to commit to the full details of any one view from this literature, as such a commitment would both take substantive space to explain and defend, and entangle me in debates not obviously relevant to the purpose at hand. In addition, these views don’t generally engage with the concerns of a causal theory of reference, a concern which requires articulating, as I do here, the distinct notion of a signal stream.
This resistance to regimentation is a problem for causal theories of reference, but not for my aims here. I believe that this resistance hints at deeper conceptual issues to such theories and is just more reason to adopt alternatives, such as the consumer-side theories discussed in Sect. 5.
Evans seems to hold this view, too. He’s not explicit about it. However, when he talks about memory as part of an information channel (e.g., Evans, 1982, p. 267), he talks about it as a mechanism for “retaining” information.
This point must be stated carefully. As I’ll discuss in Sect. 3, contemporary causal theorists of all types often accept that memory is constructive. That is, they accept that, on retrieval, a trace can be combined with other sources of information (not causally originating in the same event) to form a memory, and that information can be lost within a trace over time.
Both Robins and Langland-Hassan point out that very new memories won’t face this problem. For example, the first time you go to a party serving wine will form a new connection, party–wine, which will be unique to this event. However, this connection will become promiscuous as soon as you go to a second party with wine, leading to “forgetting through repetition”. Still, even here, the memory will involve some promiscuous trace, unless everything about the event is novel.
Thanks for an anonymous referee for pressing this issue.
Shea (2018) questions whether neural circuitry can be divided cleanly into distinct producer and consumer systems and memory circuits might be a good example case, but a clean division of the systems themselves isn’t crucial for my points.
The basic idea that hippocampal traces interact with traces in neocortex to facilitate the construction of episodic memories is standard in theories of memory traces (Sekeres et al., 2018). What sets CRISP apart is in holding that hippocampal traces are stable and persistent, instead of merely being transient and faciliating consolidation of stable traces in neocortex.
For example, this forking could happen right at the memory itself. The memory might be produced from a single retained, nonpromiscuous episodic trace, but still involve a stream fork if additional information from generic or semantic memory traces is added in the retrieval of the memory.
The name “unicept” is a play on the term “concept”. Millikan thinks concepts, as traditionally understand, wrongly subsume the distinct functions of unitrackers and unicepts. So, unicepts are like traditional concepts, minus the recognitional capacities.
Evans (1982, p. 125) himself suggests an epistemic theory, but elsewhere clearly seems to intend signal stream traceback to play a role in fixing reference, thereby making his view a hybrid theory. He has further constraints on reference, namely, the constraint that the mode of identification used must successfully pick out the stream target, thereby allowing the subject to know which thing they are thinking about (Evans, 1982, p. 139). Dickie (2015) has developed a well-known version of the epistemic approach in terms of reliability, while Recanati (2012) has developed a broader epistemic formulation, with hybrid elements, in terms of “epistemically rewarding” relations and dominant causal sources of information.
The obvious difference is that these streams go back to multiple events, and that some of them do not go back to the tracked event at all. However, the basic idea of tracking a single event through multiple streams remains.
An anonymous referee suggests that, in this case, it seems I’d be even more unlucky if some other events, the true distal causal antecedents of my traces, did not match my memory. Thus, wouldn’t those end up being the true referent of my memory, on this theory? I think this objection is a second form of pessimism for the epistemic approach, although it’s not obviously fatal. If I use a wide range of traces, each with a wide range of distal causal antecedents, to reconstruct my crash, the way I intermix these traces to reconstruct the crash may make it very unlikely that the resulting memory matches any of those distal causal antecedents any better than the crash.
Some have argued against the view that the circuits responsible for episodic memory function to reconstruct specific past-perceived events. For example, Schechtman (1994) argues that they function to produce coherent autobiographical narratives, while De Brigard (2014) argues that their true value is more broadly in how they enable hypothetical thinking.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting this approach.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to James Openshaw for extensive comments and discussion. Thanks also to the participants of the Bochum-Grenoble Memory Colloquium (April 12, 2022) and the Centre for Philosophy of Memory’s internal seminar (July 25, 2022), at which early versions of this material were presented. The two referees from this journal also provided helpful feedback which substantially improved the quality of the paper and pushed it in very productive directions.
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Barkasi, M. Consumer-side reference through promiscuous memory traces. Synthese 203, 86 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04509-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04509-y