Question Do you need an earlier perception to have a memory of something?

Accepted:
July 5, 2012

Comments

Perhaps one might well claim that one has to have some prior experience ("experience" being broader than "perception") in order to have memory. One might remember prior thoughts, abstract propositions or a sensation rather than a full perception. Memory seems (by definition) to be about the past (I cannot remember the future, though I can remember that I believe or know that something will occur in the future) and so if there is no experience in the past to recall, it is hard to see how one might have any memory at all. In this sense, memory appears to be a dependent cognitive power --it depends on the exercise of other cognitive powers. I suppose someone might claim that they remember remembering, but this begs us to ask the question: remember remembering what?

While that is my proposal (one needs prior experience in order for memory to function), the issues can be stretched a bit... Imagine God or some super-scientist made a creature (Skippy) on Monday at noon full of ostensible memories of a past that Skippy had no part it. So, imagine Skippy recalls getting her Ph.D. at Brown, the rocky divorce and the happy re-marriage that followed, and yet Skippy did not do any of these things. While this might seem to be a case of memory without earlier experiences, I suspect we would classify these as only apparent or ostensible (or even false) memories and not cases of authentic memory.

Question Do you need an earlier perception to have a memory of something? Accepted:July 5, 2012

Question Do you need an earlier perception to have a memory of something?

Accepted:
July 5, 2012