Our Faithfulness to the Past: Reconstructing Memory Value

Abstract

The reconstructive turn in memory theory challenges us to provide an account of successful remembering that is attentive to the ways in which we use memory, both individually and socially. I investigate conceptualizations of accuracy and integrity useful to memory theorists and argue that faithful recollection is often a complex epistemological/ethical achievement.

Keywords:

• Memory
• Reconstructive Memory
• Accuracy
• Integrity

Acknowledgements

Versions of this paper were presented at “Workshops on Memory, Mind, and Media,” Sydney, 2004, and to philosophy departments at the University of San Francisco, Syracuse University, and Dalhousie University. I thank all these audiences for their challenging comments. I am particularly grateful to Linda Martín Alcoff, Richmond Campbell, Michael Hymers, Rockney Jacobsen, Lenore Kuo, Ishani Maitra, Doris McIlwain, Letitia Meynell, Jan Sutherland, John Sutton, Jacqueline Taylor, Shirley Tillotson, and Michael Torre. I am also indebted to an anonymous referee for very helpful suggestions, and to Thane Plantikow for research assistance.

Notes

Notes

[1] I make this as an obvious observation about memory akin to Bernard Williams’ observation in Truth and Truthfulness (2002) that the ability to pool information is important to almost any human endeavor. My account of faithful memory is similar to Williams’ account of the virtues of truthfulness, in that it relies on observations about human capacities and interdependencies, which observations I offer as uncontentious, and on discussions of our practices. While naturalistic, it is not an argument in evolutionary psychology.

[2] Sharing memory with others is a fundamental way of developing relationships with them, and the ubiquity of this activity needs to be credited in accounts of recollection. See Campbell (1994), Middleton and Edwards (1990a,b).

[3] The shift towards reconstructive models of memory is interdisciplinary in scope. My summary of these models draws primarily on Campbell (2003, 2004), Haaken (1998), Hacking (1995), Loftus and Ketcham (1994), Neisser (1982), Schacter (1996), Schechtman (1994), and Sutton (1998, 2004). Reconstructive theorists often describe themselves as having replaced the archival model of memory with a reconstructive model. I have argued that a description in terms of models of mind oversimplifies the ways in which both archival and reconstructive activities are involved in people's recollective activities (Campbell, 2004). In the present paper I simply want to allow that as much of our remembering does involve reconstructive activity, we need norms for successful memory that takes this activity into account. For an excellent account of the reconstructive turn, directed at non-specialists, see Schacter (1996). For an important study that traces disputes about archival and reconstructive models back into early modern philosophy of memory, see Sutton (1998).

[4] Morton does not sharply distinguish the two dimensions of accuracy in his text, so I should be taken as offering a particular reading of his account.

[5] Neisser (1982, p. 141) notes that Dean's memories were considered accurate, even when the transcripts of the original conversations became available. No attempt was made in subsequent Watergate trials to discredit Dean's testimony.

[6] For influential contemporary examples of this approach, see Rorty (1980), De Sousa (1987), Greenspan (1988), and Calhoun (2003). De Sousa identifies Descartes’ theory of the passions as an early version of this approach.

[7] The assumption that reconstructive memory is the same thing as suggestible and unreliable memory is problematically evident in recent legal writings and decisions concerning women's reports of sexual harm. For example, in The Prosecutor v. Anto Furundzija, “the first war crimes prosecution in which rape and sexual assault was the single charge” (Charlesworth & Chinkin, 2000, p. 322), the Defense charged several reasons that Witness A's memory was unreliable, including that “her recall of events and identification were reconstructions for postwar political activists and investigators” (Campbell, 2002, p. 162). Noting that memory is reconstructive is offered here, as in many cases, as sufficient reason that it should be judged unreliable.

[8] The ways in which these virtues are taken to inform each other in recollection is evident in our critical vocabulary for memory. To criticize recollection as suggestible, nostalgic, mythic, or as exhibiting historical amnesia is to call into question both the accuracy and integrity of that memory. For an interesting account of mythic memory, see Sarat (2002).

[9] For a complex and intelligent set of reflections on the relations among individual and social memory, history, and moral responsibility, see Poole (2004).