H. P. Grice remembers that he loves B. S. Benjamin

Nothing is so uniquely personal to a man as his memories. Our inner lives revolve around their contemplation, and in guarding their privacy we seem almost to be protecting the very basiB of our personalities. Most of our remembering is done in private and though we speak of sharing our memories with others there seems to be a sense in which we could no more share a memory than we could share a para , the best that we can do is to try to describe it Yet unlike pains and aches, feelings of anger or of amusement, there are no natural and public signs of memories. We do not have to learn how to keep our recollections private as we have to learn to suppress feelings of amusement, boredom and discomfort. To the prefatory expression “ I remember ” there seems to attach the aura of a voluntary disclosure about oneself. It would seem, then, natural and indeed essential to construe the concept of remembering upon the model of an avowal about one’s state of mind, about one’s inner and in- accessible experiences It is indeed traditional to approach the concept of remembering as though it has this kind of logic ; in this paper I shall argue that such an approach is radically at fault. Although it is not my purpose either to examine particular theories of memory as they bear upon the problem, or to do justice to the literature in the field by subjecting it to detailed criticism, I shall attempt to mention what seem to me to he typical and mistaken moves made in analysing the concept And I E J la ^U 3e Sbi by considering Hume’s analysis as it is presented in the xieatise, because not only does it present in its purest form a thesis which I wish to attack, but it has exerted a powerful influence upon subsequent analyses of remembering. According to Hume, to remember something is to have a special kmd of mental experience in the form of a mental image different from any other kmd of image or idea. In part, of course, he was led to talk of * an idea of the memory ’ hy his .? cu , ^ psychology, hut it is important to notice that although facult 7 psychology are over we still feel compelled to me “ or y 111 a not very dissimilar way. Although anc * neurologists still know practically nothing ..bout the brain mechanism » which enables us to recall past experiences and previously acquired skills, it seems natural tothink of the memory as a unitary function of some sort, and from this it is easy to conclude that our memories, bemg the products of a single process, must m some way be stamped with the sign of then manufacture. This is one feature of the problem which suggests that the task set to any philosophical theory of memory is to detect those characteristics of the mental experience of remembering that will serve to isolate and define it. There is another puzzle which leads one in the same direction How do we know that certain of our images and thoughts are images of, and thoughts about, the past ? How do we know, if we are trying to remember say the look of a town, that none of the images we can summon are right, that none of them are memory images, and then, suddenly, that this one is a memory image ? Hume’s general concept of the mi nd as an entity which can perceive only its own thoughts, inevitably suggested an answer to these questions, which also did justice to the solution suggested by a faculty psychology For if one holds that a second order perception is involved in all thinking, it is natural to apply to this second order perceiving an analysis that is obvious and seems perfectly adequate to account for certain features of first order perception The commonplace that one defines words referring to physical objects by attempting to isolate those features of a physical object that are necessary and unique to it was applied by Hume to the “ objects ” of second order perception The impressions of sense, the ideas of memory and the ideas of imagination differ from each other, he said, with respect to their strength and vivacity, hence perception (first order), remembering and imagining may be defined in terms of relative strength and vivacity. Ryle mentions the absurdities involved in the classical theory of second order perception, but it is worth pointing out here that the difficulties involved m talking of perceiving an impression of sense (or a sense datum) are not by any means so obviously involved m ta lking about perceiving one’s mental image. Most students, when they first read Hume, are struck by the strangeness of his suggesting that the impressions of sense differ from the images of memory only m degree, in a way that they do not think it strange to suggest that the images of memory and those of imagination might so differ This is not surprising, for although no one has quite been able to describe how one should set about obeying a request to attend to one’s impression of sense or sense datum of an object, as distmct from looking at the object itself, everyone knows how to attend to a mental image of an object In ordinary discourse we use the verbs of perception in this second order sense quite naturally, as when we speak of hearing the tune we heard last night or of seeing the accident as clearly as if it were occurring in front of one’s eyes, and only a philosopher would feel obliged to supply inverted commas for the verbs in this use Furthermore, not only can one describe the contents of an image but one can also discriminate between and report upon properties of the image as a whole ; for example, upon its comparative vividness, intensity, blurriness, definition, and so on. I conclude, then, that when Hume suggested that the images of memory and those of imagination difier intrinsically in respect of their relative strength and vivacity, he was not making a suggestion that is difficult to understand and implausible in the way that Ins similar remarks about the impressions of sense are It is generally agreed, however, that the characteristics of strength and vivacity of an image fail to mark off unambiguously our rememberings from our imaginings. For quite often the images of our imaginings and fantasies are very much more vivacious and vivid than are many of our memory images. Usually this standard criticism of Hume’s theory is made with the suggestion, explicit or implied, that if only we were sufficiently attentive and ingenious we could discern what combination of characteristics invariably attend our rememberings and are absent when we are imagining A number have been suggested, eg. that our rememberings are accompanied by a feeling of famibarity, that this feeling makes us apply the concept of pastness to the image, and so on, though I think it is rarely suggested that such characteristics provide the criteria of remembering as Hume maintained his did. The trouble witb tbis criticism is that it fails to expose tbe real nature of Hume’s failures and m fact it simply encourages speculations which must prove equally inadequate Hume’s theory of remembering is the purest example of what I might call the mental datum theory : that to remember is to have a certain sort of mental datum or experience, and to tell others what one remembers is to inform them of the details of tins datum (usually thought to be an image). So far in this paper I nave been chiefly concerned to point out considerations which make this a natural theory to put forward. I wish now to show rt i 8 an “ n P oss ft , le thesis to maintain in any f or m.. I I ^ person statement that asserts an inner experience UJce the possession of an image, a certain sort of feeling or sensa- tion^ can be corrected by a third person. It must be accepted as e or rejected as a he ; it cannot be shown to be mistaken. If I say that I Lave a vivid image of a tree before me, my bearers can, in principle, disbelieve me on the grounds that I am lying, though it is very difficult to imagine what such grounds might be. But it would make no sense to accuse me of being mistaken about the matter. The concept of mistake only applies to cases where it is both theoretically possible to obtain independent evidence on the matter and to explain how the mistake arose. There is no way at present known of obtaining evidence independent of a man’s word as to whether or not he has a mental image of the sort he claims to have. It is sometimes suggested, indeed, that avowals of one’s state of mind or body are m principle incorrigible and hence self-certifymg. But I suggest this is an incorrect way of stating the point. "We are under no logical obhgation to accept the truth of an avowal and avowals of certain types of inner experience are regarded as corrigible by indirect evidence. To mention only one example, claims to be in pam aresometimes rejected on the evidence of medical authorities when there is a recognised correlation between the described pam and a physiologically morbid condition But malingerers are lying, not mistaken. The important logical difference between statements about one’s inner and private experiences and statements about the external and public world does not run along the cleavage line of corrigible and incorrigible assertions, but along the gap separating claims that may be true, mistaken or deceitful, and those that can only be true or deceitful. Sometimes, like George IV, people have entirely delusive memory experiences ; more frequently, they claim to remember something when there is independent evidence to show that they must be mistaken m so thinking. It is this fact that theories of memory like Hume’s cannot account for. It is plain that on Hume’s theory one must have either veridical memories or be lying, for no one can be mistaken as to whether or not he has an image of a certain strength and vivacity. This is the point at which the analogy between first and second order perception ceases to hold. We can explain how we made the mistake of taking an overcoat on the floor to be the body of a man : the light was had, we had lost our spectacles, we were too far away to see properly. But one needs no light by which to see a mental image, no oculist can attend to the defects of the inner eye, and try as we may we can neither approach nor retreat from our images. . We use no organs to detect our images, states of mind and sensations ; they are separated from us by no medium ; there is no mechanism to go wrong ; there is no inference made into which error could creep The absurd necessity that Hume's theory would impose upon us of declaring to be a liar anyone who thought himself to be remembering when he was not, clearly follows equally from any revised version of the theory. There are no special images, accompanying feelings of familiarity, or intense convictions that one is truly remembering and so on, from the experiencing of which it follows conclusively that one is indeed remembering.This follows from the fact that any claim to remember, no matter how confidently it may be based upon the possession of dear and distinct images, feelings of fa mili arity and so on, may in principle he falsified by evidence of a non-subjective kind. For instance, I may he absolutely certain that I can remember meeting a friend in the street yesterday. Yet, if it were proved that the friend whom I thought I remembered meeting had been at that time a hundred miles away, I would have to accept the fact that I could not possibly remember meeting bfm and that I must have imagined the occurrence. It follows from this corrigibility of claims to remember, that no mental datum or combination of mental data can possibly function as sufficient criteria of remem- bering as the Humean type of theory suggests they do. Or, to put the point in the way I have been doing, one can only maintain the enterprise of taking mental data to he sufficient criteria at the expense of rendering it impossible to talk of people making honestly mistaken memory claims. It is well worth noticing thatmental data ofthe type I have been considering do not function as necessary criteria of remembering either. Hume’s doctrine that one remembers if one has an image of a certain kind has only recently been abandoned in the face of