Why H. P. Grice fell in love, as he remembered, with B. S. Benjamin

REMEMBERING 


By B S Benjamin 


Nothin & is so uniquely personal to a man as Lis 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 to 

312 



REMEMBERING 


313 


think 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 imagin- 
ation 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. 

Professor Ryle has mentioned 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 



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B. S. BENJAMIN : 


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. 



REMEMBERING 


315 


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 independ- 
ent 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 are 
sometimes 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 state- 
ments 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 



316 


B. S. BESJAMEf : 


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 
a mass of psychological evidence to the contrary. Indeed, some 
would seem to have abandoned the memory-image theory with 
the poignant reluctance of the theorist confronted with impossibly 
indigestible facts. The facts are certainly indigestible, hut the 
weak points in a conceptual analysis (which eveiy philosophical 
theory of memory should be) may be detected independently of 
experimental evidence, and in this case one can certainly show 
without recourse to experimental evidence that the possession 
of mental imager}' is not a necessary condition (or criterion) of 
remembering. For example, if a barrister conducting a cross- 
examination attempted to tlirow doubt on the reliabibty of a 
witness s memory by demonstrating, per impossible, that the 
witness s account was unaccompanied by mental imagerv, no 
one m the court, would understand lus point at all. Ye” have 
e s o eci e or to help us decide whether or not people remember 
an . ome o t icse are tests for the presence or absence of necessary 



remembering 317 

conditions, but tbe possession or lack of possession of images is 
not one of these tests 

By substituting for ‘ mental image 5 any other mental datum 
in the example above, one can see similarly that no specific 
mental datum need be present before one can be said to 
remember. 

To avoid misunderstanding, it should be mentioned that 
of course these arguments do not apply to any non-introspectible 
concomitant of remembering, c.g. such as a certain pattern of 
neural discharge It may veil be discovered that phenomena of 
this kind are necessary to remembering, but non-introspectible or 
unconscious mental phenomena in the nature of the case do not, 
and could not, usefully function as cnteria of remembering, 
which is the point in question 

Modem versions of the memory image theory avoid the 
notorious flaw in Hume’s theory by attempting to account for 
the fact of honest but mistaken memory claims The core of 
the modified version is the suggestion that a memory image is a 
representative image of a past perceptual experience, and when 
one makes an honest mistake of memory one is faithfully reporting 
or observing an image that fails to represent the past experience. 
This is unobjectionable so far as it goes, but if the argument 
above, showing that images have no necessary role m remember- 
ing, is correct, it follows that this theory fails to expose any part 
of the logical structure of the concept at all, and merely describes 
a phenomenon that may or may not take place 

It is, furthermore, obvious that anyone who assigns to the 
memory-image a central role m the analysis of remembering 
must explain the connexion or lack of connexion between our 
rememberings when memory-images naturally are likely to 
occur, as in our memories of places and faces, and those when 
they are not, as for instance when we remember how to tie a 
running bowline or the first four hues of Paradise Lost 

It is worth considering one such attempted explanation, 
made by Professor Broad in The JSlind and Its Place in Nature. 
In a chapter entitled “ Memory ” m that work he says that the 
word “ memory ” is highly ambiguous m tbe sense of covering 
“ a number of very diff erent acts ” ; thus we use the verb to 
remember ” m different senses when we speak of remembering a 
set of nonsense-syllables, a poem, a proposition in Euclid, how 
to swim, and people and places, because in each case what we 
remember differs from tbe others Given this technique of 
discriminating diff erent senses of the verb to remember , 
Broad is able to declare the sense m which we remember past 



318 


B. S. BENJAMIN : 


perceptual experiences (when imaging is most likely normally to 
occur), to be different from other cases, most of which, he suggests, 
can be called instances of remembering only by courtesy. 

Professor Broad’s contention that ‘ remembering ’ is an 
ambiguous word which has many senses would be of the first 
importance if true. There are, however, several reasons for 
denying its truth, at least in the form in which he presents 
it In the first place it is plainly incorrect to assert that, for 
example, in the claims ‘ I remember her face ‘ I remember 
her name and telephone number ’, ‘ I remember how to rhumba ’, 
one could possibly mistake what was being claimed, through an 
ambiguity of ‘ remember ’, in the way that one might mistake 
ox misunderstand the claim 4 1 have been to the bank ’. Neither 
is it apparent that more subtle distinctions of sense are involved 
asm ‘I feel a penny ’, ' I feel sick ’ and ‘ I feel happy ’. The 
differences of sense involved in the latter cases can be indicated 
by the blatant inappropriateness of certain questions asked of 
one or more of the claims, which axe quite appropriate if asked 
of others, e g. what is the location of what you feel ? what did 
you feel it with? and so on But Broad does not elicit dis- 
tinctions of sense in the verb ‘ to remember ’ in the same straight- 
forward way. Instead, he first states an implied analysis of the 
concept of remembering from which distinctions can be seen to 
follow, by declaring that remembering is an act, and then not 
unreasonably concludes that the very different activities involved 
in, e g. remembering how to swim (bodily activity), the lines of a 
poem (rote activity), someone’s face (the mental activity of 
having an image), and so on, must be reflected in different senses 
of the word we use to refer to these differing acts. But such 
distinctions rest upon the highly contentious assertion that 
remembering is the name of an act or set of diffe rent acts, and is 
m no way a straight-forward statement about usage as the 
previous examples were. Indeed, the implausible conclusion 
which follows from this theory, and which Professor Broad draws, 
that there is no connexion whatever between the senses of 
remember elicited, might be taken as prima facie evidence 
of its falsity. 

The only way to. decide whether remembering and its cognates 
are radically multivocal, or substantially univocal as I wish to 
maintain, is to re-analyse the concept to see whether or not a 
uniform core of meaning is preserved m its use in different con- 
texts. This I shall attempt to do, and m the course of my 
argument it will, I think, become quite clear that it is not possible 
o construe remembering as an act, except of course m the 



REMEMBERING 


S19 


entirely empty sense in which one might say that eveiy active 
verb mast- denote an act. 

Before I proceed to this analysis something further is needed 
to do justice to at least one of the points which Broad wished to 
make For anyone, irrespective of whether or not he takes 
remembering to be simply an activity, might well be greatly 
struck by the difference between remembering a past perceptual 
experience, and remembering a poem or how to swim The 
difference seems to lie in the fact that whereas it in no way seems 
necessaiy for one’s remembering the lines of a poem or how to 
swim to be accompanied by introspectible mental experiences, 
it is difficult to understand how one could remember a perceptual 
experience without an experience analogous to the original one 
taking place For example, what would it be like to remember 
the very tones of a voice without m some sense hearing the voice 
again, or to recollect in detail the view up the High from Magdalen 
Bridge without seeing it in one’s mind’s eye ? Then again, when 
one goes over the events of the day one usually does so not by 
telling oneself the story of what occurred but by seeing, hearing 
and feeling again in memory fragments of one’s perceptual 
experiences, in short, by a sort of reliving of the day’s events. 
What I shall call, for want of a better phrase, reliving, is un- 
deniably typical of our remembering of perceptual experiences, 
and the memory-image theory is an attempt to do justice to this 
fact, as also is Broad’s assertion that remembering has different 
senses. 


Whether the phenomenon of reliving is marked by a dis- 
tinction m sense of ' remember ’ is a question that may be 
decided the better when the remaining analysis has been made. 
It is fairly obvious, however, that the notion of reliving is capable 
far better than that of a memory image of accommodating the 
recall of non-visual perceptual experiences and, hence, that the 
memory-image theory has the trivial defect of over-narrowness. 
What is less obvious is whether the argument against the memory- 
image theory presented earlier has equal weight against the 
broader reliving theory. . 

It is certainly no more a standard test of remembering^ to 
enquire whether a person is in some way reliving what he damns 
to remember, than it is to enquire if he has an image of it -But 
one might now feel tempted to argue that it does not follow from 
the fact that this is not a standard test, that reliving is never 
theless not a necessary ingredient of remembering P as evpen 
cnees We may investigate this possibility by se • => _ U P e 

hypothetical case of a man who was perfectly well able to describe 



320 


b. s. benjamin: 


his past perceptual experiences and yet denied that he underwent 
the experience of reliving in any way at all. Some people might 
wish to argue that he must be reliving the experiences he describes 
— otherwise how could he describe them? and that either he fails 
to understand what we mean by the phrases ‘ reliving ‘ seeing 
or hearing vividly in recollection ! and so on, or that he undergoes 
his reliving in a very curious way (as, for example, some hold that 
people with freakish ability to calculate in their heads must 
perform sums terribly fast and unbeknown to themselves ). 1 

It would take us too far off the course this paper must follow 
to consider the really interesting points this argument involves. 
Two, however, may be noted. First, the ability to image sensory 
experiences does vary widely from person to person, so the dis- 
agreement may well have a factual basis . 2 Second, it is a genuine 
puzzle sometimes to know what is to count as an image. For 
instance, what the writer pi esumes is his memory image of the 
High from Magdalen Bridge is so fleeting, blurred and thin that, 
if, as it were, it could be captured for the requisite time, it would 
undoubtedly prove impossible to draw it ; yet he can describe the 
view to himself and others. Would this count as an image, a 
reliving ? One tends to put an end to such a question, I think, 
by wearily agreeing that it must be an image. 

The really important point at issue, though, may he decided, 
whether or not this preliminary question can be. If reliving is 
a necessary condition of remembering a past experience, then, 
were we to find someone who could describe to himself and to 
others his experiences without any reliving of them, it would 
have to follow that he was not really remembering. I do not think 
that this point could be sustained. Our subject would give a 
perfectly adequate memoiy-performance ; he would pass all the 
standard tests of remembering ; we could not even say that 
he is not good at remembering, in the usual sense of the phrase. 
All that we could say of him is that he does his remembering in a 
curious fashion, and, at the most, that remembering is for us a 
much richer experience than it is for him, that, perhaps, it means 
more to us than it does to him. But the phrase * means more 5 in 
this context has somewhat the same force that it has in the 
observation that doing addition means more to me than it does 
to a bank teller ; we both add, but whereas his answers come 

3 A phenomenon interesting in tins connexion is reported in a recent 
note on “ Loss of Visualisation ’’ by Sir Bussell Brain, Proc of the Royal 
Society of Meihrmc, Apn! 19J4, Vol. 47, No 4 

3 An informative mid brief account of such differences is given in “The 
Measurement of Mental Images ” by P. L Short, Penguin Science Rcics, 
No. 24. 



REMEMBERING 321 

almost automatically, I leach mine by means of agonised and 
laborious little sums 

If only because we are taught to add, there is little temptation 
for us to confuse our personal methods of doing it with the notion 
of adding itself. It is perhaps largely because remembering is a 
natural phenomenon, something which we do not have to learn, 
that we feel ourselves to be authorities on the subject and that our 
personal methods and techniques will have some necessary 
connexion with the logical structure of the concept. But a 
concept used in public discourse could not be so dependent upon 
the vagaries of private experiences, the nature of which, as we 
have seen, it is not even easy to describe 3?or it to have a stand- 
ard meaning its use must be standardised, and reference to the 
experiences of reliving undergone by individuals, plainly, could 
hardly be suitable for this In fact, because of our preoccupation 
with our experiences of remembering, we tend to simply ignore the 
standard uses to which we put the concept in our discourse It 
is to these that we must now turn 

I referred earlier to the fact that a claim to remember is m 
principle falsifiable or verifiable by observations which are in no 
way connected with the state of mmd of the person making the 
claim The following example lEustrates still further points of 
difference between the logic of statements about one’s state of 
mmd and statements containing the verb ‘ to remember ’ or its 
cognates But this is incidental to the present purpose of the 
example, which is to provide further material for the study of how 
the concept actually behaves when used m discourse. Suppose 
two men, each of whom is thoroughly acquamted with the painting 
of a certain artist. This artist has painted a view fa mili ar to each, 
and one man has seen the painting and the other has neither seen 
it nor had it described Now suppose we ask each man to try 
and picture the painting to himself and then to tell us what the 
painting is like The man who has seen the painting before will 
probably claim to remember it, and we can test his claim by 
getting him to describe it to us Should his statement be such that 
it would count as a description of the painting, it must be allowed 
that he remembers it Should his statement not be a description 
of the painting, 1 or shouldhe be unable even to begin a description, 
Tre would have to declare tliat lie did not remember the painting ; 
in the first case that either he was guessing or confusing the 
painting with another one ; in the second, unless he suffered from 

° r "° fc C ° lmt aB a descn P tl0n 111 thls of context 

21 



322 


B. S. BENJAMIN . 


a speech defect or the painting was such that a verbal description 
presented great difficulty, simply thathe had failed to remember it. 
We could hardly expect the other man to be able to describe the 
painting, but it is just possible that, knowing the scene and being 
familiar with the artist’s ' vision palette and so on, he could tell 
us sufficiently well what the painting was hbe. But even were his 
answer to be in substance exactly the same as that of the man who 
remembered the painting, and even if both were to have similar 
mental pictures, the second man would not be remembering the 
painting but guessing what it was like, and even if he were 
honestly to believe himself to be remembering it, it could not 
follow that he was. Alternatively, if the first man had quite 
forgotten that he had seen the picture and had then told us what 
it. was like, thinking he was guessing, we should be forced to declare 
that in fact he was remembering the picture although he was 
unaware that he was domg so. 

The obvious point which this example illustrates is the in- 
dependence between on the one hand, the state of mind, mental 
imagery and so on, of the person who claims to remember or not 
remember the painting and, on the other, the factors which, on 
appeal, decide whether the claim is to be accepted or rejected and 
reformulated as a guess or an imagining. As was mentioned 
earlier, that memory claims are verifiable m principle by 
recourse to pubbcly ascertainable facts 1 indicates a marked 
difference between the logic of these assertions and those reporting 
a mental experience An even more staking distinction hes in 
the fact that if a claim to remember is rejected in toto, it is im- 
mediately reclassified, as for instance * you couldn’t remember 
such an occurrence because it never took place ; you must have 
imagined it or guessed it. or made it up ’. Each of us has been 
subject to such corrections and unquestionably we were not being 
convicted of linguistic incompetence : neither, as we have seen, 
could it be for mistaking the nature of our (conscious) mental 
experience. What, sort of mistake, then, were we committing ? 

An answer suggests itself most strongly when one notices the 
way m which rejected memory-claims are corrected : you 
didn’t remember, you imagined, dreamt, guessed it, and so on. 
We use these forms of emendation when certain of the conditions 
which must he fulfilled before remembering can take place, have 

•This is not aht ays possible, of course, eg. it hen ne remember our 
dreams feelings and so on But treat our memories of such tilings 
nx though they arc verifiable independently, m as much as everyone it ould 
admit that it is possible that his memory of, e g lus dream, is mistaken 
or faulty. 



REMEMBERING 


323 


not been fulfilled, for example, when someone claims to 
remember seeing an occurrence which m fact never took place, or, 
if it did, winch he could not have been m a position to witness. In 
such a case, the statement presented as a memory-claim or the 
unexpressed thought which is taken to be a memory, cannot have 
come to mind as a result of the memory process, t e as the 
retention of past experience, for the experience never took place 
To correct the claim with ‘ you must have imagined, dreamt, 
guessed it’, and so on, answers the question which the demal 
that remembering took place poses, namely, How then did he 
come to t hink of it? by ascribing to him a mental process different 
to the one originally claimed. 

I think that it would be true to say that the everyday view of 
remembering is simply that it is the final stage of a causal process 
and that the memory is some sort of causal device or mechanism. 
The fact that in our language remembering is opposed by other 
process words like imagining, guessing, inventing, making-up, 
dreaming, and so on, is itself evidence of this belief The view 
that remembering should he thought of as part of a causal process 
is, of course, fundamental to psychology and to neurologists 
attempting to find the brain mechanism responsible for the 
phenomenon The process view also underlies the extensions 
made to the concept of memory when, under the influence of the 
new evolutionary biology, the notion was apphed to races and 
groups, or m our own day when we apply it to inanimate objects 
capable of certain involved causal processes, as when we speak of 
calculating machines having a memory. 

The fact that it makes some sense (although also different 
senses) to talk of human memory, race memory, machine memory 
and so on, indicates how central to the concept of memory is the 
process-analysis Add to this the point that if we are to explain 
the phenomenon of memory we undoubtedly have to assume that 
a process of some sort is responsible, and one is led to enquire 
whether the analysis of remembering into a process-concept may 
not solve the problems which the analyses so far mentioned have 
been unable to meet For one thing, reference to an underlying 
mental processprovides a common factor m our use of the memory 
words over a wide range of differing contexts, and would thus 
appear to explain our usage For another, it would seem to 
avoid the difficulty raised by honest but mistaken memory- 
claims, as there is no reason why privileged access should extend 
to unconscious mental processes 

There is, however, something very curious entailed by this 
suggestion On the one hand, even now very little is known about 



324 


B. S. BENJAMIN 


the processes involved m human memoiy . 1 On the other, it is 
frequently possible to establish with certainty that a person 
remembers something The consequence of the process analysis 
would be, then, that we can establish with certainty that on oc- 
casions the working of an assumed and unknown process has taken 
place. It also involves the novel information that when we claim 
to remember, what we are really claiming is that we are under- 
going a certain mental process. If this were so it is undoubtedly 
true that the vast majority of people when they claim to remember 
something, simply do not know what it is that they are claiming. 

These conclusions are quite unacceptable But the difficulties 
involved m construing the concept as a process concept do not 
necessitate the equally unpalatable course of maintaining that it 
is not a process concept. The assertion that a person remembers 
something does mvolve, or is taken to involve, the ascription to 
that person of a certain mental process undergone. But it also 
involves far more, and that of a character vastly more important 
to the purposes of everyday life m which the concept finds employ- 
ment. In its constant everyday use it finds employment, I 
suggest, as one of a group of concepts which we use to classify 
statements according to their truth-value. 

The group described earlier as process concepts opposed to 
remembering likewise serve the same purpose. But the prop- 
erties which, ru the previous context, it was natural to assume 
were properties belonging to the utterer of a statement — that lie 
is guessing, imagining, inventing, dreaming, etc — I wish now to 
point out are properties which, in the first place, belong to the 
statement itself. 

A statement is classified as a guess when it is not backed by 
evidence which would yield it as a conclusion ; an inference when 
it is so backed ; an invention, story, dream or imagining when 
it bears no relation, descriptive or evidential, to the facts which 
it purports to he about, when the statement is presented as a 
claim to remember. (To preface a statement with, e g. ' this 
story ’, * my dream etc , is to declare that it does not purport 
to be about any facts.) These rough summaries, which are not 
meant to he characterisations let alone definitions, serve to bring 
out two pomts. First, that to classify a statement under any one 
of these or similar heads is to label ltwith regard to Its truth-value. 

1 There are. of course, highly informed speculations about its nature 
See, c g The neurophysiological Basis of Mind, by J. C Eceles, Oxford 
For a discussion of certain special difficulties that accounts of the nature 
of tlie memory mechanism must face, see, “ In Search of the Engram ’ by 
K. S Lashlov, S.E B Symposia, vol. IV, Academic Press, HT.X , 1950. 



REMEMBERING 


325 


Second, that it is, so to speak, to write upon tlie label tbe support 
or lack of it which the statement possesses. Thus the labelling of 
an assertion as a guess informs people that the support or grounds 
hacking the assertion is of a certain kind, and that although 
the information asserted is unlikely to be true, it just may be so 
(it may be a shrewd guess). Though the remaining process verbs 
I mentioned, and the far larger set that I have not mentioned, 
would each need individual treatment (which I shall shortly give 
in the case of remembering) m order to demonstrate that they are 
used to classify assertions, the sample that I have given is suffi- 
cient to indicate the nature of this linguistic function. It may be 
observed that it is clearly necessary m the interests of efficient 
communication that we should apprise one another, where 
possible, of the logical status of the assertions we make. The 
enormous difficulties and frustrations reported by people who 
have experienced living m primitive societies where such dis- 
tinctions are not made is sufficient witness of this. On the other 
hand, except in certain rare instances, it is not apparent that the 
constant exchange of autobiographical prefaces to our remarks 
would be particularly useful or interesting The man who 
purveys information solely about himself is a bore 

Although the fact that it is grammatically correct to refer the 
actions denoted by active verbs to the actor (I guess, he guesses, 
etc ) clearly plays a large part m leading us to misconstrue 
sentences containing verbs of the group which concerns us simply 
as sentences giving information about the actor, this linguistic 
fact is not the whole of the matter Even though the logical pro- 
priety of employing active verbs at all in these contexts might 
now seem dubious, it equally seems unavoidable On the one 
hand, that the making of assertions or the thinking of thoughts 
of logically different lands necessarily involves a doing or activity 
seems guaranteed by the “ causal principle ” ; on the other, it is 
a matter of experience that frequently the production of different 
sorts of assertions (or thoughts) is preceded by typically di ff erent 
mental doings, experiences or processes The fact of the matter 
is that these verb forms play a multiple role m discourse , they are 
used simultaneously to label the logical status of an assertion or 
thought, and to refer to the activities or processes which are 
causally responsible for the assertion. Neither role can be reduced 
to the other, but it is important to see that one is logically primary. 

That the process role is secondary showed itself m the case of 
remembering, m that no types of mental experiences or thought 
processes were found to be either necessary or sufficient conditions 
of remembering. Equally, the primacy of the logical status 



326 


B. S. BEXJAMIX : 


marking role appears when. it is realised that the conditions which 
are necessary and sufficient are those relating to the truth value 
and truth conditions of the statement of what is remembered, e g. 
my claim to remember seeing Jones hit Smith is correct only if 
Jones did hit Smith and I witnessed the occurrence. Once "the 
relationship existing between the two roles is dear it is not difficult 
to see why the experiences which typically enter into our remem- 
bering have no part in the logical structure of the concept. They 
could never provide conclusive tests of whether remembering has 
taken place or not because what the tests must he designed to 
determine is whether the putative memorr is veridical {eg. 
whether Jones did hit Smith, etc.). If the assertion ' I remem- 
ber p 5 is true then it follows that one’s memory processes worked 
correctly, but the truth of the assertion is not logically de- 
pendent on the workings of the memory process. This point 
can be seen more clearly in the following logically analogous case 
The test of whether an electronic calculating machine is working 
correctly (and was designed correctly) hes in the correctness of 
its calculations. The tests of correctness are of course logically 
related to the rules of the calculus employed, not to an electronic 
process. The production of a calculation is causally dependent 
upon the functioning of some process, mechanical or mental, 
which employs certain mathematical procedures, just as the 
production of a memory is causally dependent npon some 
individual’s memory processes. But logical dependence cannot 
be assimilated to cansal dependence (or vice versa ) as the theories 
of remembering examined earlier in fact attempt to do. For 
instance, even if a totally error-free calculating machine were 
developed, so that it became practicable to say that the correct 
answer to a complex calculation is the answer given by the 
machine, the machine’s answer would still in principle he veri- 
fiable and the relations between logical and causal dependence 
remain unchanged Human memories are not perfect, and when- 
ever anything of importance hangs npon an individual's meznoiy 
claim we endeavour to verify it. But although in practice we 
never accept as quite conclusive those experiences whatever 
they may be, which lead a man to state with honest conviction 
I know I remember , we do accord them the status of strongly 
presumptive signs of remembering. If our memories were 
uniformly excellent then undoubtedly we would drop our practice 
of verifying claims to remember, except as a check for mendacity, 
and treat them as if they were self-certifying. But. even in thi* 
remote contingency, the primacy of the status labelling role 
would remain unchanged. 



REMEMBERING 


327 


What I liave referred to as the ‘ logical status labelling ! role 
played by tbe mental process verbs must be elucidated further 
m the case of remembering. To preface one’s remarks with the 
phrase ‘ I remember . . . ’ (or a cognate) is to indicate to one’s 
audience that you certify the truth and accuracy of the infor- 
mation you are about to give or which you claim to be able to give 
or to the correctness of the performance you will or could under- 
take The nature of the status-label affixed to p m a statement 
of the form ‘ I remember p ’, might, m part, be paraphrased 
* p is true (or this performance is an instance of p) and you have 
my word for it ’. In this, the role of these expressions is notably 
parallel to that of ‘ I know ’, and this comes out in the fact that 
very frequently we can employ either verb with indifference both 
to the intended and understood sense of the utterance, eg ‘do 
you know/remember Ins name* ‘ do you know/remember 
Ohm’s Law* ’ and so on It similarly shows itself m the fact that 
if one remembers p it entails that one knows p The reverse, 
of course does not. hold. One may use the verb ‘ to remember ’ 
only to certify statements or performances relating to the past, 
whereas we can, by the use of * know ’ certify statements about 
the past, present or future I propose to mark tlus common 
linguistic role by describing each concept as a certificatory 
concept We may now understand the concept of knowledge to 
be our most general certificatory concept, and the concept of 
remembering to be specialised m the respect just mentioned 
It might at first seem that the certificatory role is at once too 
obvious and too unimportant to be worth the mention For 
the norm of communication is essentially the exchange of infor- 
mation supplied m all sincerity. We expect perfectly ordinary 
statements like ‘ the car is outside ’, * it was raining yesterday ’, 
I can see him coming ’ to be true, and lienee there is a perfectly 
good sense in which one can say that the mere utterance of ap- 
parently informative statements commits the utterer to standing 
by the truth of lus statements. But this very fact makes it 
obviously desirable to have expressions which underline our 
committal to the truth of our assertions, and which can be used 
to stress the fact that the information is certified. I shall turn 
shortly to consider the contexts in which we do and do not use 
remember ’ , here, it may be noticed that a phrase like * body 
of knowledge ’ can be translated into ‘ body of certified informa- 
tion and ‘ theory of knowledge ’ into ‘ theory of certification ’ 
with some gam m illumination A further gam stems from the 
power to explain certain features of the logical grammar of the 
concepts which this way of loo kin g at them allows. 



328 


S. S. BENJAMIN : 


If one proffers information accompanied by the formula 'I 
remember (that) p 5 or ‘I know (that) p’, then, should p turn out 
to be false, to be misinformation, one is forced not merely to 
admit the falsity of the information, but also that one did not 
remember, that one did not know. One is forced by the rules of 
language formally to eat one’s own words. One may attempt 
to explain the existence of such a rule by pointing out that, at 
least in the case of the verb to remember and the verbs of 
perception, which are also subject to this rule, one is dealing with 
what Ryle has called achievement words. This is both true and 
useful, for one can talk here of trying or of failing to achieve 
the desired result, eg oi trying or failing to remember, to see, 
to hear and so on ; and success may sometimes indeed be ac- 
companied by a very real feeling of achievement. But one 
cannot make this point of the verb ‘ to know ’ : it is not clear what 
could be meant by ‘ trying to know or ' failing to know ’, except 
in the acquaintance sense of the word where the rule does not 
apply. The reason for this difference is undoubtedly that the 
verbs of ’ achievement ’ are also process (or procedure) verbs 
whereas the verb ‘ to know ’ in its relevant sense is not Processes 
may or may not work, they need suitable conditions (‘ the light 
is too bad to see ‘ it happened too long ago for me to remember 
the details ’, * my ears are full of water ’) ; and sometimes they 
can be made to work (‘ turn on the light then you’ll see ’, ‘ if you 
remember what you did before that it might come back ‘ you’d 
better see a doctor ’) If a process fails to work one must with- 
draw a claim which implies that it has worked But the fact 
that this rule of formal withdrawal applies equally to the verb to 
know, which is not a process verb, suggests that there must 
be more behind the rule than reference to processes which may 
or may not have taken place The remaining explanation emerges, 
I suggest, if one sees the rule also as a device, embodied m the 
language, to protect the integrity of certificatory expressions 
Words may be abused, suffer debasement and lose their force, 
and if it were not for the presence in the language of a formal 
rule of this nature, certificatory expressions would soon lose 
the special emphasis which makes them so valuable. 

It is important to notice that because we use the verb 'to 
remember ’ as a mark that the information we are giving is true 
and correct, it does not follow that memory can never play us false, 
that we cannot make a mistake in our remembering, that one 
either remembers or one doesn’t. If a man were to make three 
mistakes in a recitation of the Ode to a Nightingale no one could 
sensibly accuse him of failing to remember the poem, unless it 



REMEMBERING 


329 


happened to be an occasion when perfection was required. On the 
other hand, if he were to get his telephone number wrong, we 
would say that he simply doesn’t remember it rather than say 
merely that he made some mistakes "We have no hard and fast 
rules for what is to count as a correct description, an accurate sum- 
mary, getting an account right, knowing a street or an argument 
or a poem Hence, we cannot state hard and fast rules for what is 
to count as remembering, for we treat remembering as a function 
of the truth, correctness and accuracy of a statement (or perform- 
ance). We evaluate the truth or accuracy of a statement by 
taking mto account the demands of the contest and situation in 
which it is made, and express this evaluation by choosing terms 
from, so to speak, a rough scale of expressions For example: 
‘ completely accurate ’, * fairly accurate ’, * inaccurate ’, 1 quite 
true ’, ‘ partly true ’ and so on. Likewise we evaluate and 
express the truth or accuracy of what is remembered For 
example, * he remembered it perfectly ‘ he half-remembered 
it ’, ‘ he didn’t remember it at all ’ and so on. Similarly we may 
dimini sh the claim to correctness implied by the use of the verbs 
* to remember ’, ‘ to recollect ’, * to know ’ by prefacing them 
with, eg. ‘ I seem to . . ’, ‘ I think I . . . ‘ I believe I . . . ’ and 

so on The object of such qualifications is of course to warn 
the listener that there is, to a varying degree, some doubt about 
the correctness of the information which will follow and that, 
having given due warning, the speaker cannot be blamed if his 
listener puts too much weight upon his words 

A noteworthy consequence of the certaficatory role of remem- 
bering may be seen in the fact that it is only rarely necessary 
to bring up the notion of remembering m our everyday discourse. 
Now one could generate a sense of the verb to remember such that 
from the demonstration that one has not forgotten p, i e that one 
has produced or performed p, it would follow that one remembers 
p This sense would fully accord with the requirements of the 
process concept of memory, as the latter embodies precisely the 
rule just used to generate the new sense of remember. Hence, 
the skills and information that may be said to be memory- 
dependent, i e. which we may forget (perhaps as a result of injury 
to the brain) may now be said to be remembered when they are 
aetualised. Thus one could speak of Englishmen conversing 
or writing in E nglis h as * remembering words in the English 
language ’, of accountants doing accounts as e remembering how 
to add ’, and one might murmur as one signs one’s name ‘ I’ve 
remembered my name agam ’. 

The absurd inappropriateness of these examples if ‘ remember ’ 



330 


B. S. BENJAMIN : 


is understood in its usual sense, illustrates the opposition between 
the two senses. It is not, of course, an opposition that permits the 
crude exposure of its existence by denying that in these examples 
one remembers one’s name or one’s language, for such a denial 
would for each sense entail that one had forgotten them The 
inappropnateness would he in bringing up the notion of remem- 
bering in its usual sense at all in such connexions. 

Two -very closely related factors determine when it is appro- 
priate to bang up the notion of remembering m ordinary discourse 
It would clearly be nearly as pointless to remark the functioning 
of one’s memory processes each time they work as it would be to 
remark the fact that one breathes and is m full possession of one’s 
faculties ; that one has possession of one’s faculties is usually 
sufficiently evident. The introduction of one’s remarks with 
the phrase ‘ I remember ’ or the ascription to the remarks or 
performances of others as remembered has pomt just because 
we reserve the use of these expressions for occasions when 
there is some possibility that one may not remember what- 
ever happens to be m question. Thus the absurd examples 
given above would be sensible remarks only if made m a context 
in which there was reason to believe that the person of whom 
they are made was suffering an impairment of his faculties, or 
was a child who was actually learning this information or these 
skills As a result of this restriction of application, the very 
bringing up of the question of remembering actually implies the 
possibility of forgetting Compare the rudeness of ‘ do you 
remember your name* ’ with ‘ what is your name* ’or ‘do 
you remember what you had for breakfast today* ’ with ‘ do you 
remember what you had for breakfast three weeks ago* ’ 
Part of the absurdity of the earlier examples lies m the ineptness 
of implying that, for instance, a sane and sober accountant 
might have forgotten how to add 

Si m ilar considerations determine the occasions on which it 
would be sensible to use a certificatory expression We never 
bring up the notion of remembering nnless there are grounds 
for supposing that an assertion ma)' need checking or that a 
performance might be faulty, and in such circumstances it is 
obviously fitting to employ a certifying expression. By the same 
token it would he otiose to employ an expression with this force 
when one’s hearers stand m no need of personal assurances about 
the truth of what is uttered For instance, no one would say 
either Tremember’ or ‘Iknow that 2 + 2 = 4’ although he certainly 
does know it and, in the special first sense, he certainly does 
remember it. 



REMEMBERING 


331 


Tlie contiast ■which I have drawn between the special sense 
and the ordinary sense of the verb to remember lies, of course, 
more properly, between the concept of memory and the concept 
of remembering The concept of memory is the concept of a 
storage system, but the concept of remembering is not its natural 
corollary, that of the wholesale removal from store of the goods 
and chattels of experience Rather, as I have briefly attempted 
to show, it is devoted to the removal, not of special articles, 
but of any articles when conditions are such that the transaction 
deserves attention. 

It is now' possible to attempt an answer to the question which 
we deferred, namely, whether remembering has a unitary sense 
maintained in all contexts, or whether it is importantly multi- 
vocal 

If the arguments put forward m this paper are correct, it is 
plain that in their primary linguistic role as certificatory concepts 
the verb to remember and its cognates preserve a unitary sense 
in all contexts Things ns various ns assertions, thoughts, images, 
feelings, bodily performances and so on, may be similar in respect 
of their logical status as lmvmg been remembered It is the 
secondary process attributing lole that misleads theorists on the 
topic and invites speculations about differing senses of the verb. 
Whet tier there is a single process responsible for the phenomenon 
of remembering is a question on which no lay opimon would merit 
consideration, and m the absence of an accepted view about the 
nature of the process it seems correct to suggest that generally the 
verb has an utterly vague secondary sense, rather than a cluster 
of differing ones But it remains quite open to individuals to 
nominate specific process references should they wish to, and 
it is apparently the case that sometimes this does occur, as when 
people, impressed by the characteristic way m which their own 
memories come to them, take the verb to have reference to these 
private happenings In such cases there seems no reason why 
one should not talk of differing secondary senses of the verb, so 
long as it is clearly understood that such senses are private ones, 
and do not provide the material upon which an analysis of the 
concept must be founded.