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Memory is a kind of mental state that has an object. Memories are about things. But what entities are the objects of memories? Are those entities mental? Are they states of affairs in the world? This entry will examine three different approaches to this issue. The approach will be philosophical (or conceptual) rather than psychological (or empirical).

Two preliminary points are necessary. First, what counts as the object of a mental state? The key characteristic of memories here is their capacity to be accurate or correct. We can think of the object of a memory as that object, property, state of affairs, or event whose presence makes the memory correct and whose absence makes it incorrect. Second, we need to draw a distinction between experiential and propositional memories. This distinction is drawn in different ways in philosophy and psychology. If you propositionally remember that there is a computer in my office, then you believe that there is such a computer and you believe it because you acquired that belief some time in the past and it has been preserved until now. By contrast, if you experientially remember that there is a computer in my office, then you are in a state wherein my office is presented to you as having contained a computer (you have a sort of “memory image” of the computer) and you are in that state because, sometime in the past, you seemed to perceive the computer. The question that will concern us here is what kinds of entities make our experiential memories correct.

The World as the Object of Memory

At first glance, one would think that the objects of memory are worldly entities. After all, we say things such as, “I remember that you were at the party on Saturday,” or “I remember that Jane's car is blue.” This way of talking suggests that the objects of my memories are those states of affairs that consist in, respectively, your being at the party on Saturday and Jane's car being blue. Call this the world-directed view. The difficulty for it is the following. Suppose I perceive Jane's car as being green, but it is really blue. Days later, I am trying to remember what color it was and I happen to have a memory image of it as being blue. Call this Situation 1. Intuitively enough, we would say that my memory has failed me here. However, the world-directed view commits us to saying that, in Situation 1, I am not misremembering the car.

Sensory Experience as the Object of Memory

One is then inclined to turn to the idea that the objects of memory are one's own past perceptual experiences. This suggests a picture of memory as being similar to introspection. The idea would be that, in both cases, we are attending to our own mental states. In memory, those mental states are past perceptual experiences, whereas, in introspection, they are current mental states. This view, which we may call the introspective view, accounts for our intuitions about Situation 1. However, imagine now that your memory experience of Jane's car presents it to you as being green. The car is really blue and your memory image originates in a past perceptual experience of it as being green. Call this Situation 2. The introspective view commits us to saying that your memory experience of Jane's car as being green is correct. But we would not want to say that. If you misperceived the car as being green in the past, how can you be remembering it correctly now when it appears to you as being green? It is hard to see how a false mental state could have turned into a true mental state just because time has gone by.

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