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This chapter argues against the widespread epistemic theory of memory which consists of two interrelated claims. The first claim is that to remember a proposition is to know it, where this knowledge was previously acquired and preserved. The second claim is that memory can only preserve knowledge from one time to another but cannot generate new justification and knowledge. Both aspects of the epistemic theory of memory are shown to be mistaken. It is possible to remember something in the present that one didn't justifiably believe in the past. Likewise one may acquire in the meantime some plausible but misleading evidence that destroys the status as justified belief of the once‐genuine justified belief that one still remembers. Moreover, cases of ignorant remembering show that one can remember something that one doesn't believe. In sum then, knowledge supervenes on some but not all cases of propositional remembering. Unlike knowledge, memory implies neither belief nor justification. But the epistemic theory of memory is not only wrong in holding that memory is a form of knowledge. It is also mistaken in assuming that memory cannot alter the epistemic status of a belief. Memory doesn't merely have the capacity to preserve epistemic features generated by other sources but that it is also a generative epistemic source.

For a present propositional attitude token to stand in a memory‐relation to a past propositional attitude token, the contents of both tokens need not be type‐identical but only sufficiently similar. This view flies in the face of the widespread identity theory of memory which demands type‐identity of diachronic content tokens and attitude tokens. This chapter determines to what extent two diachronic propositional attitude tokens may differ from one another and one of them still count as sufficiently similar to the other so as to be memory‐related to it. The chapter starts out by distinguishing two aspects of the veridicality constraint on memory: authenticity and truth. The truth of a memory report has to do with the memory content correctly representing objective reality. Authenticity, on the other hand, is an internal criterion concerning the accuracy of the reproduction of a past propositional attitude (true or false). The mark of authentic content representation is entailment: a present propositional attitude token is memory‐related to a past propositional attitude token only if the content of the present token is entailed by the content of the past token. One of the consequences of the entailment thesis is that it is possible that the content of a memory state is entertained for the first time at the time of recollection. This view is compared and contrasted with Plato's theory of recollection whereby all learning is nothing but remembering. Finally, the chapter addresses the question of when two diachronic attitude tokens are of the same kind and proposes a functionalist answer. The notion of attitude‐similarity is spelled out in terms of sameness of direction of fit and polarity.

When a memory content involves an indexical reference to the rememberer, the veridicality constraint on memory demands that the rememberer is numerically the same as the one who had the original experience/representation. This chapter investigates how the notion of personal identity is related to the notion of memory. It starts out by discussing the circularity objection to the psychological continuity theory of personal identity. Shoemaker and Parfit suggest solving the circularity objection by substituting the concept of quasi‐memory for the concept of memory. For the concept of quasi‐memory to provide a solution to the circularity objection quasi‐memory must be conceptually independent both from genuine memory and ostensible memory. The conceptual independence of quasi‐memory has come under attack: there are objections from constitutive holism, from the causal theory of memory, and from the immunity to error through misidentification. This chapter argues that the notion of quasi‐memory is indeed coherent and is not a derivative from the concept of memory. The dependence of memory on personal identity of a contingent rather than a logical nature. This chapter also discusses Wollheim's and Schechtman's narrative self‐constitution view of personal identity.

This chapter suggests that most cognitive theories of memory are cast in a manner that does not satisfactorily posit both what repetition priming is and why it is that way. Often, theories are cast in terms of abstract entities that are more analogous to computer programming functions than to the functions of brain subsystems. In the abstract approach, theories concern broad functional concepts of the sort reflected by the typical organization of cognitive research topics in textbooks. Alternatively, theories can be cast in terms of neurocomputationally dissociable processing subsystems, the functions that they accomplish, their interactions, and the neurally plausible mechanisms that perform those functions and interactions. In this approach, theories can do more than organize past research findings and generate new questions; they can do so in a manner that highlights how the phenomena stem from independently derived properties and principles of how brains implement memory and how brain-like models simulate memory.

The nature of retrograde amnesia (RA) in brain disease is a particularly intriguing problem. Recent research has emphasized differing patterns (dissociations) of memory loss in RA. Less emphasis has been placed upon important associations (correlates) of retrograde memory loss, which may contribute to or explain these differing patterns. There can also be differential patterns of deficit in the retention of ‘old’ memories (RA), on the one hand, and the acquisition of ‘new’ memories (anterograde amnesia (AA)), on the other. One obvious factor which may putatively influence these varying patterns of deficit is the site or sites of focal brain pathology. However, psychological factors are increasingly recognized to have an important influence on the retrieval of ‘old’ memories; RA seems to be particularly vulnerable to psychogenic phenomena. This chapter reviews these various factors, and considers current theories of RA in the light of them.

This chapter highlights the role that functional considerations can play in improving our understanding of priming. The chapter is organized in four parts. First, it argues that priming is best explained as a by-product of learning within perceptual systems, with particular focus on visual word priming within the orthographic system. Second, it considers an alternative approach, according to which priming and perception are embedded within a more general theory of memory — so-called instance theories of memory. Third, it outlines an initial attempt to model visual word priming as an incidental by-product of learning within the orthographic system using a standard connectionist model of word recognition. And fourth, it discusses how long-term priming techniques should be used as a tool to constrain theories of reading.

This chapter argues that some contemporary reconstructive models of memory have retained a standard for “good” memory (as fidelity to an original impression) that derives from an outmoded archival model. From the perspective of the reconstructive view, which acknowledges that the needs and interests of selves and others influence memory, our recollections appear as distortions of the past. This chapter argues that when we dismiss the dubious norm of good remembering as reproductive fidelity, the reconstructivist theory no longer encourages skepticism. Campbell’s positive proposal for good remembering combines a need to get both the facts about the past and their significance for the present and future right. The phenomenon of nostalgia is used to illustrate one sort of failure to get the significance of past facts right.

This chapter offers a conception of faithfulness to the past that acknowledges the reconstructive turn in memory theory. It argues that successful remembering includes getting something about the significance of the past right, as judged from the standpoint of our present needs and interests. Furthermore, even though we remember in highly individual ways, we determine the significance of the past together. The norm of integrity thus enters into how we configure our remembering in response to both the concerns of the present and the way that others remember. The connections between accuracy and integrity are illustrated through an extended analysis of an Argentinian political performance by the children of the disappeared, performances undertaken to reshape individual and communal memory in ways that reconfigure possibilities for future response.

The memory wars, fueled by concern with the “false memory syndrome,” assumed an account of integrity as a virtue for protecting memory from influence and for guarding the boundaries of the self. The chapter argues that the idea that there is only one true story to be told about the past comes with a correlative conception of the self as constituted by an accumulation of determinate past experiences. Both of these overly simple ideas are casualties of the reconstructive turn in memory studies. Rather than regarding the reconstructive nature of memory as a source of inevitable distortion, the chapter identifies a view of truth that supports and accommodates the complexities of good remembering. It argues that a multiplicity of perspectives is in itself no threat to accuracy, and that a concern for the truth about the past is essentially implicated in our concern for the value of integrity to the self and others.

This chapter tracks the further demise of Pan Americanism via nueva canción, a folkloric, often anti-U.S. genre popular in cold war Latin America. It also attracted the U.S. composer and Marxist sympathizer Frederic Rzewski, whose fifty-minute virtuosic piano piece, 36 Variations on “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!,” reflects the values of nueva canción despite having been premiered under the auspices of the U.S. Bicentennial. Unlike Copland’s El salón México or Gershwin’s Cuban Overture, The People United commemorates one of the bleakest moments in U.S.–Latin American relations: the CIA-assisted coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile. Applying theories of Freud and Paul Ricoeur reveals that the work’s unusual formal structure explicates processes of memory and forgetting, both central concerns in Latin America today. Memory and forgetting are also germane to the historiography of Latin American music in the United States, which has largely forgotten sameness-embracing in favor of fetishizing difference.