§1 Two forms of memory and Goethe’s Problem

Let us start with a familiar distinction between two forms of memory: episodic memory (remembering a thing or an episode) vs. factual memory (remembering that something is the case).1 Factual memory does not necessarily give rise to the corresponding episodic memories. For instance, we colloquially use formulations such as the following: (1) I remember (I know) that I broke my leg when I was a child, yet I don’t remember the incident itself. I remember that the incident was painful, but I do not remember the pain. I know that I broke my leg, because I learnt it from my parents, but I have forgotten (in the relevant, episodic sense) the painful experience itself. In general, factual memory that p does not imply episodic memory of x, where x is an objective constituent of the proposition that p. Many things which I know about myself and my own past life I learnt from others. This is especially true of events in my early childhood. A central question in the philosophy of memory is how we should explain the distinction between those of my autobiographical memories (i.e. the memories whose expression requires use of the first-person “I”) which are genuinely episodic and those which belong to personal folklore – to things that friends and family members told me at various times after the remembered events. One suggestion is that the relevant difference between episodic and factual memory has to do with the memory’s causal history (rather than with its content). Arguably, any memory – episodic or not – which refers to a particular past experience causally derives from * I would like to thank the Editors, Christoph Hoerl and Teresa McCormack, for their very valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. 1 Various versions of this distinction can be found, inter alia, in Russell (1921), Bergson (1939), Ayer (1956), and Malcolm (1963). In what follows, I freely oscillate between saying that a subject remembers an incident and saying that a subject remembers experiencing the incident. As we shall see, the latter description is more perspicuous than the former as far as episodic memory is concerned