PPIG: Philosophy, Psychology, and Informatics Reading Group
3 Feb 2016 16:30 – 18:00, in Room 1.17, Dugald Stewart Building
Prof Chris Mole (University of British Columbia, Vancouver)
Involuntary Episodic Recall
On occasions when we have neither a desire nor an intention to remember them, incidents from our past do sometimes come to mind. Research into the psychological basis of such involuntary recollections has asked how they differ from their voluntary counterparts. The most sustained attempt to articulate this question is Dorthe Berntsen’s 2009 book, Involuntary Autobiographical Memory (Berntsen, 2009). In this paper I critique Berntsen’s conception of how her question should be asked. My point in doing so is not to launch an attack on Berntsen’s answer to it. Psychologists have tended to accept the terms in which Berntsen’s question is posed, while rejecting the answer that Berntsen herself gives to it. My point is the contrary one: the position that Berntsen aims to occupy is, I claim, a strong one, but — on account of working with an inadequately-specified conception of the question that she is addressing — that position is identified in a way that conceals some of its advantages. Berntsen tells us that her work aims to be “clearly psychological” (p. ix), and her position should therefore be thought of as an hypothesis for empirical testing, rather than as a thesis for philosophical proof. My claim in the present essay is only that the proper formulation of that position gives a strong and defensible hypothesis; one which can be freed of philosophically contentious commitments, which remains unthreatened by more recent empirical discoveries, and which has much to recommend it in the way of parsimony, and of prima facie plausibility. This paper therefore seeks a reorientation of some current debates, via the reformulation of Berntsen’s hypothesis. We shall be examining a number of pitfalls that such a formulation needs to avoid.