Memory and Temporal Awareness

Abstract

Memories have content in that they can be correct or incorrect. In addition, memories have an interesting phenomenological feature: If a subject remembers some event, then that event is presented to her as taking place in the past. The aim of this paper is to determine how we should construe the content of memories to account for that ‘feeling of pastness’ in memory. Three proposals will be considered and eventually rejected. According to some of those proposals, a reference to the temporal location of a remembered event is built into the content of the relevant memory. I will propose an alternative view. According to it, when a certain event is presented to us in virtue of having a memory experience, the content of that experience is that it was caused by a true perceptual experience of the event in question.