A note on factual memory

✍ Scribed by Stanley Munsat

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1965
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 468 KB
• Volume: 16
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0031-8116
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00422636

✦ Synopsis

Imagination and Verifiability by Bernard Gert, DARTMOUTH COLLEGE

A Note on Factual Memory by STANLEY MUNSAT UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA IN ms book Knowledge and Certainty, 1 in the chapter entitled "A Definition of Factual Memory," Professor Norman Malcolm sets up a definition for saying that someone "remembers that p." For reasons which will be discussed later, Malcolm sets up this definition in the following form (p. 236) : "Our definition of factual memory can now be stated in full as follows: A person, B, remembers that p from a time, t, [italics mine] if and only if B knows that p, and B knew that p at t, and if B had not known at t that p, he would not now know that p." I hope to show that Malcolm has given us neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for saying that a person, B, remembers that p from a time t. I will try to show this for two sorts of "factual memory statements," one where 1 make reference to something I did which I remember and one where I just make reference to something I remember, but not something I did. In par-