Remembering from the Outside: Personal Memory and the Perspectival MindWhen recalling events that one personally experienced, one often visualises the remembered scene as one originally saw it: from an internal visual perspective. Sometimes, however, one sees oneself in the remembered scene: from an external 'observer perspective'. In such cases one remembers from-the-outside. This book is about such memories. Remembering from-the-outside is a common yet curious case of personal memory: one views oneself from a perspective one seemingly could not have had at the time of the original event. How can past events be recalled from a detached perspective? How is it that the self is observed? And how can we account for the self-presence of such memories? Indeed, can there be genuine memories recalled from-the-outside? If memory preserves past perceptual content then how can one see oneself from-the-outside in memory? This book disentangles the puzzles posed by remembering from-the-outside. The book develops a dual-faceted approach for thinking about memory, which acknowledges constructive and reconstructive processes at encoding and at retrieval, and it uses this approach to defend the possibility of genuine memories being recalled from-the-outside. In so doing it also elucidates the nature of such memories and sheds light on the nature of personal memory. The book argues that field and observer perspectives are different ways of thinking about a particular past event. Further, by exploring the ways we have of getting outside of ourselves in memory and other cognitive domains, the book sheds light on the nature of our perspectival minds. |
Contents
An Introduction | 1 |
2 Being Faithful to the Past | 35 |
3 Getting Outside of Ourselves | 65 |
Point of View in Imagery | 96 |
5 The Plurality of Perspectives | 130 |
6 Modes of Presentation in Personal Memory | 150 |
7 Personal Memory and the Perspectival Mind | 181 |
199 | |
215 | |
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Common terms and phrases
agery allocentric representations allocentric spatial argue autobiographical memory Bernecker Brugger Campbell causal chapter claim cognitive content of memory Debus distinction egocentric emotional emphasis original episodic memory event-memory example experienced experiential explicit content explicit de se explicit dese external perspectives feeling of detachment field and observer field perspective first-person Freud from-the-inside genuine memories Goldie idea idiothetic imaginative project immune to error implicit intentional object kinesthesia kinesthetic Leyden memory image mental imagery Michaelian modality mode of presentation multiperspectival Nigro & Neisser notion O’Keefe OBEs object observer memories observer perspective memories occupied point one’s oneself from-the-outside original experience past event past perceptions perceptual experience personal memory perspectival mind perspectives in memory phenomenology point of view recalled Recanati 2007a relation remembered scene remembering from-the-outside Rowlands seems self-presence semantic memory sense sensory server perspectives spatial information subjective suggest Sutton thinking unoccupied Vendler ventral stream visual imagery visual perception Walton Wollheim