Title: Episodic Memory Is Not Immune to Error Through Misidentification: Against Fernández
Lecturer: Kourken Michaelian (Professor at the Université Grenoble Alpes in France)
Chairperson:YU Feng (Associate Professor of Philosophy, East China Normal University)
Date: 3 pm, April26th, 2019 (Friday)
Venue: Feng Qi Academic Achievements Exhibition, 5103 Building of School of Humanities, Minhang Campus, ECNU
Sponsor: Si-mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, ECNU
Abstract of the Lecture:
Fernández maintains that episodic memory is immune to error through misidentification in the sense that, if a subject judges, on the basis of an accurate memory, that he had a certain property, then it is not possible for his judgement to be false due to the fact that he has misidentified himself as the person whom he accurately remembers to have had the property in question. Observer memory intuitively seems to undermine this IEM claim, but Fernández argues that it does not. The talk will isolate three key assumptions of Fernández' argument: a certain definition of observer memory, a certain conception of memory content, and a certain view of the relationship between memory and belief. It will then show that, though the third assumption is plausible, there is good reason to reject the first two and that, if we do so, we obtain the intuitively expected conclusion that observer memory undermines the IEM claim.
Brief Introduction of the Lecturer:
Kourken Michaelian is professor at the Université Grenoble Alpes in France. A specialist in the philosophy of memory, he is the author of Mental Time Travel: Episodic Memory and Our Knowledge of the Personal Past (MIT 2016), which argues against the dominant causal theory of memory and for a novel simulation theory, and the coeditor of volumes including New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory (Routledge 2018) and The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory (2017). At the Université Grenoble Alpes, he is a member of the Philosophy, Pratiques et Langages laboratory and directs the Centre for Philosophy of Memory (http://phil-mem.org/).
