The Metaphysics of Memory, by Sven Bernecker

Given the recent dearth of philosophical work on memory, Sven Bernecker’s The Metaphysics of Memory comes as a welcome intervention, particularly as it brings historical philosophical debates around memory into contact with relevant recent philosophical work and (though to a lesser extent) with relevant empirical work on memory. The book will be an indispensable addition to the library of any philosopher of memory; due to its systematic but accessible character, it will also be a useful resource for other researchers and advanced students in need of an introduction to the area. Bernecker begins with a brief chapter providing some background on the project of the book. His focus on fact (rather than object, property, or event) memory, on veridical (rather than ostensible) memory, and on occurrent (rather than dispositional) memory is natural and familiar. His distinction between reproductive memory (memory for facts) and metarepresentational memory (memory for one’s own mental states) is less so, and as he returns to the distinction elsewhere in the book, it would have been helpful to see it developed in more detail. Chapter 1 also considers preliminary analyses of reproductive and metarepresentational memory; these amount to a schematic statement of the venerable causal theory of memory, according to which remembering requires a causal connection (via a memory trace) between a current representation and an earlier representation. Part I of the book then develops and defends a more precise version of the causal theory, while Part II argues for direct realism about the objects of memory and responds to scepticism about memorial knowledge by applying epistemological externalism to memory. Part III, the shortest but most interesting section of the book, is concerned with reconciling the factivity constraint (the requirement that the content of a memory matches a previously represented content) with the observation that memory is in general reconstructive, arguing in the process for a novel memorial contextualism according to which ‘whether a memory state must be identical with the representational state it causally derives from or whether it suffices that the two states are merely similar depends on the conversational context of the rememberer and the attributor’ (p. 169). Part I begins with a chapter discussing a range of direct arguments for and against the causal theory. For example, In response to Malcolm’s argument (against the theory) that Reviews 623