Abstract
The Galilean explanatory style is characterized by the search for the underlying structure of phenomena, the positing of "deep" explanatory principles, and a view of the relation between theory and data, on which the search for "crucial data" is of primary importance. In this paper, I trace the dynamics of adopting the Galilean style, focusing on the science of episodic memory. I argue that memory systems, such as episodic and semantic memory, were posited as underlying competences producing the observable phenomena of memory. Considered in idealized isolation from other systems, episodic memory was taken to underlay the ability of individuals to remember events from their personal past. Yet, in reality, memory systems regularly interact, standing in many-to-many relations to actual memory tasks and experiences. Upon this backdrop, I explore a puzzle about the increasing prominence of the notion of autonoetic consciousness in Tulving's theory of episodic memory. I argue that, contrary to widespread belief, the prominence is not best explained by the purported essential link between autonoetic consciousness and episodic memory. Rather, it is explained by the fact that autonoetic consciousness, hypothesized to uniquely accompany episodic retrieval, was considered a source of crucial data, predictable only from theories positing a functionally distinct episodic memory system. However, with the emergence of a new generation of theories, positing wider memory systems for remembering and imagination, the question of the relation between episodic memory and autonoetic consciousness has been reopened. This creates a pressing need for de-idealization, triggering a new search for crucial data.
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Notes
It is worth noting that some authors are skeptical that the Galilean style can be characterized uncontroversially in terms of a small set of distinctive attributes, if such characterization is expected to have the required measure of historical credibility (e.g., Botha 1982). This is certainly an important exegetical question. Here, however, I am less concerned with establishing historical authenticity, and more with illustrating the way in which a cluster of explanatory attitudes is exemplified in the memory sciences. For the purposes of the paper, we may take these attitudes to characterize what Botha calls "a lax Galilean style", a mode of inquiry that represents an important methodological tool in the (psychological) sciences, even if it is only loosely connected to Galileo.
Think, e.g., of the variety of systems underlying a simple mental activity like watching the movement of a flock of seagulls. These include shape and color processing systems, motion and object tracking systems, various auditory systems etc. Examples of this kind are easy to generate. See also note 5.
Hence, Galilean idealization is importantly different from what Weisberg (2007) calls "minimal idealization": the practice of constructing theories or models that include only the causal factors that "make a difference" to the occurrence of a target phenomenon. Galilean and minimal idealization differ both in their representational ideals and in the way they are typically justified. For discussion, see Weisberg (2007, pp. 640–649). Thanks to an anonymous referee for prompting me to clarify this point.
In his original characterization, Weinberg (1976) emphasized the pursuit of mathematical models as a central property of the Galilean style (see also Koyré 1943). While Chomsky seemingly borrows this commitment, it is an open question to what extent formal theories in psychology (need to) have a mathematical structure in the sense familiar from physics (see Botha 1982, pp. 9–11). For this reason, I do not include mathematization as a distinctive property of the Galilean style.
On Chomsky's view, the actual use of language, affected as it is by myriad performance factors, is simply too complex to cover by a single linguistic theory (see, e.g., 2000, Ch. 2). "Like the trajectories of leaves or automobiles, [language use] is a massive interaction effect" (Allott et al., 2021, p. 519).
Chomsky takes this idea even further: "If someone were to descend from heaven with the absolute truth about language or some other cognitive faculty, this theory would doubtless be confronted at once with all sorts of problems and 'counter-examples', if only because we do not yet understand the natural bounds of these particular faculties and because partially understood data are so easily misconstrued" (1980, p. 10). See 4.2. for a recent echo of this sentiment, expressed by a memory scientist.
For a good historical overview of the key developments, see Bower (2000).
If you are worried about defining memory processes in terms of memory tasks, you should be, but probably not to death. See Francken et al. (2022) on the likely inevitability of "circular", and iterative, characterizations of tasks, processes, and mechanisms.
Sherry & Schacter (1987) distinguish between a strong view, on which component processes of a system interact only with each other, and a weak view, on which any of the components can interact with processes outside the system. Following the authors, I adopt the weak view in this paper. This should be obvious in the discussion that follows.
We should be careful here. It shouldn't be controversial that there has been uncertainty in the literature pertaining to whether MMS proposals are explanatory or taxonomic. I agree with Willingham & Goedert (2001) that some theorists, especially in moments of carelessness, have tried to have their cake and eat it too. Yet, as Willingham & Goedert readily admit, most MMS proposals have been offered as explanatory theories. Indeed, the debates concerning the individuation of memory systems reflect this. That said, there has been some residual confusion about the relation between memory competence and performance, which I hope to delineate in this paper. See the main text below.
For an excellent historical treatment of the development of Tulving’s thought about episodic memory, and its relation to semantic memory, see Renoult & Rugg (2020).
It should not be underestimated just how bold this proposal was. Tulving aimed to bring together data from disparate domains and—in the pursuit of depth—posit an underlying structure that has serious potential to unify a variety of generalizations. In an early review of Elements, Crowder (1986) noticed this, highlighting Tulving's "radical new focus of episodic memory" (p. 566), a focus which Tulving would later characterize as a "threat to the [then] prevailing order" in the memory sciences (2001b, p. 19).
At different points in this paper, I adopt the idiom associated with the so-called ontic conception of explanation, according to which it is real mind-independent entities—such as neurocognitive systems—that constitute explanations (Salmon 1984). This is primarily for convenience. As far as I am aware, the relevant claims can survive translation to a "representationalist" idiom, associated with the idea that explanations are constituted by explanatory texts of some kind (e.g., sentences, models, diagrams). Tulving, to my knowledge, had no firm view on this issue concerning scientific explanation.
Tulving's conception of semantic memory evolved significantly from 1972, through 1983, to the 2000s. See Renoult & Rugg (2020) for the most important developments.
In the text that follows, I abstract away from some features of Tulving's evolving view of the relation between the episodic and semantic systems; e.g. their position in a class-inclusion hierarchy (1985b) or their process-specific relations, posited by the SPI model (1995). Again, this is mostly for convenience and should not affect the main arguments of the paper.
Admittedly, this point is presented somewhat anachronistically here. In Elements, Tulving adopted an "initial" characterization of episodic tasks, anchored on the necessity of the involvement of the episodic memory system (1983, p. 55). As the quote in the main text indicates, empirical results will push Tulving to the rejection of this idea in the 1990s.
For example, the autobiographical interview, a widely used memory test, is based on the idea that semantic and episodic elements are regularly mixed in "normal" recall and have to be teased out by special scoring protocols (Levine et al., 2002).
Indeed, one can think of particular memories as solutions to various cognitive tasks (Andonovski 2021).
An important corollary of this point is that taxonomic proposals intent on classifying all memories as, e.g., either episodic or semantic will have a characteristically hard time. Moreover, if they do manage to accomplish this, the resultant taxonomies will likely not reflect the functioning of the underlying systems. Tulving (2002a, p. 4) indeed explicitly characterizes the task of unambiguously identifying a particular memory as being either episodic or semantic as "uninteresting", believing it to "lead nowhere". Words of caution for those keen on characterizing the developments in the science of episodic memory as reflecting a search for a good taxonomic criterion of this kind.
As we will see in 3.3, the accumulation of what Tulving considered only seemingly disconfirming evidence—pertaining to the ability of amnesiacs to complete nominally "episodic" tasks—was a major impetus behind the shift of focus to autonoesis.
In many ways, this paper's focus on declarative memory is for expositional convenience. As we will see below, debates in the sciences of memory concerned the existence of (multiple) memory systems tout court. See also note 34.
As it will become clear in the main text, Tulving often talked of autonoesis, mental time travel, and chronestesia in the same breath. All of these notions became prominent and were meant to illuminate a cluster of—not fully independent—properties characterizing the experiences of remembering and imagination. The focus on autonoesis here is primarily for the purpose of gaining some clarity and explanatory leverage. Arguably a similar story can be told by focusing on mental time travel.
Tulving was, of course, building on a long and complex history of philosophical and psychological characterizations of the experience of personal recollection, a history which I omit for reasons of brevity.
He reserved “noetic” (knowing) for the impersonal consciousness linked with semantic memory, and—somewhat curiously, given received wisdom—"anoetic" (non-knowing) for the alleged consciousness associated with procedural memory.
Tulving's sharpened focus on autonoesis was, unsurprisingly, accompanied by a progressively stronger insistence that episodic memory is uniquely human (see Tulving 2005 for the final verdict). That said, the claim that episodic memory and autonoesis are uniquely human appears in the very first paragraph of Elements (1983), yet another reason to think that Tulving's views had not really changed as much in those twenty-odd years as it is widely believed.
It is probably worth noting that Perrin et al. (2020) are actually misquoting Tulving here. In the relevant passage, Tulving tells us that episodic memory is the only memory system "that allows people to consciously re-experience past experiences" (2002a, p. 6). The construction "to episodically remember" does not appear in the 2002 article and, in fact, rarely does in Tulving's articles. As I argue in the text, the slide from competence to performance may be a bit more pernicious than philosophers take it to be.
Tulving (1989), in fact, only rejected the a priori acceptance of concordance across all domains. The key point was that the doctrine, if accepted independently of, and prior to, empirical investigation, can obscure important differences between kinds of processes. See his (1999) on why processing theorists—allegedly—make this mistake. See also 4.3.
For the detail-oriented: see, e.g., 1985a, pp. 385–388; 1985b, pp. 2–3; 1987, pp. 72–73; 1993, pp. 68–69; 2002a, pp. 5–6; 2005, p. 9; Wheeler et al., 1997, pp. 332–333.
This model leaves some important questions open. E.g. what are the degrees of autonoetic consciousness constituted by and how are they manifested? Should we think of them in terms of the strength or vividness of the relevant feelings? While questions of this kind are certainly pressing, Tulving's hypothesis was that specific experimental procedures will reflect the underlying nature of the experiences. Thus, in the newly devised remember-know experimental paradigm, the degree of autonoetic consciousness was taken to be reflected in the strength of the disposition to judge that a certain event/item is remembered and not just known.
See 4.1.
Cf. Tulving (2005): "Let us begin with a thumbnail sketch, or definition, of episodic memory. Because definitions do play a role in the study of nature, even in today's dominant Zeitgeist of "exploratory" science, and because definitions have a habit of changing, it is helpful to identify definitions in a way that sets them apart from others in their class" (p.9, emphasis added).
Again, the claim is not that autonoesis isn't a part of episodic memory's essence. It is only that the prominence of the notion of autonoesis is not best explained by its relation to the alleged essence of episodic memory. It is rather explained by the fact that its distinguishing character was considered a source of crucial data (see the main text below). On the Galilean picture, a thing's essence is constituted by more than just its epistemically distinguishing features. That said, it should not be denied that Tulving does occasionally express peculiar views on these issues. (For example, his responses in an interview with Gazzaniga (1991, pp. 90–92) are particularly puzzling in this regard.).
In the literature, this shift is often characterized as signaling a change in Tulving's conception of episodic memory: from a system that stores what-where-when information to a system to a system characterized in terms of the subjective experience of autonoesis (see, e.g., Cheng et al., 2016). As I aim to illustrate in the main text, we should be careful about how we frame this point. In an important sense, Tulving's conception of episodic memory did not change in the relevant period: in both Tulving (1983) and Wheeler et al. (1997), episodic memory is characterized by a proprietary information store and a retrieval process accompanied by autonoetic consciousness. What changed rather was Tulving's conception of semantic memory: from a system that did not store what-where-when information of the relevant ("episodic") kind to a system that did, or at least could (cf. Renoult & Rugg 2020). As a consequence, the utilization of such information—e.g., in an experimental task—was no longer seen as a reliable indicator of the involvement of episodic memory, triggering a strong shift in emphasis toward autonoesis, which was seen as such an indicator. This is precisely why data about autonoesis came to play the role of crucial data in Tulving's developing theory. (See the main text below.) I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for prompting me to clarify this point.
On one reading of the dialectic, there were actually two issues debated in parallel: the first concerning the very existence of memory systems (as opposed to, e.g., processes), the second the existence of multiple (declarative) memory systems. Part of the difficulty of presenting the dialectic in a non-biased way is due to the fact that rival theorists understand it differently. For Tulving (e.g., 1999, p. 12), only the second issue is worth seriously debating, with the opposition between processes and systems "a false belief". For processing theorists, in contrast, the first question takes precedence (see, e.g., Roediger et al., 1999). For expositional convenience, we are forced to discuss the two issues together. In any case, Tulving's key claim was that processing theorists could not account for the dissociations between "autonoetic" and "noetic" tasks, even if they could account for the dissociations between explicit and implicit ones. See below.
Results from this paradigm have been interpreted in a number of distinct ways after Tulving. For an overview, see Dunn (2004).
To be very clear, I do not endorse this conclusion. I am rather attributing it to Tulving, aiming to illustrate the role autonoesis data played in the development of the theory. As we'll see in 4.2, processing theories are alive and reasonably well.
Two points are worth highlighting here. First, the notion of an ideal autonoetic task is only a conceptual tool, employed to illustrate the different predictions of Tulving's theory and processing (unitarian) theories. Its employment involves no commitment to the claim that such a task is (meta)physically possible. Indeed, given his views, Tulving would likely consider it impossible. Second, by appealing to degrees of autonoesis to characterize "maximally autonoetic" memories, the proposal inherits the problem of clarifying the nature of such degrees. As I indicate in note 29, this is a serious problem for Tulvingian theories.
One cannot but admire Tulving’s prodigious concept creation. If philosophy is uniquely characterized by the creation of concepts (Deleuze & Guattari 1994), then he is quite the philosopher.
This does not mean that they are committed to the absence of such a connection.
The line dividing simulation and autonoetological theories is likely blurrier than presented here. (E.g. it's not clear how to classify Klein's (2016) idiosyncratic account). Nevertheless, the idealized presentation helps us zero in on the issue examined in 4.2.
It is perhaps worth noting that some theorists have taken the report of Klein & Nichols (2012) with an amount of salt. One of the several reasons for this is the peculiar expressive sophistication of R.B., who tended to characterize his anomalous experiences in familiar theoretical terms, speaking, e.g., of taking "ownership" of memories and of his "working memory loss" (p. 688).
In reality, the idea that memories have properties that vary along a number of continuous dimensions has a long history and is, prima facie at least, compatible with the existence of functionally distinct underlying memory systems (Tulving 1983, pp. 67–69).
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Acknowledgements
I am particularly grateful to Georges Rey for introducing me to the Galilean style and inspiring this research. Thanks also to Kourken Michaelian, Steven Gross, Denis Perrin, James Openshaw, Chris McCarroll, André Sant’Anna, Juan Álvarez, José Camillo, Jonathan Najenson, David Colaço, Vilius Dranseika, Andrea Rivadulla Duró, two anonymous reviewers, and audiences at “Phenomenology of Remembering” at the Centre for Philosophy of Memory and “Memory and Consciousness” at Jean Nicod Institute & Ruhr-Universität Bochum.
Funding
NA’s research is funded by the European Union’s Horizon research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement 101062754.
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Andonovski, N. Autonoesis and the Galilean science of memory: Explanation, idealization, and the role of crucial data. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 13, 42 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-023-00548-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-023-00548-3