Recall the Memory Argument for Inner Awareness

Dados Bibliográficos

ID21876362
AutoresAmit Chaturvedi (0000-0003-1774-9870, University of Hong Kong, autor correspondente)
Ano2025
Volume11
Fascículo3
Páginas601-621
Data de publicação2025-09-01
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoJournal of the American Philosophical Association (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 2053-4477 • E-ISSN: 2053-4485
EditoraCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/apa.2025.10
OpenAlexW4409704384
IdiomaEN
Referências citadas43

An intuition about consciousness known as the ’Awareness Principle’ states: For any mental state M of a subject S, M is conscious only if S has an ’inner awareness’ of M. Some have recently defended this principle by revising the ’memory argument’ first offered by the sixth-century Buddhist philosopher Dignāga: from the fact that an experience can be episodically remembered, it should follow that a subject must have been aware of that experience. In response, I argue that defenders of the memory argument haven’t convincingly established the episodic memorability of experience, because they haven’t defused a countervailing claim that conscious perceptual experience is phenomenologically ’transparent’. This claim, if true, would suggest that what one can episodically remember is just how the (external or internal) world appeared through one’s ’outer awareness’, rather than how the past experience itself appeared through one’s inner awareness. I further argue that the memory argument can accommodate phenomenological transparency only at the expense of making the Awareness Principle trivial. The memory argument defender may then claim that there is some non-introspectible feature of a past experience that is episodically memorable, namely, that experience’s subjective character or phenomenal ’for-me-ness’. In response, I develop an objection from the tenth-century Śaiva philosopher Utpaladeva against the possibility of recalling a past experience’s subjective character as such. Overall, while the objections this article raises cannot falsify the Awareness Principle directly, they may motivate its proponents to recall their support for the memory argument

Cognitive psychology · Cognitive science · Recall · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Medicine · Memory and Neural Mechanisms · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Psychology

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