13 - The authenticity and utility of memories

Summary

I do not recall the position lucidly enough to notate it here, but perhaps some lover of “fairy chess” (to which type of problem it belongs) will look it up some day in one of those blessed libraries where old newspapers are microfilmed, as all our memories should be.

Vladimir Nabokov (1966), p. 15

Accuracy implies correspondence between what is remembered and an earlier state of affairs in the world. There are two influential points of view that assume that memory is not, or cannot, be accurate. The first, essentially a postmodern view of the world (see Gergen, chap. 5 of this volume), rejects the possibility of correspondence between memory and the event remembered on the grounds that there is no single valid interpretation of the original event against which to attempt a match. By this view, past realities are always being constructed anew and any match is illusory. Another view grants that a kind of accuracy is possible – events may leave a record – but still rejects any simple correspondence model. Memory is seen as a process of reconstruction, not reappearance (Bartlett, 1932; Neisser, 1967). By this view, it is highly unlikely that remembering will be entirely faithful to the original event. There may be occasional correspondence, or accurate remembering, but normal remembering is dynamic. Still, no matter how passive or dynamic one's theory of memory function, it would be very surprising from an evolutionary standpoint if our memories had little to do with the events in our past at all.