Immunity to Error through Misidentification
Chapter 6 offers an account of an epistemic feature of memories; their immunity to error through misidentification. When one judges that one experienced something, based on a full and accurate memory, it is not possible for one to be wrong because one has misidentified the person who one remembers to have had the experience as being oneself. Two challenges to the idea that memories have this feature are considered. One employs the notion of quasi-memory. The other one appeals to the phenomenon of observer memory. It is argued that neither challenge is successful and that the self-referential content of memories does suggest that memory judgments are immune to error through misidentification. The key to this immunity concerns the presence of the self in the content of memories. And that presence, in turn, is due to the nature of perceptual content and the relation between perceptual content and mnemonic content.