Semantic experiments on 'remember' as Gettier cases of memory
Emil Rosina
May 2024 

This paper brings together my existing semantic and experimental work on memory reports. The composition in (Rosina – Liefke 2024b) zooms in on the German memory predicate ‘noch wissen’ (‘still know’) combining with ‘dass’ (‘that’) and ‘wie’ (‘how’) clauses and unifying the two cases propositionally. Extended to memory predicates in general, we predict that “remembering how” requires better evidence than “remembering that”. Our experimental data (Rosina – Liefke 2024a) suggests an even broader phenomenon of experientiality in memory reports, confirming also the unacceptability of ‘Blue remembers Grandma swimming in the sea’ when Blue did not personally experience the swimming. For the case of ‘dass’/’that’ complements in the same situation (so concerning the question whether indirect experiencers remember at all), the results depend heavily on the study format. Our semantics predicts acceptability, possibly blurred by pragmatic competition. I suggest that pragmatic effects interact in different ways depending on the study format, and that this poses a circularity challenge for experimental methodology. The second lesson from the investigation of my experiments as support for our semantics is that a specific opposing claim is hard or impossible to falsify. Our semantics predicts that experientiality (i.e. the requirement that one must have directly experienced an event in order to “remember how”) is only a pragmatic inference from what we consider good evidence. Alternatively, one can write experientiality directly into the semantics (Stephenson 2010). However, experience and evidence are in practice so connected that examples that would show cancellability are situated in very far-fetched worlds. I put forth an internalist interpretation of our semantics that predicts that beliefs about other people’s reliability intervene between truth-conditions and experimental results. Furthermore, the concepts of direct experience and of evidence are both philosophically nontrivial, so our own philosophical and everyday conceptions play a special role in research on memory reports.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008328 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	[omitted]
keywords:	remembering, episodic and semantic memory, evidentiality, knowledge, pragmatic effects of experimental design, philosophy of linguistics, semantics
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