Sofia Pedrini and Markus Werning
Affiliation: Ruhr University Bochum
Category: Philosophy
Keywords: Justification, Sense of Reality, Phenomenology of Memory
Date: Wednesday 3rd of September
Time: 17:00
Location: Room 161 (161)
View the full session: Subjective Experience
I look out my kitchen window and see that it is raining and that the garden is wet. I then take a shower. Later, I return to the kitchen and notice that the rain has stopped, but the garden remains wet. Since I remember that it rained earlier, I justifiably form the belief that the garden is wet because it rained. Now, suppose I had not witnessed the rain before taking my shower. In this case, upon seeing the wet garden, I might wonder: Did it rain, or was the garden watered? Without access to additional evidence—such as a weather app or someone’s testimony—I cannot rationally decide between the two possibilities.
This example illustrates that both perception and episodic memory can justify beliefs about what is actually the case, whereas imagination—at least in this context—cannot. When I perceive that it is raining, I am justified in believing that the garden is wet because it is raining. When I remember that it rained half an hour ago, I am justified in believing that the garden is wet because it rained. However, if I merely imagine that it rained, I am not justified in forming the same belief (Hopp 2011).
What explains the shared epistemic power of perception and memory? A widely accepted view holds that a mental state’s justificatory power stems from its phenomenal character—such as the Leibhaftigkeit (Husserl 2005) or transparency of perception (Martin 2002). Thanks to this phenomenal character, we tend to “trust” our perception, reliably basing our beliefs on it. The same appears to hold for memory: in certain cases, such as the one above, we reliably form beliefs based on memory. To fully understand mnemic justification—how we justifiably form beliefs based on episodic memory—we must analyze the phenomenal character of memory itself.
Contemporary debates on the phenomenology of memory often focus on two key aspects of episodic remembering: the sense of pastness and the sense of ownness. The sense of pastness acts as a temporal marker, signaling that the remembered object, event, or experience belongs to the past. The sense of ownness, on the other hand, is the feeling that the remembered object or event was experienced firsthand, or that the remembered experience belongs to oneself (Dokic 2014).
These features distinguish the phenomenal character of episodic memory from that of sensory imagination. However, I argue that they are insufficient to fully account for memory’s justificatory power. To explain why memory, like perception, can justify beliefs, we must identify the shared phenomenal feature that enables both memory and perception to do so.
I propose that this common feature is the sense of reality, which—drawing on early phenomenological accounts of “objective experience” (Textor 2019)—I define as the sense of the represented object’s independence from the act of representation. This crucial aspect of the phenomenology of remembering has been overlooked in contemporary philosophy of memory (Dokic 2014; Perrin, Michaelian, & Sant’Anna 2020; Perrin & Barkasi 2024), yet it is essential for understanding mnemic justification, as neither the sense of pastness nor the sense of ownness can fulfill this role. The sense of reality thus deserves closer attention and analysis.
The sense of reality can be analyzed in terms of three core features. First, perception and memory exhibit mind-independence: their objects are experienced as existing independently of the act of representation—whether perceptual or mnemic. Second, they display constancy, retaining their identity across different perceptual and mnemic acts. Third, as a consequence of mind-independence, their objects are experienced as revealed rather than created, meaning they appear as coming into view rather than being brought into existence by the subject.
By highlighting the role of the sense of reality in mnemic justification, this paper contributes to ongoing debates on the epistemic significance of phenomenal character, the nature of memory, and the role of epistemic feeling. My account offers a conceptual and phenomenological framework open to empirical refinement, inviting further research into the relationship between memory, perception, and justification.
References Dokic, J. (2014). Feeling the Past: A Two-Tiered Account of Episodic Memory. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 5(3), 413-426. Hopp, W. (2011). Perception and Knowledge: A Phenomenological Account. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Husserl, E. (2005). Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925). J. Brough, trans. Dordrecht: Springer. Martin, Michael G. F. (2002). The transparency of experience. Mind and Language 17 (4):376-425. Perrin, D., Barkasi, M. (2024). Immersing oneself into the past: Episodic remembering can include perceptual presence. To be submitted to Philosophy and the Mind Sciences. Perrin, D., Michaelian, K., Sant’Anna, A. (2020). The Phenomenology of Remembering is an Epistemic Feeling", Frontiers in psychology 11: 1531. Research topic: Epistemic Feelings: Phenomenology, Implementation, and Role in Cognition. Eds. C. Fields, D. D. Hoffman, E. Dietrich, and R. Prentner. Taylor, R. (1956). The “Justification” of Memories and the Analogy of Vision. The Philosophical Review, 65(2), 192–205. Textor, M. (2019). Perceptual objectivity and the limits of perception. Phenom Cogn Sci 18, 879–892.