Memory and Representation

On any view which thus treats causal connectedness as built in to our concept of memory, remembering is a core instance of the general, flexible human capacity to think about events and experiences which are not present, so that mental life isn't entirely determined by the current environment and the immediate needs of the organism. We can often remember without having any such traces in our current external environment, such as photographs or words written in a diary: so many philosophers and scientists have argued that memory traces or representations are retained within the individual.
Although it takes many significantly different forms, this idea that a ‘trace’ acquired in past experience somehow ‘represents’ that experience, or carries information about it, is at the heart of ‘representative’ or ‘indirect’ realism in the philosophy of memory. This has been the dominant view of memory in modern philosophy of mind, and it is assumed in much work on memory in cognitive science. Research programmes for representative realism thus seek to clarify the nature of representations in memory, and the various processes in which they are involved. But before examining these topics, we need to look at criticisms of the entire representative realist framework. Some recent work in the cognitive sciences of memory, described in section 3 below, is intended to respond to or incorporate the more powerful of these criticisms within revised forms of representative realism.