Abstract

We are acutely aware of the effects of our own memory, its successes and its failures, so that we have the impression that we know something about how it works. But, with memory, as with most mental functions, what we are aware of is the outcome of its operation and not the operation itself. To our introspections, the essence of memory is language based and intentional. When we appear as a witness in court then the truth as we are seen to report it is what we say about what we intentionally retrieve. This is, however, a very restricted view of memory albeit with a distinguished history. William James (1890) said ‘Memory proper is the knowledge of a former state of mind after it has already once dropped from consciousness; or rather it is the knowledge of an event, or fact, of which meantime we have not been thinking, with the additional consciousness that we have thought or experienced it before’ (p. 648).