Abstract

Without articulate memory, we should have little worthy of the name of knowledge, other than awareness of what is present, recognitional abilities, some forms of know‐how and inchoate expectations resulting from past experience. Knowledge of past experience involves memory, but not all memory is knowledge of past experience. This chapter explores three alternative suggestions and emphasizes the nexus of memory with knowledge previously acquired, rather than with knowledge of the past. Broadly speaking, the thought is that perception gives us knowledge of the present, expectation gives us opinion of the future, and memory gives us knowledge of the past or ‘access’ to past experience. The chapter examines the idea that all memory is ‘of the past’. The relationship between remembering and ‘actualizing’ one's memories is not the same as that between being able to do something and doing it.