Memory, anaphora, and content preservation

KRISTA LAWLOR

MEMORY, ANAPHORA, AND CONTENT PRESERVATION

(Received 4 October 2000; received in final version 20 June 2001)

ABSTRACT. Tyler Burge defends the idea that memory preserves beliefs withtheir justifications, so that memory’s role in inference adds no new justificatorydemands. Against Burge’s view, Christensen and Kornblith argue that memoryis reconstructive and so introduces an element of a posteriori justification intoevery inference. I argue that Burge is right, memory does preserve content, but todefend this view we need to specify a preservative mechanism. Toward that end, Idevelop the idea that there is something worth calling anaphoric thinking, whichpreserves content in Burge’s sense of “content preservation.” I provide a modelon which anaphoric thought is a fundamental feature of cognitive architecture,consequently rejecting the idea that there are mental pronouns in a Language ofThought. Since preservative memory is a matter of anaphoric thinking, there arelimits on the analogy of memory and testimony.

1. INFERENTIAL JUSTIFICATION

A central tenet of rationalism is that certain sources of knowl-edge are a priori, so beliefs based on these sources have theirjustification independently of any particular course of human exper-ience. Recently, Tyler Burge has explored a rationalist approach totraditional epistemological problems, extending the a priorist claimoutward to territory involving testimony and memory.1

Focusing on memory, Burge argues for the existence of its non-empirical exercise. “Preservative memory,” as Burge calls it, is“memory that preserves beliefs with their justifications, but contrib-utes no independent source of justification.” Preservative memory,Burge adds, is “epistemically necessary if we are to understand anyargument as justifying beliefs through the steps of the argument.”2

Suppose that Sarah reasons her way through a proof of theexterior angle theorem. She remembers the result of an earlierstep in the proof, that two angles A and B are congruent. On arationalist conception of inference such as Burge defends, Sarah’s

Philosophical Studies 109: 97–119, 2002.© 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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memory-based belief that A and B are congruent retains its a priorijustification, even though Sarah counts on the reliability of hermemory in holding it. The reliability of Sarah’s memory is an empir-ical matter, of course, but entertaining a premise to this effect is nota part of her reasoning, nor is it a fact that is entered as part ofthe justification of her reasoning. Memory, the rationalist wants tosay, can deliver beliefs for use in inference without adding to thejustificational demands on the inference. This is crucial if one isever to enjoy a priori warrant for claims based on inference.3

Burge believes that the argument for the existence of preservativememory will be a simple one: “Preservative memory normallypreserves not only beliefs but warrants . . . for the beliefs itpreserves. This can be argued on a priori grounds, assuming onlythat we reason in time and are sometimes entitled to beliefs that weargue for.”4

But matters are not so simple. It is important to realize that sucha priori considerations can establish at most a provisional claim: Ifwe are to have a priori inferential justification, then we must enjoypreservative memory. This leaves open the possibility that we in factdo not enjoy preservative memory, and so we in fact do not have apriori inferential justification. Indeed, some naturalistically mindedepistemologists have argued that our memories just don’t work in apreservative way.5

A defense of the rationalist conception of inference, then,requires more than the simple a priori argument. We must be ableto specify a memory mechanism with the right features – one thatis capable of preserving justificational space – and one that weplausibly have. In the absence of an account of how we have preser-vative memory, the defense of a rationalist conception of inferenceis incomplete.

I will argue that we do have preservative memory, and that themechanism by which content is preserved is a fundamental featureof our cognitive architecture. While I believe this is an importantresult, I will also argue that it is also importantly limited. Specifi-cally, subsequent comparison of memory and testimony does notfavor extending rationalist claims to the case of beliefs gainedthrough testimony. Burge argues from an analogy of memory andtestimony, that we might apply results concerning memory to the

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case of testimony; however, I believe that once we spell out aplausible account of how memory could work to preserve content,we see that the disanalogies between memory and testimony areoverwhelming.

2. MEMORY’S PRESERVATIVE POWERS

We have to start by digging deeper into what it is to keep justifica-tional space intact. What exactly is preservative memory supposedto do?

Burge begins with a simple observation. In making inferences,one often relies on one’s memory of earlier premises. The longer aninference is, the greater the demands on one’s memory to deliverearlier premises. Even very short inferences demand at least acapacity for some working memory. Thus memory – all are agreed– has a routine role in demonstrative reasoning.

Burge’s distinctive rationalist step is taken when he argues thatthis routine role of memory in demonstrative reasoning is not tosupply propositions about memory or about past events, but simplyto preserve the propositions that have been entered into the demon-stration at an earlier juncture.6 Any reasoning in time will requirememory to fill this role while not imposing additional demandson one’s justification for one’s inference, Burge argues. Otherwiseinferential justification for a belief might fail to be a priori, solelyin virtue of memory’s contribution.7

Preservative memory, according to Burge, in contrast withsubstantive memory, has these features:

Purely preservative memory introduces no subject matter, constitutes no elementin a justification, and adds no force to a justification or entitlement. It simplymaintains in justificational space a cognitive content with its judgmental force.Like inference, it makes transitions of reason possible, but contributes no proposi-tional content. Unlike inference, it is not a transition or move – so it is not anelement in a justification.8

Preservative memory is supposed to (1) make content available, andso (2) make rationally possible inferential moves while at the sametime (3) adding no justificatory demands on the inference.9

This is a job-description, but we have as yet no candidate to fill it.Some argue that the job can’t be filled. Christensen and Kornblith,

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in a recent reply to Burge, have argued that human memory cannotbe preservative in Burge’s sense, charging that “the way memoryactually works suggests that even the purely preservative use ofmemory often introduces empirical elements into the justificationof memory based beliefs.”10 Note that the authors call “preser-vative” those exercises of memory that do change the justificatorystatus of inferential beliefs (from a priori to a posteriori), whileBurge wants to reserve use of the term for exercises that do notalter justification.11 The semantic difference will become extremelyimportant to us soon. Throughout I will follow Burge’s usage, andso characterize Christensen and Kornblith’s claim as the outrightdenial of the existence of preservative memory.

In brief, Christensen and Kornblith’s argument againstpreservative-memory is this: human memory involves reconstruc-tion, as opposed to retrieval, and reconstructive processes alwaysrely on “background beliefs” that are themselves, often enough,empirical in their origin. Consequently, every memory-based beliefis tinged with the a posteriori.

Let us take each of these points in turn. Christensen andKornblith’s first observation is that exercises of memory involvereconstruction of contentful states:

Memory may be divided into three stages: encoding, storage and retrieval. TheHall of Records View would have us believe that encoding is a matter of, ineffect, taking a photograph of the passing scene: storage is a matter of placing thatphotograph in a file; and retrieval is a matter of taking the photograph out of thefile. In fact, however, memory is far more constructive, and less passive, than sucha picture would suggest. Our background concerns, interests and other beliefs –whatever their sources – affect the process at each of the three stages . . .12

Just as everyone agrees that demonstrative reasoning often requiresexercises of memory, everyone will agree that the “hall of records”picture of memory is seriously limited. This is unobjectionable.

Christensen and Kornblith further claim that memory-basedbeliefs are in some sense dependent on background beliefs:

Of particular interest is the way in which memories are often conditioned by,and in a sense incorporate, our background beliefs. Our remembering that P issupported by P’s connections – its inferential connections – with our backgroundbeliefs, just as our beliefs in general tend to cohere with one another. And thebackground beliefs involved include, of course, the empirical ones.13


We can certainly grant the claim that memory is “conditioned by”background beliefs, and that these beliefs are often empirical.14

More specific claims are entered here, however. Which can therationalist accept? Certainly, the rationalist should hesitate over theclaim that reconstruction is a matter of activating specifically infer-ential relations to background beliefs. We can accept this claim as itapplies to beliefs other than those delivered by strictly preservativememory. But we cannot allow that the memory whose job descrip-tion involves (2) and (3) above is itself constituted by the activationof inferential connections.15 I will return to this point below.

A still more serious point of contention is whether such a claimabout the dependence of memory-beliefs supports the claim thatevery memory-based belief, even those conjured up in the courseof inference, must have empirical warrant. This is what Christensenand Kornblith conclude:

. . . insofar as memory is inferentially informed by empirical beliefs, its power tojustify belief would seem to derive, in part, from sense-based information. In suchcases, it would seem pointless to deny that justifications relying on memory wereempirically-based.16

The authors claim that if memory’s “power to justify” derives fromempirical information, then beliefs formed on the basis of memorycan only have empirical warrant. Of course, one wants to knowwhat it is for a capacity to derive its “power to justify” from infor-mation. We’ll examine this claim in a moment, but what is mostimportant to notice here is Christensen and Kornblith’s conclusion:they mean to argue that is that it is pointless to imagine anything likea preservative exercise of memory in inference.

Let’s examine the argument more closely. Christensen andKornblith ask us to consider a case: imagine two people Sophie andSam, who both acquire a belief that the Vikings preceded Columbusin discovering the American continent. Both can no longer recallhow they came by their beliefs. In Sophie’s case, the authors argue,her memory-belief is now available because inferential connectionsexist between this belief and other well-grounded beliefs aboutVikings (she takes a course with an expert), while in Sam’s case,his memory-belief now is available only because inferential connec-tions exist between this belief and other very shabbily groundedbeliefs about Vikings (he believes the rantings of a mad-man). We

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judge Sophie’s belief that the Vikings preceded Columbus to bewarranted, but judge Sam’s belief to be not warranted. The differ-ence must be traced, the authors argue, to the justificatory status ofthe preserving background beliefs:

Even in the cases involving the purely preservative function of memory, the justi-ficatory status of the beliefs a memory causally depends on must be recognizedas playing a role in determining the justificatory status of beliefs based on thatmemory.17

Thus, Christensen and Kornblith argue, it is by causally sustaininga belief that memory comes by its “power to justify.” And theonly mechanism in view that sustains the memory-belief is itsinferential connection to empirical background beliefs. So thesebackground beliefs also justificationally sustain the memory belief.As a result, the empirical background beliefs force memory-beliefsto be empirically justified.

With this much of the dispute before us, I think we can see wherethe rationalist needs to take a stand: preservative memory shouldnot be understood to require inferential connections to other beliefs.The presence of an inferential tie between memory-beliefs and back-ground beliefs makes for a transmission of justificatory status thatthe rationalist wants to deny.

Christensen and Kornblith assume without argument that preser-vation will require inferential relations between beliefs. But nothingforces the rationalist to make inference the mechanism of preser-vation. What the rationalist needs, then, is to specify an alternativemechanism by which memory-beliefs are preserved. In specifyingthis mechanism, the trick will be to acknowledge that the preser-vative memory mechanism might still involve a kind of reconstruc-tion, and that memory-beliefs might be in part “conditioned by”background beliefs.

I believe we can supply the needed preservative mechanism.Before turning to this undertaking, however, I want to brieflyconsider Burge’s own reply to Christensen and Kornblith.


3. BURGE’S REPLY

Burge actually makes two replies to Christensen and Kornblith: thefirst is that we must distinguish between causal and justificatory tiesto background beliefs. So, Burge argues, “the fact that a psycholog-ical condition keeps preservative memory going does not show thatthe condition bears on the epistemic status of the preserved belief.”18

Burge’s distinction is a good one. However, it only turns ourattention to this crucial question – what is to convince us that insuch cases, there is anything but empirical beliefs serving to sustainthe justificatory ties? Distinguishing roles will help Burge only ifthere is a distinctive role-filler: in this case, something that main-tains a memory-belief’s justificatory status, regardless of what itmight be that causally maintains the memory-belief in the cognitiveeconomy. It is open to Christensen and Kornblith to counter with theclaim that the empirical background beliefs fill both justificatory andcausal-sustaining roles, and consequently the memory-based beliefis empirically warranted.

This brings us to Burge’s second reply: Burge insists that all heneeds to argue for is the claim that there must be a distinct capacitythat serves to preserve a priori justification. So, he asks us to focuson the claim that it might happen that “one has different sources ofpossible warrant – those preserved by the original memory and thoseassociated with the subsequently acquired empirical beliefs whoseinferential connections to the belief help support it epistemically.”19

Burge goes on to read Christensen and Kornblith as havingmissed the importance of this possibility of distinct lines of justi-fication, preservative and non-preservative:

They think that there is not even a prima facie entitlement to the belief that derivesfrom the belief’s being preserved from its initially warranted acquisition, in caseswhere the belief is inferentially integrated with other beliefs. I disagree, at leastif (as they seem to stipulate) there remains a preservative memory connection thetimes the belief was held with the original good warrant.20

In other words, Burge reads Christensen and Kornblith ascontending that the presence of non-preservative actions of memoryserve to empirically tinge the justificatory status of a belief. And insome passages, Christensen and Kornblith do in fact seem to acceptthat there really are preservative lines of justification in the example

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in question, lines of justification that get muddied by the presence ofstill other lines of empirical justification. This invites Burge’s quitelegitimate reply. All he set out to show was that one of these lines ofjustification is preservative.

The trouble is, although Christensen and Kornblith seem toacknowledge purely preservative memory, and thereby inviteBurge’s reply, they in fact do not really accept that there is apreservative memory connection at all in the cases in question. Infact, they anticipate Burge’s response about independent lines ofjustification.21 But they counter:

It is hard to see the motivation for the claiming that the justification conferredby a memory which depends on inferential integration with empirically justi-fied background beliefs can itself be purely a priori . . . in cases where amemory is preserved through its connections with empirically justified beliefs,the justification the memory confers will itself be empirical.22

Christensen and Kornblith then, in light of Burge’s proposal aboutindependent lines of justification, continue to insist that no lines ofjustification plausibly are preservative in Burge’s sense.

At this juncture it is clear that Christensen and Kornblith nevermean to fully acknowledge preservative memory in Burge’s sense.In cases like Sam’s and Sophie’s a memory is reconstructed andnot preserved “through its connections with empirically justifiedbeliefs.” Christensen and Kornblith’s objection, then, is not thatpreservative memory’s line of justification can be tinged by the pres-ence of still other lines of justification that are empirical. Nor dothey mean to argue that prima-facie a priori warrants delivered bypreservative memory will be over-ridden by all-things-consideredjudgments. They mean to argue that there’s really no such thing aspreservative memory in Burge’s sense.23

For this reason, it’s no good for Burge to claim that as long asChristensen and Kornblith agree that “if the relevant preservativememory were still sustained” then his conclusions are sustained.The point is that they do not agree.

We reach a stalemate: is there really preservative memory or not?The rationalist says Yes, while the empirically-minded philosophersays No. A weakness is thus exposed in Burge’s defense of therationalist conception of inference. To repair it, we need to show thatthere really is such a thing as preservative memory. And in order


to do that, we must supply a preservative mechanism, and showexactly how facts about memory revealed by cognitive psychologycan be accommodated. If memory is reconstructive, and reconstruc-tions can be effected by background beliefs, we need to understandhow the memory faculty can nevertheless perform a preservativefunction.24

In short, we need our search for a candidate to fill the job ofpreservative memory to turn up something concrete.

4. ANAPHORA AND CONTENT PRESERVATION

Here is a suggestion. Let us begin our search for a mechanism bywhich content is preserved by looking at language that preservescontent.

Specifically, let’s consider a case where some features of preser-vation are familiar – the case of linguistic anaphora, or pronominalreference-fixing in written and spoken language. For example, Samtells Sophie:

Vikings made voyages to America, and Columbus arrived after the Vikings. Sincethat’s true, he couldn’t have discovered it.

Sam’s last statement has component contents that are delivered bylinguistic anaphora. His utterance, “he couldn’t have discovered it,”refers to Columbus, and predicates of him not discovering America.These contents are in some sense preserved from earlier utterances.

Grant that linguistic anaphora does in some sense preservecontent. Our question must be, is content preserved in Burge’ssense?

A good prima facie case can be made for the claim that linguisticanaphora preserves content in just the sense Burge cares about. Forstarters, notice that in deploying linguistic anaphora, Sam engendersno new justificational demands in making his second reference toColumbus. Having secured reference with his first utterance, he canmake reference again, with no new risks of reference failure. Thus,no new justificatory demands attach to his use of the anaphoricpronoun “he.”

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But Burge is concerned with preservation of complete proposi-tional contents, and not just the contents of individual terms. Howcan linguistic anaphora work to preserve propositional contents?

To see how, we need to turn our attention to another anaphoricdevice in Sam’s utterance. When Sam tells Sophie “that’s why hecouldn’t have discovered it,” I want to say, Sam uses the pronoun“that” as an anaphoric device. Just what sort of anaphoric deviceis a delicate issue. “That” is anaphoric, I want to say, because theterm gets its semantic value from an earlier utterance. But “that” isnot a “pro-sentence.”25 This can easily be seen by replacing “that”with a sentence, in Sam’s utterance “that’s true” and noting that theresult is gibberish. (For instance, “Vikings discovered America istrue.”) I think it’s better to say that “that” is a pronominal, specifi-cally, a way of naming a sentence. Replacing “that” with a namefor a sentence yields a good English sentence. (For instance, “thatVikings discovered America is true” or “. . . ‘Vikings discoveredAmerica’ is true.” Thus I claim, there are cases in which linguisticanaphora manages to “reactivate” entire propositional contents.

Furthermore, I believe this reactivation of content counts aspreservation in Burge’s sense. Return to the job description for“content preserver.” According to Burge, the mechanism of contentpreservation must (1) make content available, and so (2) makerationally possible inferential moves while at the same time (3)adding no justificatory demands on the inference. We can see nowthat linguistic anaphora of the sort just described fits this job descrip-tion nicely. The pronominal “that” in our example makes contentfrom earlier utterances available, and so makes rationally possiblethe inference Sam makes. The work that the propositional anaphordoes in no way adds justificatory demands to Sam’s inference. Samdoes not need to justify a claim to the effect that his use of “that’strue” in fact has the propositional content of earlier utterances. Thefact that this content is available is something he is simply entitledto, if his utterance is interpretable at all. Modifying Burge’s formula,then, we can say that linguistic anaphora maintains in justificationalspace an utterance content with its assertoric force.

The case of linguistic propositional anaphora suggests ananalogy. Suppose that one has a capacity for inner anaphora, forthinking about things using anaphoric means. Then thought contents


might enjoy links to each other that preserve content in the senseBurge cares about. Just as in deploying linguistic anaphora oneengenders no new justificatory demands in having made use ofearlier contents, in deploying mental anaphora, one might haveaccess to contents of earlier thoughts without engendering newjustificatory demands.

In short, if we could say what anaphoric thinking might be, wecould say how memory works to preserve content.

5. ANAPHORIC THINKING AND ARCHITECTURAL CONTENT

In what follows, I will take this suggestion up. I will develop theidea that there is something worth calling anaphoric thinking, whichpreserves content in Burge’s sense of “content preservation.”

Before giving the account, however, I should note that Burgedoesn’t like the idea of modeling preservative memory on linguisticanaphora. I will return to Burge’s concerns after proposing anaccount of mental anaphora. We’ll see that what counts as mentalanaphora needn’t run afoul of Burge’s concerns.

We can proceed to make sense of anaphoric thinking in oneof several ways. For one, we could adopt a Language-of-Thoughtmodel of thinking. Then we would try to say that sometimes thestructured representations deployed in an episode of thinking aregappy in some way, or incomplete until some function specifies howto fill the gap with the content assigned to a previously deployedmental structure. In short, we could say that the language of thoughthas pronouns. LOT pronouns are mental representations whosecontent is determined by a function from other LOT markers (andpossibly, context) to content.

We face a serious problem if we take this approach, however.Leaving aside the matter of the defensibility of LOT, the mainproblem is that this solution seems ad hoc. What other reason havewe, aside from wanting a non-inferential mechanism of contentpreservation, for claiming that the LOT has pronominal represen-tations? The reasons we find pronouns in spoken and writtenlanguages do not seem to be reasons for one’s mental vocabulary toinclude pronouns. First, economy of expression is not served, sinceone has to interpret coreference with antecedent mental names to

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which one already has access. One might as well use the mentalname itself, again, in thinking. Second, issues of disambiguation,in which spoken pronouns have subtle and important roles, simplyseem to lapse in the case of a single producer who is also theconsumer of the inner language. Moreover, relying too heavily onthe analogy with linguistic anaphora makes it difficult to get aroundconcerns Burge raises about using anaphora as a model of contentpreservation.

For these reasons, I prefer another approach entirely. I prefer amodel of anaphoric thinking on which there is no explicit markerof anaphoric reference at all: that is to say, there is no inner repre-sentation whose content is the coreference of two representations,nothing with special representational duties similar to the duties ofa pronoun in natural language. The idea is rather that anaphoricthinking arises when a combination of architectural and contextualconstraints are met, in such a way that the content of the struc-tured representation that underwrites one thinking and the content ofthe structured representation that underwrites a second thinking arecontents about the same thing. The fact that the system is designedto produce this effect makes it the case that there is an anaphoriclink between two thinkings. Anaphoric content is an extra layer ofcontent that is determined on the cheap, as it were, without addi-tional explicit representations whose job it is to denote sameness ofreference between thinkings.

My suggestion needs sharpening. In sharpening it, I draw onan account of “architectural content” given by Perry and Israel.26

Architectural content is content determined by the architecture ofthe cognitive system.

Consider by way of illustration their example of a height andweight scale in a doctor’s office. With respect to constraints onthe weight scale concerning how it works, and certain “connectingfacts” such as, that the person in question is standing on the weightbar, the “signal fact” that the weights are at 100 and 80 carriesthe information that the person on the weight bar is 180 pounds.And similarly, with respect to constraints on how the height scaleworks and connecting facts, the signal fact that the height bar is at65 inches carries the information that the person is 65 inches tall.These bits of informational content are “incremental” on Perry and


Israel’s account. The content is information about an individual invirtue of certain contextually varying facts. Further bits of incre-mental informational content are determined when we add furtherfacts. Add the fact that Elwood is on the weight bar, and we havethe incremental content that Elwood weights 180 pounds.

Now Perry and Israel argue that another sort of information isalso available – information that is carried only relative to specialconnecting facts and constraints. The special connecting fact in thisexample is delivered by facts about the architecture of a doctor’sheight/weight apparatus, namely, that the height and weight bars areparts of an apparatus designed in the paradigmatic way. And thenewly important constraint, call it Cscale, concerns this architectureand facts about the shape of persons:

Cscale: if a weight bar and height bar are connected in the appro-priate way, the person who stands on the weight bar willbe the person whose head hits the height bar.

Relative to these constraints and the connecting facts, the twosignal facts – that the weights are at 100 and 80, and that theheight bar is at 65 inches – determine further informational contents,namely: the fact that the height bar is at the 65 inch mark carries theinformation that the person on the weight bar is 65 inches tall; andthe fact that the weight bar is at the 180 mark carries the informationthat the person whose head is hitting the height bar is 180 pounds.

This informational content is determined by the system’s archi-tecture (and is thus dubbed “architectural content”). The importantpoint of such content of course, is that it is useful to the doctorin sizing up the health (via the dimensions) of one person.That is to say, the architecture of the height/weight apparatus isdesigned to induce a relation between the subject of the first signalfact and the subject of the second signal fact. This architectur-ally induced relation (identity) permits architecturally determinedcontents that involve shifted modes of presentation. (The personweighed becomes the subject of a height measurement, and viceversa.) Such shifts carry new and useful information.

The notion of architectural content is very powerful. It isessential for understanding information processing devices of anycomplexity. I believe it is just the tool for understanding anaphoricthinking.

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Compare the following story with the one Perry and Israelprovide. Let’s imagine an architecture for stretches of thinking, anduse it to describe the example of Sam’s making his inference aboutthe Vikings. Sam thinks

Vikings made voyages to America, and Columbus arrived after the Vikings. Sincethat’s true, he couldn’t have discovered it.

Now, I want to say that Sam’s last thought has component contentsthat are delivered by mental anaphora. To capture this notion, Iwill say that the content of the anaphoric thought is determined byarchitecturally induced relations between his thinkings.

In detail, here is how the story will go. Let us suppose that Samentertains structured representations with each thought expressedin this speech to Sarah. When he thinks Vikings made voyages toAmerica, he entertains a representation R1 with component notionsof Vikings, c1, and for the property of voyaging to America, v1. Therepresentation R1 we can imagine has a logical location, let’s callit the “memory register.” Now suppose Sam’s anaphoric thinking“that’s true” involves the representation R2 at another logical loca-tion, the “working register.” And let us imagine that the two registersare designed to work together according to the following constraint:

Cstm: If the memory register and the working register areconnected in the appropriate way (the way they are innormal human beings), then the content of R1 and R2 isthe same.

Relative to this constraint, and the connecting fact that there isa representation R1 in the memory register, the fact that R2 is inthe working register will have the architectural content that thereis a propositional content P such that both the representations R1and R2 have that content.27 The representation R2 has its contentdetermined by an architectural relation. There is no need to supposethat R2 is a special LOT pronoun. Cognitive architecture makes foranaphoric content determination.

Let’s take stock. With this model of thinkings as architecturallyrelated, we can give real sense to the claim that Sam’s successivethoughts about Vikings are anaphorically linked. We can rightly callthis anaphoric thinking, because contents of earlier thinkings are


available to later thinkings. Thus we make good on a broad analogywith anaphora in language.28

I have argued that anaphora in language is a good model fora non-inferential preservative mechanism. And now, I claim, wehave in hand a way to make sense of the idea that thinking canalso be anaphoric. So we have the desired mechanism for contentpreservation.

6. ANAPHORIC THINKING AND PRESERVATIVE MEMORY

As I earlier noted, Tyler Burge is not enthusiastic about modelingpreservative memory on linguistic anaphora. It’s time to considerhis reservations.

Burge admits to seeing an analogy between preservative memoryand what he calls “pronominal back-reference.” The analogy restson the way in which causal chains in preservative memory connectlater thoughts to earlier ones. Preservative memory, Burge says,“takes up the ‘antecedent’ content automatically, without having toidentify it . . .”29

But Burge also sees a disanalogy between preservative memoryand anaphora. As he says,

Anaphora is a syntactic device, whose semantic interpretations may vary,depending on the type of anaphora and the linguistic context of the pronoun.To this degree, anaphora and preservative memory differ. Preservative memoryis not primarily a syntactic matter. It is a preservation of content, fundamentalto the coherence of rational activity. In the memory case, the content and thereferent of the remembered material is not distinct from that of the antecedentthought content . . . The point of preservative memory is to fix the content inpresent mental acts or states as the same as the content of those past ones that areconnected by causal-memory chains to the present ones. If the individual reliesprimarily upon preservative memory, and if the causal-memory chains are intact,the individual’s self-attribution is a reactivation of the content of the past one,held in place by a causal memory chain linking present to past attributions.30

Since anaphora is a “syntactic” device, and preservative memoryis not, Burge resists modeling preservative memory on “pronom-inal back-reference.” Even more importantly, preservative memoryshould be a causal process, according to Burge, not an interpretativeone. Since processing linguistic anaphors requires interpretation, but

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preservative memory introduces no interpretive elements, anaphorais a poor model for content preservation.

I believe Burge’s resistance is understandable, since there aredisanalogies between the operations of preservative memory and theoperations of linguistic anaphora. However, I believe that whateverdisanalogies exist between preservative memory and linguisticanaphora, there are no such disanalogies between preservativememory and mental anaphora. So while I would agree that weshould not model preservative memory on the deployment of alinguistic device, I argue that we certainly can model it on mentalanaphora.

Mental anaphora, as I have it, is not a syntactic device. Anaphoricthinking involves a relation between thought-contents determinedby architecture and context. The input and output of anaphoricthinking are representational contents. Anaphoric thinking results ina re-activation of propositional content without the thinker’s havingto refer to her own thoughts or in any other way to re-identifyanything.

Consequently, I believe that Burge should not resist the idea thatanaphoric thinking preserves content. Moreover, no other mech-anism explains as well the fact that content preservation is requiredfor genuine inference. (Burge’s second desideratum.) In the courseof making an inferential transition, one must appreciate, or takeit to be the case, that various of one’s thoughts in an inferenceare about the same thing.31 And anaphoric thinking involves justthis sort of appreciation. Consider Sam’s reasoning about Vikings:In making his inference, Sam in some sense supposes that he isthinking of the same thing (Vikings) throughout. His suppositiondoes not come in the form of an explicit premise of course.32 Moreformally, we might say that it is a presupposition of his infer-ence that there is sameness of reference across premises. Anaphoricthinking, on the account I’ve just offered, is precisely what deliversthis presuppositional content. So we can give sense to the idea thatpreservative memory, understood as a bit of anaphoric thinking,makes inferential transitions possible.

Also, we see how reliance on the mechanisms of anaphoricthinking does not alter the a priori nature of deductive inference.Appeals to anaphoric thinking are not part of the justification


of the inference. Empirical premises concerning the workings ofanaphoric thinking are not entered into one’s justification for aninferential transition. So the a priori nature of inference is notaltered on this account of content preservation. Justificational spaceis left unaltered by the exercise of the mechanism responsible forpreservation of content.

Finally, we can make sense of the idea that memory involvesreconstruction as much as retrieval. On the anaphora model, thecontent of beliefs is determined in part by architectural relations toother beliefs. Thought content that is preserved is a function of theserelations. No simple retrieval from a storehouse is involved.

What about Christensen and Kornblith’s objection, that preservedbeliefs determined by background beliefs would have to be empir-ical if the background beliefs are empirical? We answer thisobjection by rejecting the idea that content is preserved by infer-ential connections to background beliefs. On the anaphora modelpreserved belief content does not stand in inferential relations tobackground beliefs. Rather, preserved belief content is determinedby cognitive architecture, which is a causal relation.

The upshot is that the preserved belief retains its initial justifi-catory status. An empirically justified belief that is preservedremains empirically justified. And an a priori belief that is preservedremains a priori. This is just what Burge wants to say. His centralpoint is that preservation itself adds no new justificatory demandson the inference, not that it makes all preserved beliefs a priori.The mechanism of preservation simply holds a propositional attitudein justificatory space. (Again, while the mechanism must of courseitself be reliable if inference is to be good, the fact of reliability isno part of the justification of the inference.)

All these features of preservative memory are made good by theanaphora model. For these reasons, a capacity for mental anaphoraexplains the phenomenon of content-preservation.

7. MEMORY AND TESTIMONY

My central concern has been the defense of the rationalist concep-tion of inference as a source of knowledge. Specifically, I havebeen concerned with the contribution of memory-based beliefs to

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the overall justification of an inference. I have argued that preser-vative memory, understood as anaphoric thinking, makes transitionsof reason possible, while not itself being a transition of reason.Reliance on preservative memory, therefore, even if memory issusceptible to causal malfunction, does not alter the a priori natureof deductive inference.

Further, the mechanism by which content is preserved, if I amcorrect, is an important and routine feature of our cognitive andperceptual architecture. We see evidence of architectural contentdetermination everywhere. For example, in our visual system,stereoptic content is architecturally determined. So there is everyreason to suppose that further researches into the workings ofmemory will corroborate the hypothesis that we engage in anaphoricthinking.

How far do these results take us? Significantly farther in thedefense of rationalism about inferential knowledge, I believe. Butwhat about Burge’s hope to extend the domain of the a priori toinclude beliefs formed on the basis of testimony? Here, I think theresults are negative. If we model preservative memory on anaphoricthinking, there are obvious limits on the analogy of memory andtestimony.

Burge wants to claim that one can enjoy defeasible (pro tanto)a priori entitlement to belief contents delivered through testimony.He argues that we can understand how by exploiting an analogybetween memory and testimony. There are numerous questions wemight have about the suggested analogy. What I want to focus on isthe fact that nothing in the model of anaphoric thinking in terms ofarchitectural determination of content supports an extension to thetestimony case.

The reason is simple. My beliefs about what you say are deter-mined through a process of rational interpretation. But the mech-anism of anaphoric thinking which I have posited is causal, notrational. Anaphoric thinking is not a matter of self-interpretation.

In fact, the model of anaphoric thinking is constructed preciselyto observe this fact. Only in this way did we avoid Burge’s chargeagainst syntactic anaphora as a preservative. Beliefs formed on thebasis of testimony involve interpretation, beliefs formed on the basisof preservative memory do not. Consequently, if we understand how


memory can be preservative in the way I argue, then we lack groundsfor extending the model to the testimony case.

Admittedly, there is a way in which an anaphora model of contentpreservation is suggestive about issues concerning the epistemol-ogy of testimony. Testimony, after all, can and often does involvelinguistic content preservation through linguistic anaphora. This isan important enough fact to be worth a brief digression.

Suppose Sarah tells John that her teacher proved the externalangle theorem; Sarah’s been impressed by her teacher in the past,leading her to call him “Mister Math.” John subsequently testifiesabout her report: “Sarah tells me that the person she calls ‘MisterMath’ proved the external angle theorem in class.” John’s reportinvolves a kind of testimonial anaphora.33 John’s utterance employsan anaphoric referring device “the person she calls ‘X’,” whose ante-cedent is Sarah’s use of the expression “Mister Math.” The referenceof the expression in John’s utterance will be resolved by determiningthe reference of this expression in Sarah’s utterance. If Sarah’s utter-ance is true (the teacher did prove the theorem), John’s utterance willbe, too. The fact that he transmits these contents does not alter theircontent.

Here then is a disagreement with Burge. Burge seems to thinkthat all linguistic anaphora is ruled out as a tool of contentpreservation. Recall that Burge argues that linguistic anaphora isnot apt for memory-based content preservation because “anaphorais a syntactic device, whose semantic interpretations may vary,depending on the type of anaphora and the linguistic context ofthe pronoun.” He thereby suggests that in the standard case ofpreservation, the memory case, we cannot allow room for inter-pretation. Interpretation would create a distinction between originaland preserved content, but in the memory-case, “the content and thereferent of the remembered material is not distinct from that of theantecedent thought content. . . .”

But the deployment of linguistic anaphora does not alwaysinvolve interpretation, at least if we allow such phenomenadescribed above to count as linguistic anaphora. So it is not ruledout as a means of content preservation. As we have seen, sometimesone simply reports upon whatever another speaker uttered, withoutresolving anaphoric reference oneself.34

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That said, this disagreement with Burge over the role of linguisticanaphora is small. We can agree with Burge that linguistic anaphoracannot serve as a preservative tool to transmit a priori warrant tobeliefs formed on the basis of hearing testimony. It is this sort ofcontent preservation that interests Burge. Suppose Kay hears John’sreport about Sarah’s testimony. She comes to believe the contents inquestion, not in virtue of standing in some causal relation to theutterances, but in virtue of understanding what John’s utterancesmean, and having reason to credit them as true. Coming to believesomething on the basis of resolving anaphoric reference will involveinterpretation. And here, I think Burge is correct to think that purelylinguistic anaphora will not transmit content to belief states withwarrants preserved.

In sum, anaphora is a good model for beliefs formed on thebasis of memory, but not for beliefs formed on the basis of testi-mony. Since anaphoric thinking is the best candidate to fill the jobof content preserver in the case of inferential memory, argumentsfor content preservation in testimony will probably best proceedwithout reliance on an analogy between testimony and memory.

NOTES

1 See Burge (1993, 1997, 1998).2 Burge (1997), p. 37.3 Being careful about what we mean by “a priori” will be not be crucial to ourdiscussion. Nevertheless, we should note that there is disagreement in usage in theself-knowledge literature: sometimes it is used to mean that “sufficient reflection”should suffice for knowledge of that which is a priori knowable; or that “avail-ability to introspection” is a hallmark of a priority. Others simply identify the apriori with “the given,” or occasionally that which is “in the head or before themind” in order to repudiate it. I believe that the sense of a priority most suited toclaims that self-ascribe thought content does not require introspection as a source;rather what is central to a priority is that the self-ascription be available withoutreliance on inference from specific empirical belief. This accords with Burge’susage.4 Burge (1997), p. 37. Notice that Burge’s claim is not that memory is a source ofa priori warrant, but that appeals to memory (or exercises of memory that delivermemory-based beliefs) need not disrupt the a priori character of inference.5 Christensen and Kornblith (1997).6 Of course, sometimes it is memory’s role to deliver propositions about thepast for the purposes of demonstrative reasoning, but this sort of memory is


substantive, not preservative, and it is not the sort of memory that has a routinerole in inference.7 Burge’s opponent here is Chisholm, who argues that exercises of memory doplace extra burdens on a prover. See Burge (1993), p. 457ff.8 Burge (1998b), p. 465.9 Not only is content made available, as (1) demands, but also the original attitu-dinal force is preserved.10 Christensen and Kornblith (1997), p. 13.11 Burge does not imply that preservative memory makes beliefs a priori, but thatif the belief is a priori and then preserved in memory, it will retain it’s a prioristatus. He stresses this point in Burge (1997).12 Christensen and Kornblith (1997), p. 15.13 Ibid.14 There are at least two senses in which memory is “conditioned by” backgroundbelief: in one sense, the content of memory-based beliefs will be determined (inpart) by still other retained beliefs; in a second sense, whether one manages toremember, as opposed to what is remembered, is so determined.15 Noting this, it is curious that Burge himself allows for the sake of argumentthat preservative memory meets Christensen and Kornblith’s conditions.16 Christensen and Kornblith (1997), p. 15.17 Ibid., p. 17 my emphasis.18 Burge (1997), p. 41.19 Ibid., p. 42.20 Ibid., p. 43, original emphasis.21 They write: “one might object that, in the case in question, the initial warrantfor Sam’s belief (provided by his purely preservative memory) is present, butis undermined by the belief’s inferential connections with other beliefs. Thusthe belief receives a certain degree of warrant from purely preservative memory,independent of any considerations of the memory’s inferential integration,” p. 17.This just is Burge’s reply.22 Ibid., p. 18.23 Regardless of Christensen and Kornblith’s real intentions, however, whatmatters is that anyone wanting to argue against Burge’s rationalist conception ofinference should argue against the very possibility of preservative memory, andits delivering independent lines of justification.24 One immediate concern is whether all memory is reconstructive in the senseChristensen and Kornblith intend. We might enjoy a variety of memory capacities,some more reconstructive than others. It is open to Burge to argue that inferentialmemory is less like reconstruction and more like pure retrieval. For the sake ofargument, I will suppose that all memory is in some way reconstructive.25 Discussion of “pro-sentences” and “pro-sentential” operators can be found inGlover (1992).26 Perry and Israel (1991), and Perry (1993).27 Some architecturally delivered content is not to the effect that there is identityof subjects of various other representational contents. The architecturally induced

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relation in some systems may fall short of identity. See Perry and Israel forexamples.28 Note, in giving an anaphora model of preservative memory, we do not imaginethat one has special anaphoric ways of thinking, or modes of presentation, of theobject itself. One doesn’t grasp a referent under a distinctly anaphoric mode ofpresentation. This is a virtue in the eyes of those for whom anaphoric modeswould be anathema for roughly the same reasons that indexical modes are.See Perry (1993). In a Fregean framework senses are absolute and not contextsensitive in the way that indexical expressions and anaphoric expressions are.

So too, we avoid making the assumption that there exists in a language ofthought a stock of inherently pronominal mental words. If one is committed toa language of thought, one should perhaps find odd the idea of repeatable typeswhose only function is pronominal. Why should the cognitive system use theseinstead of the concept or mental word itself? If economy of cognitive effort isconsidered, it argues in favor of letting anaphoric effects fall out of architecturalconstraints.29 Burge (1998b), p. 358.30 Ibid., p. 359, my emphasis.31 The force of the “must” here is conceptual. Were one not to in some senseappreciate the sameness of thing thought about, one’s thinking would not evencount as an inference. (Alternatively, if we were to speak in terms of a languageof thought, we might say that one must appreciate in some sense that variouskey terms (the middle terms) in one’s inference, share reference.) The appeal ofanaphoric thinking in this role should now be apparent. We can avoid tortoise-and-hare style regress arguments.32 John Campbell (1987) makes this point, calling the requirement for makinginferential transitions the requirement that one be able to “trade on the purportedcoreference of two mental term tokens.” As I would have it, “trading on corefer-ential purport” requires thinking of the thing as being the same thing. But I resisttalk of trading on coreference of mental terms, since I want to avoid talking interms that suggest a language of thought.33 For further details see Robert Brandom’s approach in Brandom (1994), espe-cially chapter 5.34 It is an interesting question whether in such cases, something more like a purelycausal mechanism can be posited to preserve content. We no doubt enjoy facilitiesfor speech production that helps us to parrot utterances without understandingthem while we do so.

REFERENCES

Brandom, R. (1994): Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and DiscursiveCommitment, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Burge, T. (1993): ‘Content Preservation’, Philosophical Review 102(4), 457–489.


Burge, T. (1997): ‘Interlocution, Perception and Memory’, Philosophical Studies86, 21–47.

Burge, T. (1998a): ‘Reason and the First Person’, in MacDonald, Smith andWright (eds.), Knowing Our Own Minds: Essays on Self-Knowledge, Oxford:Oxford University Press.

Burge, T. (1998b): ‘Memory and Self-Knowledge’, in Ludlow and Martin(eds.), Externalism and Self-Knowledge, Vol. 85, Stanford University: CSLIPublications, 465 pp.

Campbell, J. (1987): ‘Functional Role and Truth Conditions: Is Sense Trans-parent’, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume LXI, 273–292.

Christensen and Kornblith (1997): ‘Testimony, Memory and the Limits of the APriori’, Philosophical Studies 86, 1–20.

Glover, D. (1992): A Prosentential Theory of Truth, Princeton: Princeton Univer-sity Press.

Perry and Israel (1991): ‘Information and Architecture’, in Barwise et al. (eds.),Situation Theory and Its Applications, Vol. 2, Stanford University.

Perry (1993): ‘Thought Without Representation’, in Perry (ed.), The Problem ofthe Essential Indexical, New York: Oxford University Press.

Stanford University, CAUSA

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Memory, anaphora, and content preservation