Remembering as a metacognitive kind
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H/G21, Eynns Room, Heslington Hall, Campus West, University of York (Map)
Event details
Recent philosophy of memory models confabulation on perceptual hallucination. Just as hallucinators are said to perceive no present object, confabulators refer to no past event. Yet confabulating patients (eg, in Korsakoff's syndrome, Alzheimer's disease) often do produce representations of, and from, events in their pasts, without thereby remembering them.
What goes wrong is not a missing connection to a real event but proper functioning of processes that select, monitor, and evaluate memory retrieval. Making sense of this requires rethinking what remembering is: a teleofunctional capacity whose function is to deliver information fit for use. As such, monitoring is not an external audit of remembering but a constitutive element. Remembering is a partly metacognitive kind.
About the speaker
James Openshaw
James is an Assistant Professor (tenure-track) in Philosophy at NTU Singapore. His principal interests are in philosophy of mind/cognitive science. Recent work concerns memory and singular thought (or reference).
He serves as Graduate Coordinator for Philosophy at NTU, and Chair of the Philosophy of Memory Organization. He is an Affiliated Member of the Centre for Philosophy of Memory in Grenoble, where he led the Objectual Memory project as a Marie SkÅ‚odowska-Curie Individual Fellow from 2021–2024.
He currently holds a Singapore MOE Tier 1 research grant for the project Referential (Dis)continuities in Imagination and Memory (2026–2029) and collaborates on an ANR/DFG-funded project, The Semantics of Episodic Representations (2026–2029).
Time has been set aside after the event for informal discussion with the speaker.