CONTRIBUTI / 14 / Shin Sakuragi
“Remember” is one of the most frequently used English verbs to express our mnemonic phenomena. In the traditional taxonomy of memory in philosophy, called the tripartite concepts, two concepts of declarative memory – propositional and experiential memories – are distinguished. Recently, the traditional classification has been drawing criticism. Markus Werning and Sen Cheng reject the classification because it is based upon English grammar. Sven Bernecker argues that the distinction between the two concepts is «not sharp». In this paper, I defend the two philosophical concepts of memory. The argument in this paper is twofold. Despite Werning and Cheng’s observation, I argue that the two memory concepts are not characterized by English grammar. Against Bernecker, I also defend the alleged ambiguity between the two memory concepts. In my view, the two types of memories appear to be «not sharp» not due to conceptual ambiguity, but rather different ways of memory attribution.
