Notes on "Memory" in SEP, part 1

Notes on "Memory" by John Sutton in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
<John.SUTTON@scmp.mq.edu.au>

1. Distinguish memory (or learning or plasticity) in animals and memory in human cognition. Models for animals need to be consistent with more sophisticated models for human cognition. Logical approaches to modeling, such as CG, Situation Theory, DRT and MRS, are rather specialized models of human cognition, that still need to be grounded in models for animals.
2. Memory is to "retain information and reconstruct past experiences, usually for present purposes." From situation theory, we can say memory is to retain over time the attunement to a usually past situation. The typical case is that a situation that is presently experienced enters memory as it passes into the past. Considering long-term memory, the process may require a good nights sleep, and what is retained is attunement to a discrete representation of what is salient in an experienced situations, perhaps only a fragmentary representation much less detailed that what was experienced. We can also have prospective memories, remembering plans or intentions for the future that have not actually occurred, what is remembered is the conscious experience of planning or intending. "For present purposes" implies that memories are activated into current mental experience for present action.
3. Memory is not pure imagination. Conscious experience can come in many forms: cognized immediate perception (perhaps animals without consciousness require us to consider levels of perception that are not cognized, or we can just call the subcognitive phenomena sensation or basal perception), plans and intentions, pure imagination and mental imagery, verbal daydreaming and song lyrics, and conscious memory. Conscious memory can be of past perceptual experience, of past plans and intentions. Are there veridicality conditions on memory, so that false memories are not really memories at all but memory-like experiences that fail on some essential criteria of what is memory? What about readily inferrable knowledge, that a person never really knew but inferred from facts and constraints that are known, but with the inference occurring only at the time of "recall"? Is it knowledge, but not memory, that I know Nelson Mandela has a liver? Searle talks about "unconscious" beliefs and other intentional mental states.
4. The term memory is used very broadly. I am most concerned with the remembering of facts and knowledge as intentional mental states. Things like beliefs, desires, prior intentions, intention-in-action, perhaps even cognized perception. This excludes phonological memory and music memory, which are below the lexical-factual level of mental states, and basic visual memory which is not yet discretely classified, although it could include memory of visual relations (the red cylinder is on top of the green cube) . A big chunk of this is done in verbal schemes of individuation, but visuo-spatial facts can also be remembered. And the edge cases of Deaf language and language-isolated deaf children are also interesting to test the models. This mental level is too broad for thesis study, so I would like to narrow down to lexical-phrasal memory in a specific language, and related conceptual memory that is language independent. This could go slightly below lexical items, to the discrete qualia proposed by Pustejovsky.
5. What is the relation of memory and belief? We remember facts (at least) and we believe facts to be true. But we can remember indeterminate states of affairs (a doubtful "fact-nonfact"), or remember an optical illusion we know is not actually true. Perhaps a belief is like a speech act in that it involves a commitment, a thought-is-to-world direction of fit.
6. I am interested in the aspects of remembering that can be communicated. It is possible that there is no overarching model of memory and mental states, there are only thousands of memory games with family resemblances.
7. ... [continue with section 1.1]