Misremembering the past: a failure but not a malfunction

Abstract

Abstract Episodic memories can fail to represent the past. We often forget, misremember, or make up histories we have never experienced. Yet according to the mnemonic function, episodic memory evolved for encoding, storing, and retrieving tolerably accurate representations of the past to use in retroactive and unrestricted learning (Boyle, 2019, 2022; Brown, 2024; Schwartz, 2020). This appears to entail that episodic memory malfunctions regularly (De Brigard, 2014), whenever episodic memory is less than tolerably accurate. In this paper, I reject the intuitive inference from a trait’s failure to achieve its selected effect to a malfunction. Instead, I argue that inaccurate memories are often failures without being malfunctions. I exemplify this by considering the misinformation effect and the false memory paradigm. These are two common and extreme ways of misremembering, often cited to show the malleability of episodic memory (Loftus, 2005). However, I show that the best explanation of these memory errors is that they are “misfunctions” rather than malfunctions (Millikan, 2017; Sullivan-Bissett, 2024). To properly show that this is the best explanation of these memory errors, I exclude various alternative explanations. While these alternatives do not provide a good explanation of these two memory errors, their discussion is of vital importance for the aim of the paper. This is because they highlight that “mere failures to perform” (Sullivan-Bissett, 2024, p. 4) can be produced by a variety of causes. Thus, many failures of episodic memory to achieve an accurate representation of the past are not malfunctions.