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mong the many topics covered in Sven Bernecker's impressive study of memory is the relation between memory and personal identity. Bernecker uses his grammatical taxonomy of memory and causal account to defend the claim that memory does not logically presuppose personal identity and hence that circularity objections to memory-based accounts of personal identity are misplaced. In my comment I investigate these claims, suggesting that the relation between personal identity and memory is more complicated than Bernecker's analysis suggests. In particular, I argue (1) that while he shows that some memories do not presuppose personal identity he fails to show that those that are appealed to in memory-based accounts of personal identity do not, and (2) that the features of his view that allow him to define memory without reference to personal identity also obscure important features of memory that must be part of a complete account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Sven Bernecker's excellent new book, Memory, he proposes an account of what we might call the 'metasemantics' of memory: the conditions that determine the contents of the mental representations employed in memory. Bernecker endorses a 'pastist externalist' view, according to which the content of a memory-constituting representation is fixed, in part, by the 'external' conditions prevalent at the (past) time of the tokening of the original representation (the one from which the memory-constituting one is causally derived). Bernecker argues that the best version of a pastist externalism about memory contents will have the result that there can be semantically-induced memory losses in cases involving unwitting 'world-switching'. The burden of this paper is to show that Bernecker's argument for this conclusion does not succeed. My arguments on this score have implications for our picture of mind-world relations, as these are reflected in a subject's attempts to recall her past thoughts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses on the author opinion regarding the issue of self-knowledge. According to the author that knowledge of one's own mind is an interesting type of knowledge for various reasons, however, there's no epistemic privilege or special normative forces attaches within the self-knowledge alone as knowledge of one's own mind is as fallible and corrigible as any other areas in human knowledge.