The proposal sketched in Sect. 2 reframes the challenge of giving an account of object-involving hallucinations as a special challenge for an account of perceptual remembering. Understanding these hallucinations in this way provides a firmer ground upon which to build and is a substantial improvement over prior approaches to the phenomenon. Nevertheless, one might be tempted to object to my proposal by arguing that object-involving hallucinations lack some essential characteristic or characteristics of memory and thereby cannot be a species of remembering. I will consider three versions of this objection: (i) an ‘epistemic transparency’ version that focuses on the claim that distinctive phenomenological markers make the fact that a subject is remembering transparent to her; (ii) a ‘connection with reality’ version that focuses on the claim that hallucination puts subjects “out of touch” with reality; and (iii) an ‘autobiography’ version that focuses on the claim that one can only remember objects and events one has witnessed.

All three versions attempt to demonstrate that perceptual remembering and object-involving hallucination differ in some essential feature and my strategy for responding to each of them will be the same. I will argue that there are uncontroversial cases of remembering that lack the feature(s) my opponents claim are both essential to memory and absent in hallucination. This shows that perceptual remembering and object-involving hallucination share their most crucial features. In doing so, it supports the thesis that object-involving hallucinations are an unusual species of perceptual remembering.

Epistemic transparency

Remembering perceived objects, events, or qualities is typically thought to involve an awareness of them as in the past.Footnote 27 One might even suppose that such awareness is the hallmark of remembering; it makes the fact that a subject remembers transparent to her. Since hallucinations lack such awareness—when a subject hallucinates, it seems to her as though she perceives something and the apparent awareness involved in perception concerns things in the present—an opponent might be tempted to conclude that the proposal must be mistaken; no species of hallucination could be a species of remembering.

One could find inspiration for such a position in, e.g. Martin (2001, pp. 271–281). There he argues that phenomenological differences between perception, imagination, and memory are best understood in representational terms. The phenomenology of perception arises from its presentational nature; it presents objects, events, and qualities to the mind. Consequently, for subjects undergoing a perceptual experience, it is as if the objects of the experience must exist and be present. In contrast, the phenomenology of memory and imagination arises from their representational nature; they represent experiences of objects, events, and qualities, and this allows those objects, events, and qualities to be before the mind in a way that does not require that it is as if they must exist and be present. In visually imagining, a subject represents objects, events, or qualities, as they would be experienced. In remembering, a subject represents specific prior experiences and in doing so represent the objects that were proper parts of the contents of those experiences. That is, subjects recall previously experienced objects, events, and qualities, as having been once presented to their point of view.

As formulated, Martin’s proposal is a thesis about how to understand phenomenological differences between these states, when there are such differences.Footnote 28 However, one might be tempted by a stronger view. Namely, one might hold that such phenomenological differences are essential to these respective mental state types.Footnote 29 Consequently, if a subject perceives \(o\), the distinctive phenomenology of perception enables her to recognize that she perceives; if she remembers \(o\), the distinctive phenomenology of memory enables her to recognize that she remembers; and if she imagines \(o\), the distinctive phenomenology of imagination enables her to recognize that she imagines.Footnote 30 This view would be inconsistent with the proposal I advocate in this paper and, while I can see its initial pull, I think that there are decisive reasons against it. The central problem is that our capacity for self-knowledge of this sort is imperfect and so does not satisfy the demands of such an ambitious proposal.

Consider perceptual remembering. We cannot accept a view according to which all instances of perceptual remembering are epistemically transparent because there are clearly cases in which subjects remember without recognizing that they are remembering. For example:

Suppose that someone asks a painter to paint an imaginary scene. The painter agrees to do this and, taking himself to be painting some purely imaginary scene, paints a detailed picture of a farmyard including a certain colored and shaped house, various people with detailed features, particular items of clothing and so on. His parents then recognize the picture as a very accurate representation of a scene [that] the painter saw just once in his childhood...the painter did his work by no mere accident. (Martin and Deutscher 1966, pp. 167–168)

Although the painter sincerely believes that his work is purely imaginary, there is good reason to think that he has actually remembered, and then painted, a scene from his childhood.Footnote 31 As with other instances of perceptual remembering, the painter’s mental states are a vehicle for knowledge of past objects of perception. In this case, his knowledge of the past scene is simply expressed by his painting.Footnote 32

Other cases of non-transparent perceptual remembering are not particularly hard to come by. To see one further example, consider the familiar scenario in which you are unsure whether you are remembering a prior event, or whether you are simply imagining that some event had previously occurred. In such cases, you are not aware of the event as being in the past and you are not aware that you are remembering (both are precisely what you are unsure of) and you lack this awareness even if you are, in fact, remembering.Footnote 33 So, perceptually remembering something need not be epistemically transparent; one can remember without recognizing (or without it seeming to one) that one is remembering. Consequently, the fact that subjects lack awareness of objects as in the past in cases of object-involving hallucination cannot be used to argue that those hallucinations must not be a kind of perceptual remembering.Footnote 34

Examples in which phenomenology fails to lead to appropriate metarepresentational judgments are not special to memory. For example, subjects are capable of judging that perceptual experiences are familiar from the past when they are not (as in déjà vu) or vice versa (as in, e.g. failures to recognize known faces).Footnote 35 They are also capable of mistakenly judging perceptual experiences to be instances of perceptual imagination.Footnote 36 This suggests a more general problem for views that make phenomenological features essential to the criteria by which to draw metaphysical distinctions between mental state types (at least in the cases of perception, imagination, and memory). Namely, such views assign the wrong theoretical role to phenomenology.

It is not surprising that we can, in various circumstances, be mistaken about whether or not we are perceiving, imagining, or remembering something. Psychological processes are generally imperfect and there is little reason to think that the processes underlying the phenomenological features that guide meta-representational judgments about mental states should somehow be different. Given this, phenomenology is not best seen as a determining factor for mental state types. Rather, a more plausible theoretical role for phenomenology is as defeasible evidence of the type of mental state occupied by a subject on a given occasion. While the fact that subjects are sometimes led astray by phenomenology challenges its potential role as a component of mental state type definitions, it does nothing to challenge the idea that, when subjects do recognize that they are, e.g. remembering, it is typically because it seems to them that the objects of their experience are in the past. One simply should not infer from this that all perceptual remembering involves an awareness of objects as in the past. Consequently, one should not conclude that object-involving hallucination is not an unusual species of perceptual remembering on phenomenological grounds.

Connection with reality

A second version of the objection focuses on a different apparent epistemic discrepancy between hallucination and memory; namely, an opponent might claim that hallucinating necessarily puts one “out of touch” with reality, whereas remembering puts one, in some sense, in touch with reality. Consequently, she might say, object-involving hallucinations cannot be instances of perceptual remembering.Footnote 37

This objection seems to rest on an overly restricted conception of hallucination. Object-involving hallucinations do put subjects in touch with parts of reality—that is what makes them a distinctive species of hallucination. They connect subjects to reality by preserving a perceptual connection to real things (past objects of perception). They are hallucinations because, in addition to the knowledge they sustain, they also present unreal states of affairs and in particular, they mis-present the temporal source of represented objects, events, or qualities by presenting them as present when they are not.

For the objection to put pressure on my proposal it would have to be the case that perceptual remembering never misrepresents the temporal source of the objects of experience. However, this is clearly not the case. It is not only possible for memory to provide mistaken information about the temporal source of objects of remembering, but it is likely that such errors occur relatively frequently.

To illustrate, suppose that three years ago, you attended all three APA division meetings and went to numerous talks at each of those meetings. Importantly, you attended a talk by a particularly famous philosopher at the Pacific. Now, three years later, suppose that you recollect the famous philosopher’s talk but mistakenly take it to have occurred at the Eastern. In such a case, there is an object you remember (the philosopher’s talk), despite being out of touch with a particular feature of reality; namely, despite being wrong about the temporal source of the object represented by your memory. Perceptual remembering tolerates error in ways that propositional remembering does not.Footnote 38 Consequently, we cannot conclude that object-involving hallucinations are not instances of perceptual remembering because they put the subject out of touch with a certain feature of reality.

One might try to press this challenge further by arguing that the problem is not just that one gets the temporal source of the represented objects wrong when hallucinating. Rather, the problem is that hallucination involves a particular kind of error—the object presents as though from the present.

This consideration would only challenge my proposal if it were impossible for a remembering subject to take a remembered object to be present. We have already seen that representing an object as past is not necessary for remembering. A little consideration makes it clear that one can also remember while representing an object as present. This is exactly what happens when one recognizes someone that they have already seen before. In such cases, the remembered object is taken to be present because it is present.

One might note that recognition is itself a complicated matter and there is a sense in which what one sees before them must somehow also be presenting as past for the subject feels that the object she sees is familiar.Footnote 39 However, this provides no challenge to the present account because the object-involving hallucinations in which we have been interested share this feature with perceptual remembering. In hallucinating Banquo, Macbeth took him to be familiar just as one who sees someone they recognize takes that person to be familiar.

So one cannot drive a wedge between object-involving hallucination and perceptual remembering by citing the presence of mistaken information about the temporal source of the remembered object. The upshot is that one cannot deny that object-involving hallucination is an unusual species of perceptual remembering by arguing that hallucination puts one out of touch with reality. Object involving hallucinations are distinctive because they put subjects in touch with certain parts of reality—they are a vehicle for knowledge of past objects of perception, just as are other species of perceptual remembering. Moreover, those senses in which object-involving hallucinations misrepresent reality text can be shared by perceptual remembering as well.

Autobiography

Finally, a third version of the objection could be made as follows. Perceptual remembering is always the remembering of something in one’s past (i.e. it is autobiographical). However, an opponent might argue that one can have an object-involving hallucination of something that is not in one’s past. Johnston (2004, p. 122) offers one putative case of this in the form of a “Manchurian Candidate” scenario. Suppose, for example, that Macbeth had never actually interacted with Banquo before his hallucinatory experience in the dining hall. Instead an evil (time travelling) neuro-surgeon implanted representations of him in Macbeth’s mind. In such a scenario, my opponent might be tempted to argue that Macbeth could have still undergone an hallucination of Banquo exactly as he did as described in Sect. 1, but he could not have been remembering him in virtue of the fact that he had had no prior experiences of him.

There are at least two responses to this kind of case. First, one might question whether this is actually an hallucination of Banquo as opposed to an object-independent hallucination (i.e. an hallucination of a man but no man in particular) that is phenomenologically indistinguishable from an hallucination of Banquo. In the absence of a fully developed theory of object-involving representation, it is simply not clear whether such implantations can preserve connections to particulars. Second, suppose that we grant that this is genuinely an object-involving hallucination of Banquo. Even granting this, I think there is good (independent) reason to reject the first premise. Specifically, while most cases of remembering objects/individuals are autobiographical it is not clear that all are. We often speak of remembering things with which we have no prior personal experience. For example, we remember Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and many of us do so in a distinctively visual way—we call to mind images of the man—despite not having prior direct perceptions of him. The fact that television or some other form of visual information transmission mediates our visual representations of Dr. King surely stands as no obstacle to our remembering him.

Given that at least some cases of perceptual remembering are consistent with mediated visual information, we might simply take the fantastical evil-neurosurgeon scenario to be a case in which there is an unusual intermediary in the process of transmitting visual Banquo-information to Macbeth. That is, in so far as we think that such cases are object-involving, it is also plausible such cases involve unusual perceptual memories. As such, we cannot straight away conclude that Macbeth cannot remember Banquo in the scenario sketched here, and this version of the objection, like those before it, does not present a counterexample to my proposal.Footnote 40

The upshot of this section is that the putative counterexamples to my thesis fail because remembering is a multifaceted cognitive ability. Although it often involves a sense in which the remembered objects are remembered as past, it can involve a variety of phenomenological features (or, as in the case of the painter, the lack of any distinctive phenomenological feature at all).Footnote 41 Moreover, while some or other causal relation between remembering subject and past object/event is surely necessary for remembering, memory can arguably be sustained by a variety of causal relations between subjects and remembered objects. Some of those relations make the connection more direct (cf. the painter case), and others make it more mediated (cf. our memories of MLK Jr.) Given the heterogeneous nature of perceptual remembering, my opponents’ cases fail to challenge the idea that object-involving hallucination is simply one of its more unusual species.