Lebowitz Prize goes to memory: De Brigard and Robins to face each other

Most philosophy prizes go to one person. The Lebowitz Prize goes to two — and the criterion of selection is an unusual one: the winners must be two philosophers who hold opposing views on a live question.

The recipients present their positions and debate one another at a Lebowitz symposium held at a divisional meeting of the American Philosophical Association. The prize is awarded jointly by the APA and the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

This year's winners were announced at the end of August: Felipe De Brigard, professor of philosophy and of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, and Sarah Robins, professor of philosophy at Purdue University.

They work in the same field: the philosophy of memory.

Why memory?#

Memory was for a long time a second-order subject in philosophy. Over the past twenty years it has moved to the centre, and the reason is what neuroscience has found.

The classical picture treats memory as a store: the event we live through is recorded, kept, and retrieved when needed. To remember is to read the record.

Experimental work has shaken that model. Remembering looks less like passive reading than like active reconstruction. The memory is rebuilt at each recollection, and the rebuilding is shaped by present circumstances, by expectations, and by information acquired afterwards.

From this a philosophical question follows, and it is the axis of the debate: is there a difference in kind between remembering and imagining?

Two positions#

De Brigard's work starts from findings which show that remembering and imagining the future draw on the same neural system. On this reading, memory is a faculty that evolved not to render the past accurately but to simulate possible states of affairs. Recalling the past runs the same machinery as asking how things might have been otherwise.

The view makes the accuracy of memory secondary. If memory errs, that is not a malfunction but a consequence of the way the system is built.

Robins is among the leading defenders of the opposing line, on which memory is a distinctive faculty. Erase the difference between remembering and imagining, she argues, and you destroy the concept itself. What separates remembering from imagining is that a memory stands in a causal relation to an event — that it carries a trace of it.

Robins's work on the role that the science of memory plays in philosophy also amounts to an argument about method: about how the traffic between the two fields ought to be arranged.

Why the argument matters#

The subject looks technical, but its consequences are broad.

Law. The reliability of eyewitness testimony depends on what kind of faculty memory is. If remembering is reconstruction, how much weight does "I saw it" carry?

Personal identity. Grounding personal identity in memory has been a common position since Locke. That was the criterion set out by Locke, whom we marked in this column yesterday. But if memory is continually rebuilt, the ground on which identity stands turns slippery too.

Artificial intelligence. How much does the feature that language models call memory resemble human memory? Derrida's concepts of the archive and the trace, which we discussed this month, touched precisely on this question: is recording remembering?

The idea behind the prize#

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Lebowitz Prize is its structure.

Prizes in philosophy usually reward a position. Lebowitz rewards disagreement: it takes the capacity of two good philosophers to reach different conclusions about the same question as a sign of the field's health.

That applies institutionally the thesis of Krista Lawlor's Being Reasonable, which we reviewed this month: reasonableness is not a matter of defeating the other side but of being able to read its map of values.

Which APA divisional meeting will host the symposium has not yet been announced.