[PHILOS-L] Jessie Munton - Retrieval induced forgetting and the epistemic significance of remembering (BGTMC Zoom talk, April 28, 12:15 CEST/18:15 Taiwan time)

[DENIS PERRIN]

Dear colleagues,

On behalf of the Bochum-Grenoble-Taipei Memory Colloquium, I am pleased to announce the talk “Retrieval induced forgetting and the epistemic significance of remembering” by Jessie Munton (University of Cambridge) on Tuesday, April 28th (12:15 CEST/18:15 Taiwan time).

Please join the Zoom meeting using the details below. Registration is not necessary.

•⁠ ⁠Link: https://univ-grenoble-alpes-fr.zoom.us/j/98859063721?pwd=6Xx6tmUpCSaSD4BkF4bPGhrxSuca5t.1

•⁠ Meeting ID: 988 5906 3721
•⁠ Password: 302355

Abstract: This talk starts from the phenomenon, widely studied in psychology and neuroscience, of retrieval induced forgetting (RIF). Retrieval induced forgetting occurs when, in the course of remembering a piece of information x (a phone number for instance), the subject must suppress competing, related pieces of information, y and z, which are consequently forgotten (at least for some period of time). The phenomenon of retrieval induced forgetting reveals to us that remembering comes at a price. But we struggle to articulate what that price is with standard measures of epistemic value. What is the epistemic difference which remembering makes? To answer that question I argue that we need to distinguish between potential epistemic value—the value which attaches to states we are poised to use,—and actual epistemic value—the value which attaches to states we are occurrently accessing and using. In cases of retrieval induced forgetting we trade  potential epistemic value for actualised value. This distinction has implications for another significant question at the intersection of philosophy of mind and epistemology: what is the epistemic role of attention? I argue that attention is the gateway that mediates between these forms of epistemic value. Retrieval induced forgetting is an unusually clear instance of the trade-off we face between these two sorts of epistemic value, but it is just one manifestation among many of the attentional mechanisms that govern the interface between memory and forgetting, retrieval and suppression. To understand epistemic value, the forms it takes and the cognitive achievements in which it vests, we need to pay attention to the way the mind moves through and engages with information, to the variegated nature of belief, and the transformations wrought by the mind’s movement through information that is in some weak sense already known to it. 

 
This virtual colloquium series focuses on topics in the philosophy of memory and related areas, and also reaches out to philosophically interested researchers in the cognitive sciences. The colloquium is organized by the Centre for Philosophy of Memory at Université Grenoble Alpes (Kourken Michaelian and Denis Perrin), the Ruhr University Bochum (Markus Werning and Juan F. Álvarez), and the Institute of Philosophy of Mind and Cognition at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (Ying-Tung Lin and Chris McCarroll).

Here is the schedule for this semester:

14.04.2026 – Francesco Fanti Rovetta (Ruhr University Bochum)
28.04.2026 – Jessie Munton (University of Cambridge)
05.05.2026 – Kaspars Eihmanis (University of Latvia)
19.05.2026 – Carlotta Pavese (University of Oxford)

16.06.2026 – Tony Cheng (Waseda Institute of Advanced Study)
23.06.2026 – Juan Diego Bogotá (University of Jyväskylä)
07.07.2026 – Santiago Amaya (Rice University)

For further details, see the colloquium webpages: https://phil-mem.org/seminars/bochum-grenoble-taipei.php and https://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/phil-lang/MemoryColloquium.html#BGTMC_2025_2026

We look forward to seeing you.

On behalf of the organizers,

Denis

Denis Perrin

Professeur des universités

Institut de Philosophie de Grenoble - Centre de philosophie de la mémoire
Université Grenoble Alpes CS 40700 - 38058 Grenoble cedex 9
www.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr

Philos-L "The Liverpool List" is run by the Department of Philosophy, University of Liverpool https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/philosophy/philos-l/ Messages to the list are archived at http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/archives/philos-l.html. Recent posts can also be read in a Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/PhilosL/ Follow the list on Twitter @PhilosL. Follow the Department of Philosophy @LiverpoolPhilos To sign off the list send a blank message to philos-l-unsub...@liverpool.ac.uk.

[DENIS PERRIN]

Dear colleagues,

On behalf of the Bochum-Grenoble-Taipei Memory Colloquium, I am pleased to announce the talk “Retrieval induced forgetting and the epistemic significance of remembering” by Jessie Munton (University of Cambridge) on Tuesday, April 28th (12:15 CEST/18:15 Taiwan time).

**Please disregard the recent message announcing the talk by Francesco Fanti Rovetta on Tuesday, April 14th, which was sent again by mistake**

[DENIS PERRIN]

Dear colleagues,

On behalf of the Bochum-Grenoble-Taipei Memory Colloquium, I am pleased to announce the talk “Memory-saturated attention: Buddhist concept of memory (smṛti) and the phenomenology of retention” by Kaspars Eihmanis (University of Latvia) on Tuesday, May 5th (12:15 CEST/18:15 Taiwan time).

Please join the Zoom meeting using the details below. Registration is not necessary.

•⁠ ⁠Link: https://univ-grenoble-alpes-fr.zoom.us/j/98859063721?pwd=6Xx6tmUpCSaSD4BkF4bPGhrxSuca5t.1

•⁠ Meeting ID: 988 5906 3721
•⁠ Password: 302355

Abstract: Contemporary philosophy of memory inherits from cognitive science a functional partition between attention and memory, and from the modern mindfulness literature a further partition between mindfulness as a present-directed attentional attitude and memory as a past-directed faculty. Against these partitions, the Buddhist philosophical tradition treats smṛti as attentional and memorial at once: a capacity by which what is currently attended to is registered in such a way that later recollection becomes possible without loss. The translation of smṛti as “mindfulness,” taken as an independent category, obscures this temporal depth - what mindfulness is said to do is already what smṛti does, because attention is already saturated with memory. This paper argues that the Buddhist tradition develops, across its successive treatments of smṛti, bīja, and ālayavijñāna, a layered phenomenology of retention that the predominantly Husserlian tradition in Western phenomenology had to work toward, and that contemporary philosophy of memory has not so far differentiated. Smṛti, as defined in the early Abhidharma and systematized by Vasubandhu in the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya, functions at the moment-to-moment level as the retention structure that William James called primary memory and Husserl called retention: not an act of recollection directed at a distant past, but a condition of temporal coherence within experience itself. The Sautrāntika theory of seeds (bīja) addresses the subliminal level at which past experience persists as disposition rather than as content, and stands in close structural proximity to what Husserl analysed as sedimentation. The Yogācāra ālayavijñāna elaborates this into an architectural account of how dormant retention is itself modified over time by the subject’s ongoing engagements. Under the constraint of the doctrine of no-self (anātman), the tradition develops at three distinct levels what phenomenology addresses primarily at one. I attempt to advance a comparative-phenomenological thesis: the Buddhist analysis isolates features of the temporal structure of experience that cut across the partitions current philosophy of memory inherits, and the tradition’s differentiated account of how the just-past, the dormantly-retained, and the architecturally-sedimented stand to the present gives contemporary phenomenology of memory resources for its own further development.

 
This virtual colloquium series focuses on topics in the philosophy of memory and related areas, and also reaches out to philosophically interested researchers in the cognitive sciences. The colloquium is organized by the Centre for Philosophy of Memory at Université Grenoble Alpes (Kourken Michaelian and Denis Perrin), the Ruhr University Bochum (Markus Werning and Juan F. Álvarez), and the Institute of Philosophy of Mind and Cognition at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (Ying-Tung Lin and Chris McCarroll).

Here is the schedule for this semester:

14.04.2026 – Francesco Fanti Rovetta (Ruhr University Bochum)
28.04.2026 – Jessie Munton (University of Cambridge)
05.05.2026 – Kaspars Eihmanis (University of Latvia)
19.05.2026 – Carlotta Pavese (University of Oxford)

16.06.2026 – Tony Cheng (Waseda Institute of Advanced Study)
23.06.2026 – Juan Diego Bogotá (University of Jyväskylä)
07.07.2026 – Santiago Amaya (Rice University)

For further details, see the colloquium webpages: https://phil-mem.org/seminars/bochum-grenoble-taipei.php and https://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/phil-lang/MemoryColloquium.html#BGTMC_2025_2026

We look forward to seeing you.

On behalf of the organisers,

Denis

Denis Perrin

Professeur des universités

Institut de Philosophie de Grenoble - Centre de philosophie de la mémoire
Université Grenoble Alpes CS 40700 - 38058 Grenoble cedex 9
www.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr

Philos-L "The Liverpool List" is run by the Department of Philosophy, University of Liverpool https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/philosophy/philos-l/ Messages to the list are archived at http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/archives/philos-l.html. Recent posts can also be read in a Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/PhilosL/ Follow the list on Twitter @PhilosL. Follow the Department of Philosophy @LiverpoolPhilos To sign off the list send a blank message to philos-l-unsub...@liverpool.ac.uk.