Memory and its offspring: Realism and the “specious present”

Without memory we could not recall events, nor could we imagine, image, or expect things. Representationist accounts of memory claim that to remember is to access stored representations of past events. This is logically impossible: there are no such things as mental representations. Memory is the direct apprehension of past events. Some assert that this claim involves the temporal absurdity of supposing that the past can be known directly in the present. There is no such absurdity: cognition and its objects have temporal duration as well as spatial location. Situations perceived and remembered are extended temporally as well as spatially. William James drew attention to the specious present, the belief that we live in a temporally unextended now. A solid ontological account of the metaphysics of time and space is provided uniquely in the empiricist metaphysics of John Anderson’s realism