Posted by Larry Hoover on October 25, 2004, at 12:00:15
In reply to Re: Forging false memories, posted by fires on October 25, 2004, at 11:26:01
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> > Yes, we know that whole memories can be fabricated. That's what brain-washing is all about. However, generalizing from extreme and exceptional instances to the more typical ones is a logical fallacy.
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> Who generalized from extreme and exceptional circumstances?Whole memory fabrication is an extreme and exceptional circumstance. If A then B, not B is not proof of not A. That's called denying the antecedent.
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> > The links you have provided suggest, rather, that details of memory are rather flexible, but that those details are arranged around a core memory which is rather stable. Whether broken glass was or was not found at an accident scene may be an important detail in a trial, but it does not disprove that there was a collision at all. People were in an MRI machine focussing their cognition on images; whether an image was physical or conjured may be unclear to the participants after the fact, but they were in an MRI "doing" images.
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> > It is also important to consider what one does with memories. Dealing with repressed memories for therapeutic processes is quite a different sequence of events than attempting to use those memories for criminal or civil prosecutions. I'm not clear just what issue it is that you're trying to address, but there are many shades of grey between the limits of what (I believe) you are portraying in terms of black and white.
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> You may be too young to recall when entire groups of people were sentenced (falsely) to prison due to someones recalled "repressed" memories.Careful. I am neither young, nor naive. I have followed the debate closely over the years, after studying it in some detail at university.
Again, that sort of outcome was an extreme, the endpoint on a continuum. Those instances do not preclude veracity in other cases. And as I pointed out, the use to which memories are put is not the same issue as their mere existence.
> > > As college profs say: "Half of what you learn this quarter will be found to be incorrect within a few years, unfortunately we don't know which half."
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> > That argument has not a whit to do with memory, but is instead in respect of what we call knowledge.
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> I made the point to illustrate that just because you know that some of your memories are true, doesn't help you determine WHICH ones are true and which are false.Your predicate assumption, that some memories are false, is not demonstrated. That is called petitio principii, begging the question. In essence, the conclusion is used as verification of the premise. Also, your remark reiterates my earlier contention, that you are presenting black and white arguments about issues that rightly lie on a continuum. It is a false dilemma to only consider true and false as the entirety of possible outcomes for the question.
As I said, minor detail is quite flexible, but the core memory is remarkably robust. Witnesses to an armed robbery might describe the guns or the perps in very different ways, but they would all agree that they witnessed an armed robbery, with an accuracy of 100%.
Lar
poster:Larry Hoover
thread:406646
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20041016/msgs/407033.html