Abstract

THE FATES of perceiving and remembering have been inextricably intertwined in Western philosophy and psychology. It has been asserted from Plato’s Theaetetus onwards that there can be no remembering without perceiving and, though much less frequently, no perceiving without remembering of some sort. Just how either of these forms of interdependency occurs, however, has given rise to continual controversy. Little discernible progress has been made since Plato first proposed, in the Theaetetus, a model of the mind as an aviary in which individual memories wait like captive birds to be plucked from the cage of recollection in order to aid in the identification of present perceptions. The elaborate and ingenious character of this memory machine—elaborate and ingenious in comparison with the simpler model of the wax tablet also proposed in the Theaetetus—was to prove prophetic, since later treatments of perception often invoke memory as a deus ex machina brought in to resolve ambiguities and perplexities of perceptual experience.