David Barnett

An important philosophical tradition treats the deliverances of one’s own internal faculties as analogous to the deliverances of external sources of testimony. Pushing back against this tradition in the special case of the deliverances of one’s own memory, I aim to highlight the broader interaction between an internal (or first-person) and an external (or third-person) perspective that one might adopt towards one’s own states of mind. According to what I call the ‘diary model’ of memory, one’s memory ordinarily serves as a means for one’s present self to gain evidence about one’s past states of mind, much as testimony from another person can provide one with evidence about that person’s states of mind. I reject the diary model’s analogy between memory and testimony from one’s former self, arguing first that memory and a diary differ with respect to their psychological roles, and second that this psychological difference underwrites important downstream epistemic differences.