ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the alternative theory of memory which was attributed to the plain man, the theory called Naïve Realism, according to which an act of memory has for its cognitive object the actual event remembered. It is not that a perceptual judgment is naïvely realistic, while a memory judgment in itself is not; it is rather that, normally at any rate, the contents of the present impinge on us much more forcibly than the contents of the past, and that the prime function of memory is to play second fiddle to perception. And if memory falls to the sceptical axe, so also does a great deal else of what ordinarily passes for knowledge. The problem then of memory judgments is only a special case of the problem of the validity of belief in general, and of the distinction between knowledge and belief.
