Memories as data: The case of radical reuse

Evidence, in ordinary English, denotes a kind of object: something you could put in a box, or at least on a hard-drive. But recent epistemologists prefer to think of evidence as part of a thinker’s mental state, her knowledge, beliefs, or the way things appear to her. This paper argues in favor of the objectual view, by showing that in the case of memory, the very feature thought to be a weakness of this conception is in fact a strength: roughly that the very same object can support an endless range of inferences, including mutually contradictory ones. Just as objects are shared between two people, the causal relationship we have to our memory allows us to share access to the very same memory over time. By drawing a parallel with the use of legacy data in science, I show how one kind of memory success is only explicable if we think of memories as evidential (mental) objects.