The Psychology and Philosophy of Memory

Memory refers to the system, or systems, by which the mind registers, stores, and retrieves information for the purpose of optimizing future action.

Memory can be divided into short-term and long-term memory,and long-term memory can be further divided into episodic and semantic memory.Episodic memory records sense experiences, while semantic memory recordsabstract facts and concepts, with episodic memories eventually seeping intosemantic memory. Interestingly, the distinction between episodic memory andsemantic memory is already implicit in a number of languages in which the verb‘to know’ has two forms, for example, in French, connate and savoir, where connateimplies a direct, privileged kind of knowledge acquired through senseexperience.