Ignorance is Bliss: The Intersection of Emotion,
Epistemology and Therapeutic Forgetting
By
Alexander McCobin, The
Introduction
Movies such as Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, Men in Black and Paycheck
all depict technology that is able to single out human memories and wipe them
from our minds. While such sophisticated technology that is able to erase
entire events from our memory does not yet exist, there are developments moving
in that direction. A new drug called propranolol has been developed that is
able to dull people’s memories of events by dulling their emotional reaction to
them. One of the leaders in the field of memory research, Dr. James McGaugh,
notes that, “emotionally significant events create stronger, longer-lasting
memories.”1
This occurs because strong emotions involve the release of adrenaline that
activates portions of the brain and increases one’s ability to remember the
event.2
Stronger emotions associated with an event affects one’s memory of the event in
two ways. First, the memory remains in the mind longer than if it was not
emotionally significant, meaning the person does not forget the event or
information altogether as readily. And second, the emotionally significant
event produces memories that are more accurate over time and less susceptible
to alterations that introduce false information to the memory.3
Propranolol is a beta-blocker that prevents adrenaline
from affecting the areas that increase memory ability. For it to work, though,
people must take the drug within several hours of the event they wish to dampen
the memory of, so the emotional significance of the event can be controlled
during the formation of the memory.4
This does not eliminate a memory.
However, it does dull one’s reaction to the event and therefore one’s memory of
it, meaning the memory is not as strong.
This drug is currently being used therapeutically for
patients suffering from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) because of the
highly emotional and damaging nature of the memories that cause PTSD. Studies
involving the treatment of patients with propranolol immediately after an event
occurred that could potentially lead to PTSD, have shown propranolol to be
fairly successful at preventing PTSD symptoms including powerful memories of
the accident that commonly hinder PTSD victims. Specifically, Dr. McGaugh says
that propranolol helps people forget the “trauma
of the accident.”5 The
effect is that the overall strength of the memory decreases.
Most literature surrounding therapeutic
forgetting has focused on either the science behind it or its ethical and legal
implications.6
Yet, while advancing the science of memory, therapeutic forgetting raises significant
epistemological issues previously unaddressed. This paper analyzes one of those
issues. The traditional account of knowledge holds that knowledge is justified
true belief, which may also be represented as “‘S knows that P’ if (i) S
believes that P; (ii) P is justified; (iii) P is true.7
Yet, there are people who have justified, true beliefs, but do not want to have the beliefs because of the
significant negative effects those beliefs cause. The belief is true and the
individual is evidentially justified in believing that it is true, but she
still chooses not to believe it. However, choosing to not want to believe P
does not cause one to not believe P. If one is a PTSD victim, one is not able
to eliminate the traumatic memory by willing it alone.
Addressing this issue, the President’s Council on
Bioethics (PBCE) held serious reservations concerning the use of therapeutic
forgetting, arguing that it “could jeopardize the fitness and truthfulness of
how we live and what we feel, as well as our ability to confront responsibly
and with dignity the imperfections and limits of our lives and those of
others.”8
As their statement illustrates, the importance of the epistemic status of
therapeutic forgetting is that it will in part dictate the legal and ethical
conclusions. Ultimately, I argue that knowledge is a pragmatic activity, where
epistemic processes and facts are justified by their pragmatic usefulness.
Therapeutic forgetting is a legitimate epistemic procedure because it coheres
with and advances the activity of knowledge for its practical purposes.
Memory and Epistemology
Therapeutic forgetting affects our
knowledge of past events in our memory. In its current form, memory dampening targets
recent memory so that a person is less likely to remember what happened in the
hours before the consumption of propranolol. Memory of an event is closely linked to what a
person does after learning that event,9
so when propranolol weakens the emotions associated with a memory, the
weakening is of the memory retention of that event. Further, because current
memory dampening only limits the strength of our beliefs, the beliefs will
still be retained to some extent.10
Propranolol only limits how greatly or actively we believe an event happened. It
does not directly affect memories that concern current states of affairs like
how I remember my sister’s name even though I do not constantly think about it.
Rather, memory dampening only affects the memory of events in a specific time
period (the period shortly before the consumption of propranolol). To the
extent that a single event is noteworthy in a given time period and would have
been the memorable feature of the time, we may say that propranolol dampens the
memory of that single event.
Even though therapeutic forgetting directly dampens or
eliminates the memory of a single event, its effects span beyond more than the
individual incident and can affect our current epistemic reasoning in several
ways. First, dampening the memory of an event involves the epistemic claim that
the information does not deserve to be qualified as knowledge. In this sense,
the cases where people use therapeutic forgetting provide insight to what it
means for something to legitimately qualify or rather not qualify as knowledge.
Second, as a loss of substantial memory, we lose our ability to make informed judgments
about certain subject areas. That I can speak well about high school forensics
is because of the totality of my experiences in the activity. What little I can
say about driving in
Third, we draw on past events to inform our judgment of
the epistemic status of current knowledge. In defense of an internalist theory,
Richard Feldman identifies “the person’s apparent memories”11
as part of what the individual uses as the framework of background beliefs that
a new belief must cohere with to be accepted by an individual. If I have a
strong belief that conflicts with the rest of my beliefs, my internal account
of what qualifies as knowledge will be skewed by contradictory inputs. I will
be confused as to what constitutes knowledge because two contradictory features
each qualify. This may be the case with PTSD victims who hold vivid memories of
a tragedy such that they relive the tragedy or react in an abnormal way to
things they associate with the event, like a phrase or image. For example,
certain inputs cause ‘flashbacks’ for Vietnam veterans such that the input
brings their traumatic memories to the forefront of their mind and they react
as though they were in the battle they learned to associate with the input. This
type of wrongful association seems to be the product of a conflict in the
individual’s structure of knowledge formation such that she may believe the
input is part of the battle, but at the same time also that it is not.
Or if the memory does not conflict with prior beliefs, it
may alter one’s belief structure to admit of new beliefs as knowledge and
reject old ones. Therapeutic forgetting can help make beliefs more effectively
cohere with one another as the individual would prefer by diminishing the importance
of beliefs in coherentist accounts. For Feldman, that the beliefs must be “apparent”
means that they must be considered by the individual when deciding to accept
the new belief or not, so weaker memories may not be considered as readily,
making memory dampening highly effective at altering the coherence of beliefs. However,
even if background memories are important, memory dampening may help make
epistemic intuitions more plausible than if detrimental memories are retained.
The Embodied
Believer
Theories of epistemic justification are commonly taxonomized
as being either internalist or externalist. Internalism holds that the justificatory
status of a belief is determined by the internal, introspectively available,
beliefs of the individual. To be epistemically justified, the belief must
cohere with the believer’s previously held stock of beliefs. For example, if
one is a Democrat, the belief that the U.S. invaded Iraq for the sake of
protecting its interest in oil is more likely to be easily believable than if
one is a Republican. Externalism on the other hand, holds that the epistemic status
of a belief is determined, in part, by its coherence with the reality of the
external world. Whether I turned the stove off has no epistemic derivation from
my prior beliefs, but is only justified according to whether the stove actually
is off or not. Yet the common problem with both theories is that neither
account for the relationship between the belief and the believer.12
An encyclopedia does not know all the facts contained in its pages even though
the veracity of them can be verified by either their internal coherence or
their accuracy with the external world. The reason is that the encyclopedia
does not believe the information contained within. When ‘S knows h,’ that knowledge involves the totality
of S as a being, as something more than the site where a proper relation
between h and other thoughts or the
world occurs. For S to have a justified belief in h, there must be a relation between S and h themselves. That relationship is that believing h is an action S undertakes, making it
accountable like all other actions.
More specifically, as noted by Mari Sorri & Jerry H.
Gill, there is a tacit assumption in the traditional internalist/externalist
theories that beliefs are disembodied, mental states that exist independently
of bodily or physical states. They do not account for “the plain fact that
beliefs and assertions are inextricably bound up with the actions and
depositions of embodied beings engaged with each other and with
their common environment.”13
The problem is not simply their insufficient account for the activity of the
believer in possessing knowledge, but by failing to consider the embodiment of
beliefs in an embodied believer. When S believes or knows P, she has acted in a
meaningful way with important consequences, beyond “accepting P” as traditional
theories hold. And that action involves a physical action and engagement of S
and P with the physical world because both are embodied.
Not only is it the case that the body is the source of all
knowledge by providing the source of all beliefs, but the methods of perceiving
the world are part of knowledge, not external to it. Research led by Antonio
Damasio has shown that damage to the region of the brain that controls emotion
also leads to decreased rational ability.14
Emotions, like the other physical processes that form our beliefs, are facets
of the belief itself that when altered, alter the entirety of the belief.
Without emotion, we would not have knowledge or reason because we would be
missing an integral part of the belief process. Yet its role is not to
epistemically distort our knowledge by hindering our reasoning abilities.
Emotion can either improve or diminish the epistemic status of our beliefs
depending on whether the belief is practically useful or not. A traumatic event
that leads to PTSD is not valuable and so the PTSD victim does not want to
remember it. The intense emotion of pain and anguish during the event
reinforces our belief in the event. Only by diminishing the power of our
emotions can we diminish our belief. On the other hand, the exuberance of
graduation day is a joyful memory, which the pleasant emotion associated with
the event improved. Propranolol takes advantage of this and eliminates the
emotional component that strengthens memory of emotionally disturbing events.
By altering the emotional component of a belief, propranolol does not simply
alter the way the individual perceives an external event. Nor is it simply a
passion that alters our reasoning surrounding the epistemic status of the
belief. The emotional component is part of that epistemic status and
propranolol targets that part of the belief to alter its epistemic status as a
belief rather than just from how we would interpret it if we didn’t have
emotions. Without our emotions, we cannot have beliefs. They are part of the
action of believing. However, just as we need to change our reasoning processes
sometimes, we need to change our emotional processes to accord the epistemic
status of the belief with its pragmatic value.
To illustrate how knowledge involves an action in the
practical world, consider the distinction between asserting a belief and
asserting knowledge: ‘I believe that I watched the Eagles lose the Super Bowl
in 2005’ versus ‘I know I watched the Eagles lose the Super Bowl in 2005.’ The
former suggests that I am open to criticism and not willing to take any action
on the proposition. However, the latter suggests that I am willing to defend
that belief with practical consequences, by engaging in a wager. Even if I
don’t say it, but merely consider it as knowledge, I have justified taking
practical action based on that knowledge to myself. What I hold as knowledge is
the world as I perceive it and therefore it must support my ability to function
in the world at hand or else my world does not allow for my preservation or
existence. When we know something, we take an action in the physical world and
justify further actions in the physical world, meaning knowledge is justified
according to its usefulness to the actor.
Knowledge and
Volition
What therapeutic forgetting adds to
knowledge as a practical action is volitional control over the status of memory
as knowledge. We commonly engage in willful control of qualifying beliefs as
knowledge by simply reasoning whether we think we have enough valid evidence to
decide that something is true or not. Through this process, we actively decide
whether we believe P to be knowledge or not. We are able to change our reasoning
process if we so choose. If I seem to know something, but that knowledge does
not make sense with other information I know or I wish to conceive of the issue
from another perspective, I may alter the conditions for assigning the status
of knowledge to that information.
Memories of past events are more difficult to choose
through volition however, as the act of reasoning whether the event occurred or
not happened during the initial considerations of the event. As time passes, we
may question the effectiveness of our memory, meaning we may forget more things
because our memory does not remember every detail. But if we do remember
something, its credibility depends primarily on our decision at the time of the
event to believe it as true or not. Later reasoning as to whether the belief
that the event occurred or not is based on a process of rationalization rather
than analyzing the strength of the perceptions of the event.15
But what if we have memories that conjoin separate events to create a new event
in our memory that never actually occurred? That the other two events did occur
still provides the basis for believing that this new event occurred, though.
The root cause of the belief is the decision at the time that we decided the
two real events were real, and so we can trace our control to those times.
Therapeutic forgetting provides us with the ability to
choose whether to retain individual memories actively or passively. Whether
this involves the degree to how strongly the belief is held (with current memory
dampening) or just possessing the belief in an either/or sense (possible in the
future), the issue is obtaining volitional control over believing our memories.
Emotionally significant memories are difficult for us to control because our
bodies have produced conditions where we believe the event occurred
independently of our conscious reasoning. The active belief is controlled more
by bodily affairs than our other beliefs do not have control over, and
therefore we are unable to alter readily through thought processes. This is why
the situation described in the beginning of the paper occurs: people develop
justified beliefs that are true and do not want to believe, but sum to be
unable to disbelieve. Such beliefs cannot be reasoned away because part of them
is their strength, brought about by their intense physical nature.
Therapeutic forgetting provides a solution to this
problem. While we do not want to call these problematic memories knowledge,
they are still memories because we cannot eliminate the beliefs. Therapeutic
forgetting involves the ability to de-emphasize the power of memories and
strength of these beliefs by limiting out emotional reaction to events and
thereby one of the key factors in memory formation. The result is that we may
make our memories more practically useful so we may embrace them as knowledge
rather than mere beliefs that are true and justified. PTSD victims are able to
overcome disturbing memories that hinder their ability to function properly
later in life. As such, memories are made accountable to what furthers our practical
ends.
Objections
I will now consider the principle responses
that I have encountered to my argument as presented. The first is that my
argument collapses into a problematic state similar to psychological egoism in
moral discussion except in this case, anything humans do is for a pragmatic
end, nullifying the importance of the issue at hand. The problem with this is
that my argument is much more distinct than just that all knowledge and memory
is pragmatic. Rather, I go on to argue that knowledge is an action with
practical ends. In stark contrast to the commonly debated theories of
internalism and externalism, this pragmatic account introduces a new
consideration to the debate over the justification of knowledge and belief
formation, so the issue is hardly oversimplified as in psychological egoism.
A second objection could be that my
claim of knowledge’s accountability to practicality is normative rather than
epistemic, that it we should choose what knowledge to act upon based on its
practical value, but not that knowledge itself is based on practical value. In
other words, PTSD victims have knowledge of the traumatic events, but just
don’t want to know about the events; therapeutic forgetting involves the
dampening/elimination of real knowledge. This is where the importance of
knowledge as an act comes into play because it is not just that we use
knowledge to inform later actions, but that knowledge is itself an act and
therefore a practical affair in its own right. We are able to be affected by
and hold beliefs that are not cases of knowledge all the time. The epistemic
and practical concerns of a belief cannot be separated from another, though, in
that for a belief that affects us to qualify as knowledge, we must actively
support the belief, which cannot happen if it is not practically valuable in
some sense.
Yet another issue that arises is: what
about cases on the margins? What if we have an event that some may support the
use of therapeutic forgetting with and others would object to? For example,
take basic training. While the experience is very difficult and sometimes
emotionally crippling, it is often considered a memory that people should
retain in order to be an effective combatant.16
My first reaction to this is that it is entering the realm of ethics rather
than epistemology, and therefore beyond the subject of this paper. However,
there appears to be a very integral connection between ethics and epistemology
in the use of therapeutic forgetting. That therapeutic forgetting reinforces a
pragmatic interpretation for the qualification of knowledge and rejection of
beliefs as knowledge means that our epistemic process are influenced by how we
seek to act. But from this perspective, the question of cases on the margins
only serves to reinforce the point that epistemic justifications for knowledge
are determined by their practical value. If basic training is essential to
preparation for combat, then dampening one’s memories of that training would
not be valuable and therefore not epistemically justified. The calculus used to
determine whether to retain beliefs of what happened or not must include
whether the belief would lead to practical usefulness or not.
The final response I’d like to
consider is that the interpreting knowledge as what is practical bears no
relation to the truth of matters at all. As one person exclaimed to me, “but
then I could know the sky was green rather than blue if it helped me out!” I
consider this response to be a relic of objecting to the postmodern position
that truth is relative, or that what is true is that which works for an
individual. This paper presents a very different position, though. Truth is an
objective matter. Whether something happened or not is not in dispute. Any
principle of subjectification that I bring to the issue presented is in the
nature of knowledge, which is a separate concept from truth. Truth is the mere
relation of a proposition to the events it describes. Knowledge involves at
least three criteria, of which the truth of the proposition considered is only
one. However, a different interpretation could just as easily be posited that
there is a difference between the criteria for knowledge and the criteria for
disqualifying knowledge.17
Conclusion
This paper is not a full analysis
of the role therapeutic forgetting can play in our epistemic functions. Rather,
it set out to show that therapeutic forgetting provides insight to general
epistemic position that knowledge is an active process of the mind intended to
produce useful results in the practical world. Rather than being a mere passive
state of affairs, knowledge is an active process where beliefs as part of the
believer are acted out by the believer. The believer’s role in epistemic
justification is to provide the reason why a belief and its truth hood can be
combined: as the action and for future action of the believer. The technology
of therapeutic forgetting is premised on controlling the emotional component of
the belief’s embodiment in the believer, so by bringing memory under control of
the believer, therapeutic forgetting brings the believer’s life under her own
control. The PCBE is right to the extent that as humans, we must understand the
fragility of human life and learn from mistakes in our past, so we should not
eliminate every painful or negative memory. However, these can still be useful
to us practically because of what they bring. When memories inhibit our
functioning and limit the control we have over our lives and determining what
other beliefs we retain, we are epistemically justified in dampening or
eliminating the belief to maintain the practical action of epistemic belief. Memory
dampening should not be used on all negative experiences in life, but neither
should we consider it a danger to our epistemic or human experience.□
©Alexander McCobin, 2007
1 James L. McGaugh, Memory and Emotion (
2 James L. McGaugh, Interview with Scientific
American, Unmaking Memories: Interview
with James McGaugh (Scientific
American,
5 Jeanie Davis, “Forget Something? Wish We Could,” (WebMD Feature, 2004), online, accessed
6 Adam J. Kolber, Therapeutic Forgetting: The Legal and Ethical Implications of Memory
Dampening, Forthcoming, Vanderbilt Law Review (2006), Page Proofs,
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=887061.
7 Those with a background in epistemology will know
that this definition has been criticized as somehow incomplete in the sense
that it is not sufficient for knowledge, which is perhaps best illustrated by
the Gettier problem. However, it is also generally accepted that each of these
three ingredients is necessary for knowledge and the issue of my paper will not
be troubled by the insufficiency of the traditional account. The issue I am
addressing applies both to this general account and to any more complete
account of knowledge as well that may be raised.
8 The President’s Council on Bioethics, Chapter 5:
“Happy Souls,” Beyond Therapy:
Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, (
11 Richard Feldman, “Justification is Internal,” Contemporary Debates in Epistemology,
Ed. Matthias Steup and Ernest Sosa, (2005), p. 273.
12 While internalism relates the belief to other
beliefs of the believer, those previously held beliefs are not all that
constitute the believer, herself.
13 Mari Sorri & Jerry H. Gill, Post-Modern Epistemology (Lewiston, NY:
The Edwin Mellen Press, 1989). Underlines from original text.
15 This initial evaluation of whether we believe an
event occurred is almost intuitive. I say almost because it is more of just
deciding whether the perceptions one has of the event seem real or not. To see
an oasis in the desert may appear real, but if it is hazy, I may question the
veracity of my perception because I am not sure that my senses are completely
accurate. This type of verification does not occur by reason, but by either
accepting or rejecting the accuracy of my senses.
16 The example of memories of war itself could be an
example, and has been by the PBCE. That soldiers may not have to remember the
traumatic experiences of battle may mean they would be willing to perform
greater atrocities because their conscious would not plague them so greatly.
17 I find this interpretation to be interesting and
hold a certain amount of validity. While I am not fully convinced that there is
a significant difference between qualifying and disqualifying beliefs as
knowledge yet, I think discourse in this area will be valuable for elucidating the
issue.
Return to the Table of Contents