Abstract

Abstract: I have argued that the Analects of Confucius presents us with a conception of reflection with two components, a retrospective component and a perspective component. The former component involves hindsight or careful examination of the past and as such draws on previous learning or memory and previously formed beliefs to avoid error. The latter component is foresight, or forward looking, and as such looks to existing beliefs and factors in order to achieve knowledge. In this paper, I raise the problem of forgetting and argue that most of contemporary theories of knowledge have to face the problem and deal with the challenge seriously. In order to solve the problem, I suggest a bi-level virtue epistemology which can provide us with the best outlook for the problem-solving. I will correlate two different cognitive capacities or processes of “memory” (and “forgetting”) with the conception of reflection, and evaluate them under two different frameworks, a strict deontic framework (one that presupposes free and intentional determination) and a more loosely deontic framework (one that highlights functional and mechanical faculties). The purpose is to show that reflection as meta-cognition plays an important and active role and enjoys a better epistemic (normative) status in our human endeavors (cognitive or epistemic) than those of first-order (or animal) cognition, such as memory, can play.

Highlights

  • I have argued that the Analects of Confucius presents us with a conception of reflection with two components, a retrospective component and a perspective component

  • It will lead naturally to the following questions and puzzles: where do we store our memory? How do we maintain our memory? What does it mean to say that we remember something in the past? And how can we be sure that our memory is reliable, justifiable, or competent enough? Forgetting, by contrast, is usually regarded as the loss of memory or inability to recall past information

  • John Locke has characterized human’s faculty of forming and functioning memory as a process of imprinting, storing, and retrieving various ideas. He described this so-called memory process as a way in which “(our) senses at first let in particular Ideas, and furnish the yet empty Cabinet: And the Mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them, they are lodged in the Memory, and Names got to them. . . . Memory is the power to revive again in our minds those ideas which after imprinting have disappeared, or have been laid aside out of sight.” (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: Chapter X) In contemporary psychology, this process is commonly understood as a three-stage process: memory encoding, memory storage, and memory retrieval

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Summary

Introduction

I have argued that the Analects of Confucius presents us with a conception of reflection with two components, a retrospective component and a perspective component. Sosa’s position, as usually described as a kind of competencebased virtue epistemology, will allow the idea of memory (a good and reliable one) as a first-order competent cognitive capacity or mechanism, and a kind of first-order epistemic virtue.

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