Taxonomy and Unity of Memory

In the most general way of speaking, people use the noun “memory” to refer to instances where information of the past is made available for present purposes. In this minimal sense the rings of trees are memories of the climatic conditions in the seasonal succession of years during certain periods of the past. The characteristic features of tree rings make available this information for the present purposes of dendrologists. Likewise hieroglyphs inside the Cheops pyramid make information about political events in the lifetime of pharaoh Cheops available to egyptologists and can justly be called memories of that time. Making available information of the past for present purposes is also the function of certain psychological states of humans and animals that we refer to by the noun “memory”. For the psychological domain, in English, we also have the verb “remember” along with the verbs “recall” and “recollect” (as well as less frequently used or more remotely related verbs like “reminisce”, “memorize”, “commemorate”, “think of”). The usages of the three verbs differ slightly, but – at least, most of the time – refer to instances of memory. Syntactically speaking, the verb “remember” alone can figure in a great variety of grammatical constructions taking noun phrases and that-clauses or interrogative (wh-)clauses as well as infinitival and gerundival constructions as dependent arguments: