Knowledge Question: To what extend should memory be trusted when one studies primary sources

Memory is a ways of knowing and we all had autobiographies or personal diaries as our primary sources before, but to what extend shout it be trusted? From one perspective, memory was an excellent source, because it provides firsthand information and experience on the event. Some people even said that all knowledge are memory.

But from the real life situation provided by Elizabeth Loftus’s speech, a man named Steve Titus was convicted on someone’s false memory. From this case we can see that our memory cannot always be trusted, we tend to forget things, misremember things and change things that are in our memory. Just like what Avishar Margalit said: “Memory is knowledge from the past. It is not necessary knowledge about the past.” Our memory don’t work as a video camera, it is reconstructive, and it changes all the times. It changes because of the new knowledge, because of what other people told you, because of your change of perspective; it changes because of a lot of things. Like the victim in the real life situation, at first she wasn’t really sure if Titus was the raper, but when Titus was put on trial for rape and everybody thought that he is the man, the victim got confident. She went from not really sure to absolutely sure that Titus was the raper, and this change in memory was because of the approval by the public. Of course, that does not mean all of our memory are false and should not be trusted. Although our memory can be reconstructed it’s still base on something real. So we can use memory as a primary source, we just need to consider it’s limitations.