The lesson, the reliabilist will tell us, is that the justificatory status of a memory belief is, in standard cases, partially a function of the belief's justificatory status at an earlier time.  I say “in standard cases” because it is possible, of course, for one to acquire new information that will turn a formerly unjustified belief into a now justified memory belief.  But in the majority of cases, when the memory belief is not accompanied by new information, one will be justified now only if one was justified at an earlier time.  This consequence of the theory is plausible because memory is generally a belief-preserving rather than a belief-generating process. Unlike perception, which takes nondoxastic inputs and produces beliefs, memory aims at preservation.  Thus it is natural that the epistemology of the former depends only on the conditions at the time of the operation of the process, while the justification of the latter sort of belief makes demands on its history.  What both have in common is that the pedigree of the belief is relevant to its epistemic status; the pedigree of memory belief is just a more complicated and historically robust affair. 