 Direct realism (defended by Reid ([1764] 1997) and, more recently, by Laird (1920)) claims that, when one remembers, one is in the first instance related to past events themselves; it is thus perhaps the most intuitively appealing view of the nature of the objects of memory. The primary motivations for direct realism about the objects of memory parallel the motivations for direct realism about the objects of perception. One motivation is the thought that positing representations that stand as intermediaries between the remembering subject and the remembered object may have sceptical implications for our ability to know the past. Another motivation is the thought that remembering is phenomenologically direct, that is, that, in remembering, we attend to past events, not to internal representations of past events. The work on metamemory discussed in section 4 suggests that remembering may in fact often be phenomenologically indirect rather than phenomenologically direct. But there are more serious problems for direct realism, and it is these that provide the primary motivation for indirect realism.