The construct “remembering” is equivocal between an epistemic sense, denoting a distinctive ground for knowledge, and empirical sense, denoting the typical behavior of a neurocognitive mechanism. Because the same kind of equivocation arises for other psychologistic terms, the effort to spot and remedy the confusion in the case of remembering might prove generally instructive. The failure to allow these two senses of remembering equal play in their respective domains leads, I argue, to unnecessary confusion about memory externalism, the possibility of (...) episodic memory in non-human species, and the thesis of memory continuism. By distinguishing these equivocal senses of remembering, we thus gain leverage on understanding how the distinctive epistemic norms that define many of our psychologic terms are more plausibly related to the capacities studied by empirical science, given that neither identity nor elimination are possible. (shrink)

Episodic memory—memory for personally experienced past events—seems to afford a distinctive kind of cognitive contact with the past. This makes it natural to think that episodic memory is centrally involved in our understanding of what it is for something to be in the past, or to be located in time—that it is either necessary or sufficient for such understanding. If this were the case, it would suggest certain straightforward evidential connections between temporal cognition and episodic memory in nonhuman animals. In (...) this paper, I argue that matters are more complicated than this. Episodic memory is memory for events and not for the times they occupy. As such, it is dissociable from temporal understanding. This is not to say that episodic memory and temporal cognition are unrelated, but that the relationship between them cannot be straightforwardly captured by claims about necessity and sufficiency. This should inform our theoretical predictions about the manifestations of episodic memory in nonhuman behaviour. (shrink)

Remembering is one of the most characteristic and most puzzling of human activities. Personal memory, in particular - the ability mentally to travel back into the past, as leading psychologist Endel Tulving puts it - often has intense emotional or moral significance: it is perhaps the most striking manifestation of the peculiar way human beings are embedded in time, and of our limited but genuine freedom from our present environment and our immediate needs. Memory has been significant in the history (...) of philosophy as much in relation to ethics and to epistemology as in theories of psyche, mind, and self. (shrink)

Historical Discourse’s Truth Matrix was first posited by Michel Foucault to describe the emergence of a discourse of historical events subsequent to the cessation of war and established by the most powerful arbiters of those events. This paper adapts the implements of Foucault’s toolbox to conceptualise the dimensions of subjectivity that historical events pass through from the original event to the subsequent depictions of those events in historical writing or other media. The Corpus of Irish Historical Narratives is a one-million-word (...) representative corpus of oral-history witness testimonies taken from the Bureau of Military History Archive which depict the events surrounding the Irish struggle for independence from the lead up to the 1916 rising to the signing of the Anglo-Irish treaty in 1921. The archive provides a rich source of both historical, social and cultural data and has been the source of many publications pertaining to events of this pivotal time in Irish history. This study takes a hybrid corpus-driven and corpus-based approach to the analysis of epistemic modality in these statements through hedged expressions using mental process verbs and, in doing so, offers a framework for the analysis of a core dimension of historical discourse’s truth matrix. The notion of ‘paradoxical authority’ is proposed, stating that the authority of a witness is boosted rather than mitigated by expressing weak commitment to the truth of a proposition. (shrink)

A central claim by Hoerl & McCormack is that the temporal reasoning system is uniquely human. But why exactly? This commentary evaluates two possible options to justify the thesis that temporal reasoning is uniquely human, one based on considerations regarding agency and the other based on language. The commentary raises problems for both of these options.

Episodic memory has been analyzed in a number of different ways in both philosophy and psychology, and most controversy has centered on its self-referential,autonoeticcharacter. Here, we offer a comprehensive characterization of episodic memory in representational terms and propose a novel functional account on this basis. We argue that episodic memory should be understood as a distinctive epistemic attitude taken toward an event simulation. In this view, episodic memory has a metarepresentational format and should not be equated with beliefs about the (...) past. Instead, empirical findings suggest that the contents of human episodic memory are often constructed in the service of the explicit justification of such beliefs. Existing accounts of episodic memory function that have focused on explaining its constructive character through its role in future-oriented mental time travel do justice neither to its capacity to ground veridical beliefs about the past nor to its representational format. We provide an account of the metarepresentational structure of episodic memory in terms of its role in communicative interaction. The generative nature of recollection allows us to represent and communicate the reasons why we hold certain beliefs about the past. In this process, autonoesis corresponds to the capacity to determine when and how to assert epistemic authority in making claims about the past. A domain where such claims are indispensable are human social engagements. Such engagements commonly require the justification of entitlements and obligations, which is often possible only by explicit reference to specific past events. (shrink)

Mahr & Csibra (M&C) argue that event and episodic memories share the same scenario construction process. I think this way of carving up the distinction throws the baby out with the bathwater. If there is a substantive difference between event and episodic memory, it is based on a difference in the construction process and how they are organized, respectively.

Hoerl & McCormack argue that animals cannot represent past situations and subsume animals’ memory-like representations within a model of the world. I suggest calling these memory-like representations as what they are without beating around the bush. I refer to them as event memories and explain how they are different from episodic memory and how they can guide action in animal cognition.