Misremembering is a systematic and ordinary occurrence in our daily lives. Since it is commonly assumed that the function of memory is to remember the past, misremembering is typically thought to happen because our memory system malfunctions. In this paper I argue that not all cases of misremembering are due to failures in our memory system. In particular, I argue that many ordinary cases of misremembering should not be seen as instances of memory’s malfunction, but rather as the normal result (...) of a larger cognitive system that performs a different function, and for which remembering is just one operation. Building upon extant psychological and neuroscientific evidence, I offer a picture of memory as an integral part of a larger system that supports not only thinking of what was the case and what potentially could be the case, but also what could have been the case. More precisely, I claim that remembering is a particular operation of a cognitive system that permits the flexible recombination of different components of encoded traces into representations of possible past events that might or might not have occurred, in the service of constructing mental simulations of possible future events. So that imagination and memory are but one thing, which for diverse considerations hath diverse names.Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan 1.2. (shrink)

Humans can recollect past events in details and/or know that an object, person, or place has been encountered before. During the last two decades, there has been intense debate about how recollection and familiarity are organized in the brain. Here, we propose an integrative memory model which describes the distributed and interactive neurocognitive architecture of representations and operations underlying recollection and familiarity. In this architecture, the subjective experience of recollection and familiarity arises from the interaction between core systems and an (...) attribution system. By integrating principles from current theoretical views about memory functioning, we provide a testable framework to refine the prediction of deficient versus preserved mechanisms in memory-impaired populations. The case of Alzheimer's disease is considered as an example because it entails progressive lesions starting with limited damage to core systems before invading step-by-step most parts of the model-related network. We suggest a chronological scheme of cognitive impairments along the course of AD, where the inaugurating deficit would relate early neurodegeneration of the perirhinal/anterolateral entorhinal cortex to impaired familiarity for items that need to be discriminated as viewpoint-invariant conjunctive entities. The integrative memory model can guide future neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies aiming to understand how such a network allows humans to remember past events, to project into the future, and possibly also to share experiences. (shrink)

Mental imagery has often been taken to be equivalent to “sensory imagination”, the perception‐like type of imagination at play when, for example, one visually imagines a flower when none is there, or auditorily imagines a music passage while wearing earplugs. I contend that the equation of mental imagery with sensory imagination stems from a confusion between two senses of mental imagery. In the first sense, mental imagery is used to refer to a psychological attitude, which is perception‐like in nature. In (...) the second sense, mental imagery refers to a mental content, which can be grasped via different attitudes. I will show that failure to acknowledge the distinction between these senses of mental imagery has muddled philosophical discussion. This distinction brings much needed clarity to debates where sensory imagination and mental imagery are invoked, shedding light on issues such as the nature of imagistic mental states, and the representational powers and limits of mental imagery. I will conclude by sketching a general attitudinal account of imagination that does justice to both senses of mental imagery, outlining a promising framework for understanding imagination. (shrink)

Mental time travel is defined as projecting the self into the past and the future. Despite growing evidence of the similarities of remembering past and imagining future events, dominant theories conceive of these as distinct capacities. I propose that memory and imagination are fundamentally the same process – constructive episodic simulation – and demonstrate that the ‘simulation system’ meets the three criteria of a neurocognitive system. Irrespective of whether one is remembering or imagining, the simulation system: acts on the same (...) information, drawing on elements of experience ranging from fine-grained perceptual details to coarser-grained conceptual information and schemas about the world; is governed by the same rules of operation, including associative processes that facilitate construction of a schematic scaffold, the event representation itself, and the dynamic interplay between the two ; and is subserved by the same brain system. I also propose that by forming associations between schemas, the simulation system constructs multi-dimensional cognitive spaces, within which any given simulation is mapped by the hippocampus. Finally, I suggest that simulation is a general capacity that underpins other domains of cognition, such as the perception of ongoing experience. This proposal has some important implications for the construct of ‘MTT’, suggesting that ‘time’ and ‘travel’ may not be defining, or even essential, features. Rather, it is the ‘mental’ rendering of experience that is the most fundamental function of this domain-general simulation system enabling humans to re-experience the past, pre-experience the future, and also comprehend the complexities of the present. (shrink)

This book offers a philosophical account of memory. Memory is remarkably interesting from a philosophical point of view. Our memories interact with mental states of other types in a characteristic way. They also have some associated feelings that other mental states lack. Our memories are special in terms of their representational capacity too, since we can have memories of objective events, and we can have memories of our own past experiences. Finally, our memories are epistemically special, in that beliefs formed (...) on the basis of our memories are protected from certain errors of misidentification and justified in a way which does not rely on any cognitive capacity other than memory. The aim of the book is to explain these features of memory. It proposes that memories have a particular functional role which involves past perceptual experiences and beliefs about the past and suggests that memories have a particular content as well; they represent themselves as having a certain causal origin. The book then accounts for the feelings associated with our memories as the experience of some of the things that our memories represent; things such as our own past experiences, or the fact the memories originate in those experiences. It also accounts for the special justification for belief afforded by our memories in terms of the content that memories have. The resulting picture is a unified account of several philosophically interesting aspects of memory. (shrink)

Continuists maintain that, aside from their distinct temporal orientations, episodic memory and future-oriented mental time travel (FMTT) are qualitatively continuous. Discontinuists deny this, arguing that, in addition to their distinct temporal orientations, there are qualitative metaphysical or epistemological differences between episodic memory and FMTT. This chapter defends continuism by responding both to arguments for metaphysical discontinuism, based on alleged discontinuities between episodic memory and FMTT at the causal, intentional, and phenomenological levels, and to arguments for epistemological discontinuism, based on alleged (...) discontinuities with respect to the epistemic openness of the past and future, the directness or indirectness of our knowledge of past and future, and immunity to error through misidentification. The chapter concludes by sketching a positive argument for continuism. (shrink)

​Imagination will remain a mystery—we will not be able to explain imagination—until we can break it into parts we already understand. Explaining Imagination is a guidebook for doing just that, where the parts are other ordinary mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, and decisions. In different combinations and contexts, these states constitute cases of imagining. This reductive approach to imagination is at direct odds with the current orthodoxy, according to which imagination is a sui generis mental state or process—one with (...) its own inscrutable principles of operation. Explaining Imagination upends that view, showing how, on closer inspection, the imaginings at work in hypothetical reasoning, pretense, the enjoyment of fiction, and creativity are reducible to other familiar mental states—judgments, beliefs, desires, and decisions among them. Crisscrossing contemporary philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and aesthetics, Explaining Imagination argues that a clearer understanding of imagination is already well within reach. (shrink)

In this article , I first engage in some conceptual clarification of what the words "imagine," "imagining," and "imagination" can mean. Each has a constructive sense, an attitudinal sense, and an imagistic sense. Keeping the senses straight in the course of cognitive theorizing is important for both psychology and philosophy. I then discuss the roles that perceptual memories, beliefs, and genre truth attitudes play in constructive imagination, or the capacity to generate novel representations that go well beyond what's prompted by (...) one's immediate environment. (shrink)

According to the Causal Theory of Memory, remembering a particular past event requires a causal connection between that event and its subsequent representation in memory, specifically, a connection sustained by a memory trace. The CTM is the default view of memory in contemporary philosophy, but debates persist over what the involved memory traces must be like. Martin and Deutscher argued that the CTM required memory traces to be structural analogues of past events. Bernecker and Michaelian, contemporary CTM proponents, reject structural (...) analogues in favor of memory traces as distributed patterns of event features. The proposals are understood as distinct accounts of how memory traces represent past events. But there are two distinct questions one could ask about a trace’s representational features. One might ask how memory traces, qua mental representations, have their semantic properties. Or, what makes memory traces, qua mental representations of memories, distinct from other mental representations. Proponents of the CTM, both past and present, have failed to keep these two questions distinct. The result is a serious but unnoticed problem for the CTM in its current form. Distributed memory traces are incompatible with the CTM. Such traces do not provide a way to track the causal history of individual memories, as the CTM requires. If memory traces are distributed patterns of event features, as Bernecker and Michaelian each claim, then the CTM cannot be right. (shrink)

Philosophers of memory have approached the relationship between memory and imagination from two very different perspectives. Advocates of the causal theory of memory, on the one hand, have motivated their preferred theory by appealing to the intuitive contrast between successfully remembering an event and merely imagining it. Advocates of the simulation theory, on the other hand, have motivated their preferred theory by appealing to empirical evidence for important similarities between remembering the past and imagining the future. Recently, causalists have argued (...) that simulationism is unable to accommodate the difference between successful remembering and forms of unsuccessful remembering or mere imagining such as confabulating. This paper argues that, while these arguments fail, simulationism, in its current form, is indeed unable to provide a fully adequate account of unsuccessful remembering. Rather than suggesting a return to causalism, the paper proposes a new form of simulationism, a virtue theory of memory modelled not on the process reliabilist epistemology that has so far served as the inspiration for the simulation theory but instead on virtue reliabilist epistemology, and shows that this new theory grounds a more adequate account of unsuccessful remembering. (shrink)

This paper explores the implications of the psychology of constructive memory for philosophical theories of the metaphysics of memory and for a central question in the epistemology of memory. I first develop a general interpretation of the psychology of constructive memory. I then argue, on the basis of this interpretation, for an updated version of Martin and Deutscher's influential causal theory of memory. I conclude by sketching the implications of this updated theory for the question of memory 's status as (...) a generative epistemic source. (shrink)

This articles develops a taxonomy of memory errors in terms of three conditions: the accuracy of the memory representation, the reliability of the memory process, and the internality (with respect to the remembering subject) of that process. Unlike previous taxonomies, which appeal to retention of information rather than reliability or internality, this taxonomy can accommodate not only misremembering (e.g., the DRM effect), falsidical confabulation, and veridical relearning but also veridical confabulation and falsidical relearning. Moreover, because it does not assume that (...) successful remembering presupposes retention of information, the taxonomy is compatible with recent simulation theories of remembering. (shrink)

The point of this paper is to reveal a dogma in the ordinary conception of sensory imagination, and to suggest another way forward. The dogma springs from two main sources: a too close comparison of mental imagery to perceptual experience, and a too strong division between mental imagery and the traditional propositional attitudes (such as belief and desire). The result is an unworkable conception of the correctness conditions of sensory imaginings—one lacking any link between the conditions under which an imagining (...) aids human action and inference and the conditions under which it is veridical. The proposed solution is, first, to posit a variety of imaginative attitudes—akin to the traditional propositional attitudes—which have different associated correctness (or satisfaction) conditions. The second part of the solution is to allow for imaginings with “hybrid” contents, in the sense that both mental images and representations with language-like constituent structure contribute to the content of imaginings. (shrink)

Despite their intuitive appeal and a long philosophical history, imagery-based accounts of the imagination have fallen into disfavor in contemporary discussions. The philosophical pressure to reject such accounts seems to derive from two distinct sources. First, the fact that mental images have proved difficult to accommodate within a scientific conception of mind has led to numerous attempts to explain away their existence, and this in turn has led to attempts to explain the phenomenon of imagining without reference to such ontologically (...) dubious entities as mental images. Second, even those philosophers who accept mental images in their ontology have worried about what seem to be fairly obvious examples of imaginings that occur without imagery. In this paper, I aim to relieve both these points of philosophical pressure and, in the process, develop a new imagery-based account of the imagination: the imagery model. (shrink)

What is it to remember an episode from one’s past? How does episodic memory give us knowledge of the personal past? What explains the emergence of the apparently uniquely human ability to relive the past? Drawing on current research on mental time travel, this book proposes an integrated set of answers to these questions, arguing that remembering is a matter of simulating past episodes, that we can identify metacognitive mechanisms enabling episodic simulation to meet standards of reliability sufficient for knowledge, (...) and that the subjective experience of reliving the past is a precondition for the reliability of simulational remembering. The resulting account of memory, memory knowledge, and their evolution will be of interest both to philosophers interested in empirically-informed approaches to memory and to psychologists interested in the philosophical implications of empirical memory research. (shrink)

Sven Bernecker presents an analysis of the concept of propositional (or factual) memory, and examines a number of metaphysical and epistemological issues crucial to the understanding of memory. -/- Bernecker argues that memory, unlike knowledge, implies neither belief nor justification. There are instances where memory, though hitting the mark of truth, succeeds in an epistemically defective way. This book shows that, contrary to received wisdom in epistemology, memory not only preserves epistemic features generated by other epistemic sources but also functions (...) as a source of justification and knowledge. According to the causal theory of memory argued for in this book, the dependence of memory states on past representations supports counterfactuals of the form: if the subject hadn't represented a given proposition in the past he wouldn't represent it in the present. The book argues for a version of content externalism whereupon the individuation of memory contents depends on relations the subject bears to his past physical or social environment. Moreover, Bernecker shows that memory doesn't require identity, but only similarity, of past and present attitudes and contents. The notion of content similarity is explicated in terms of the entailment relation. (shrink)

To imagine is to form a mental representation that does not aim at things as they actually, presently, and subjectively are. One can use imagination to represent possibilities other than the actual, to represent times other than the present, and to represent perspectives other than one’s own. Unlike perceiving and believing, imagining something does not require one to consider that something to be the case. Unlike desiring or anticipating, imagining something does not require one to wish or expect that something (...) to be the case. // -/- Imagination is involved in a wide variety of human activities, and has been explored from a wide range of philosophical perspectives. Philosophers of mind have examined imagination’s role in mindreading and in pretense. Philosophical aestheticians have examined imagination’s role in creating and in engaging with different types of artworks. Epistemologists have examined imagination’s role in theoretical thought experiments and in practical decision-making. Philosophers of language have examined imagination’s role in irony and metaphor. // -/- Because of the breadth of the topic, this entry focuses exclusively on contemporary discussions of imagination in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. (shrink)

Counterfactual imaginings are known to have far reaching implications. In the present experiment, we ask if imagining events from one's past can affect memory for childhood events. We draw on the social psychology literature showing that imagining a future event increases the subjective likelihood that the event will occur. The concepts of cognitive availability and the source monitoring framework provide reasons to expect that imagination may inflate confidence that a childhood event occurred. However, people routinely produce myriad counterfactual imaginings (i.e., (...) daydreams and fantasies) but usually do not confuse them with past experiences. To determine the effects of imagining a childhood event, we pretested subjects on how confident they were that a number of childhood events had happened, asked them to imagine some of those events, and then gathered new confidence measures. For each of the target items, imagination inflated confidence that the event had occurred in childhood. We discuss implications for situations in which imagination is used as an aid in searching for presumably lost memories. (shrink)