Is an appropriate causal connection to the past experience it represents a necessary condition for a mental state to qualify as an episodic memory? For some years this issue has been the subject of an intense debate between the causalist theory of episodic memory (CTM) and the simulationist theory of episodic memory (STM). This paper aims at exploring the prospects for an embodied approach to episodic memory and assessing the potential case for causalism that could be founded on it. In (...) a critical section, it argues that the empirical data to which STM appeals are both incomplete and inconclusive, and on closer examination even provide support for a proceduralist version of CTM. In a constructive section, it elaborates on the notion of a necessary causal connection in terms of particular procedural patterns acquired at encoding and operative at retrieval, grounding this move on recent empirical data about eye movements in mnemonic mental imagery. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest among philosophers of memory in the questions of how to characterize and to account for the temporal phenomenology of episodic memory. One prominent suggestion has been that episodic memory involves a feeling of pastness, the elaboration of which has given rise to two main approaches. On the intentionalist approach, the feeling of pastness is explained in terms of what episodic memory represents. In particular, Fernández has argued that it can be explained (...) in terms of memory representing itself as being caused by a past perceptual experience. On the metacognitive approach, which we have recently developed in, the feeling of pastness results from the monitoring and interpretation of the processing features of episodic remembering. In this paper, we show that the metacognitive approach should be preferred over the intentionalist approach. We argue that intentionalism, and Fernández’ causal self-referential view in particular, ultimately fail as accounts of the feeling of pastness. The difficulties faced by intentionalism allows us to single out three constraints that any satisfactory account of the temporal phenomenology of episodic remembering needs to meet. We conclude by arguing that the metacognitive view satisfies those constraints in a neat way, and as such, that it should be preferred over intentionalism. (shrink)

Although episodic memory is a widely studied form of memory both in philosophy and psychology, it still raises many burning questions regarding its definition and even its acceptance. Over the last two decades, cross-disciplinary discussions between these two fields have increased as they tackle shared concerns, such as the phenomenology of recollection, and therefore allow for fruitful interaction. This editorial introduction aims to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date presentation of the main existing conceptions and issues on the topic. After delineating (...) Tulving’s chief theoretical import and multifaceted legacy, it goes on to chart the different attempts to capture the episodicity feature of memory according to three categories: a first approach aims to show the cognitive abilities required for a subject to episodically remember; the second defines episodicity as a stage-specific feature; the last explains episodicity in terms of the epistemological properties of episodic memory. This state of the art thereby sets the stage for the contributions of the present volume, which will be introduced in conclusion. (shrink)

This paper tackles the issue of the diversity of déjà experiences. According to the standard view in the neuropsychological literature, they should all be defined by means of a psychological criterion, by which they are experiences triggered by a perceived item and consist of a conscious clash between a first-order feeling of familiarity about the item and a second-order evaluation that assesses the first-order feeling as erroneous. This paper dismisses the standard view and contends there are two types of déjà (...) experiences, labeled déjà vu and déjà vécu respectively. But it also takes issue with the rare proponents of a distinct déjà vécu type. Contrary to their achievement view, it argues that recollection is not involved in déjà vécu experiences as an actual mental state or a component thereof. In our ability view, déjà vécu involves the feeling that one could recollect past occurrences of a currently lived episode of experience. (shrink)

A common view about the phenomenology of episodic remembering has it that when we remember a perceptual experience, we can relive or re-experience many of its features, but not its characteristic presence. In this paper, we challenge this common view. We first say that presence in perception divides into temporal and locative presence, with locative having two sides, an objective and a subjective one. While we agree with the common view that temporal and objective locative presence cannot be relived in (...) remembering, we argue that subjective locative presence – the feeling of being immersed in a certain scene – can be so. Our argument for this claim starts by determining independently the underpinning mechanisms of subjective locative presence in quasi-perceptual imagination. These mechanisms are self-projection, imaginative pretence, and attentional focus. We then proceed to establish that they have been found to underpin conscious states of episodic remembering too. We conclude that episodic remembering can bring us to relive the subjective locative presence characteristic of a perceptual experience, and that the common view is mistaken. Our view – ‘mnemonic immersivism’ – has important consequences regarding the relationships between memory and imagination and the phenomenology of episodic remembering. (shrink)

Neste artigo apresentamos, de forma concisa e em português, alguns elementos-chave dos principais debates contemporâneos na filosofia da memória. Nosso principal objetivo é tornar essas discussões mais acessíveis aos leitores de língua portuguesa, fornecendo uma atualização importante para esforços anteriores (Sant’Anna & Michaelian, 2019a). Começamos introduzindo a noção de viagem no tempo mental, a qual estabelece a base empírica para a metodologia empregada em trabalhos recentes, antes de apresentar dois debates centrais. Primeiro, o debate entre causalistas e simulacionistas sobre a (...) teoria da lembrança filosoficamente correta (§2). Segundo, o debate entre continuístas e descontinuístas sobre a relação entre lembrança episódica e certas formas de imaginação (em particular, o pensamento episódico acerca do futuro) (§3). Na segunda parte do artigo, apresentamos e exploramos dois tópicos de discussão crescente: a natureza do sentimento de passado característico da memória episódica (§4) e questões de meta-nível relativas ao próprio caráter das controvérsias exploradas na primeira parte do artigo (§5). (shrink)

Originally understood as memory for the “what”, the “when”, and the “where” of experienced past events, episodic memory has, in recent years, been redefined as a form of past-oriented mental time travel. Following a brief review of empirical research on memory as mental time travel, this introduction provides an overview of the contributions to the special issue, which explore the theoretical implications of that research.

Although philosophers have explored memory since antiquity, recent years have seen the birth of philosophy of memory as a distinct field. This book—the first of its kind—charts emerging directions of research in the field. The book's nineteen newly-commissioned chapters develop novel theories of remembering and forgetting, analyze the phenomenology and content of memory, debate issues in the ethics and epistemology of remembering, and explore the relationship between memory and affectivity. Written by leading researchers in the philosophy of memory, the chapters (...) collectively present an exciting vision of the future of this dynamic area of research. (shrink)

Cet article traite de la question méta-sémantique de ce qui permet au souvenir épisodique d’avoir le contenu sémantique qui est le sien. Il adopte une position singulariste quant au contenu du souvenir et critique la justification méta-sémantique relationnaliste de cette position. Selon celle-ci, le contenu du souvenir est singulier parce que le souvenir consiste en une relation d’accointance avec l’événement passé. L’article oppose un argument causal et un argument sémantique à cette analyse puis montre que les deux traits du souvenir (...) que l’idée d’accointance est censée expliquer – la phénoménologie et la singularité du souvenir – peuvent l’être au moyen de modèles singularistes non fondés sur l’accointance. (shrink)

Theoria, Volume 87, Issue 1, Page 109-135, February 2021.

La pensee de Ludwig Wittgenstein est animee, tout au long des annees 1930 et 1940, par une meditation de la question du temps. C'est un de ses aspects les plus mal connus. Ce livre vise a restituer cette meditation dans sa force et sa singularite, afin d'etablir la contribution qu'elle apporte a la tradition qui s'est consacree a cette question majeure de la philosophie. Il montre d'abord comment la tentation d'accorder un privilege au present constitue un element essentiel du projet (...) phenomenologique wittgensteinien de 1929, avant d'explorer le travail critique auquel Wittgenstein soumet ce projet au cours des deux decennies suivantes, et qui le conduit a situer dans un certain rapport a notre langage l'origine de notre facon de penser la temporalite. Une analyse originale du langage ordinaire permet ainsi de reevaluer les theories classiques du temps que proposent la phenomenologie, la philosophie de la psychologie et la philosophie du langage. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide a psychologically-informed philosophical account of the phenomenology of episodic remembering. The literature on epistemic or metacognitive feelings has grown considerably in recent years, and there are persuasive reasons, both conceptual and empirical, in favour of the view that the phenomenology of remembering—autonoetic consciousness, as Tulving influentially referred to it, or the feeling of pastness, as we will refer to it here—is an epistemic feeling, but few philosophical treatments of this phenomenology as an epistemic feeling have (...) so far been proposed. Building on insights from the psychological literature, we argue that a form of feeling-based metacognition is involved in episodic remembering and develop an integrated metacognitive feeling-based view that addresses several key aspects of the feeling of pastness, namely, its status as a feeling, its content, and its relationship to the first-order memories the phenomenology of which it provides. (shrink)

On Barzykowski and Moulin's continuum hypothesis, déjà vu and involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs) share their underpinning neurocognitive processes. A discontinuity issue for them is that familiarity and episodic recollection exhibit different neurocognitive signatures. This issue can be overcome, I say, provided the authors are ready to distinguish a déjà vécu/episodic IAM continuity and a déjà vu/semantic IAM continuity.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the chapters making up the book, which are grouped into six sections: challenges and alternatives to the causal theory of memory; activity and passivity in remembering; the affective dimension of memory; memory in groups; memory failures: concepts and ethical implications; and the content and phenomenology of episodic and semantic memory.

Judgments based on episodic memory are often thought to be immune to errors of misidentification (IEM). Yet there is a certain category of episodic memories, viz. observer memories, that seems to threaten IEM. In the resulting debate, some say that observer memories are a threat to the IEM enjoyed by episodic memory (Michaelian, 2021); others say that they pose no such threat (Fernández, 2021; Lin, 2020). In this paper, we argue for a middle way. First, we frame the debate, claiming (...) that the existing literature lacks a satisfying definition both of observer memories and of the precise issue of errors of identification in such memories. Then, we contribute to the debate by challenging an anti-separatist view about the relation between phenomenal and intentional features of observer memories that looms behind this debate. On this view, if the rememberer's self is a phenomenal feature of the memory, by implication it is also built into the intentional content. We reject this view and offer a moderate separatist account. Distinguishing between empirically-grounded species of observer memories, we say that the phenomenal self sometimes is, and sometimes is not built into the intentional content of the memory, and this results in different implications for IEM. (shrink)

Cet article opère une comparaison des théories de la proposition — entendue dans sa double dimension sémantique et gnoséologique — du Wittgenstein des Philosophische Bemerkungen et du Russell de The Analysis of Mind . Après avoir rappelé le statut sémantique nouveau que ces théories accordent au temps en intégrant le fait qu’un délai sépare, pour un grand nombre de nos énoncés, leur occurrence et leur vérification , il établit que la notion d’attente est chargée, chez Wittgenstein comme chez Russell , (...) de combler cet écart temporel. Mais — c’est le deuxième point — une notion différente est mobilisée par chacun de ces deux auteurs, et dans un projet théorique à chaque fois différent : alors que Wittgenstein vise à étendre la notion tractatuséenne de relation interne aux relations sémantiques temporelles et à défendre un intentionnalisme logique, Russell cherche au contraire à soutenir une conception externaliste de ces relations de façon à faire droit aux cas où elles sont non-intentionnelles. Pour cela, Wittgenstein adopte un concept appelé ici « intentionnel » de l’attente, alors que Russell s’appuie sur un concept dit « non-intentionnel ». Une conséquence majeure de cette différence — c’est le troisième point — est que la célèbre critique par Wittgenstein de l’analyse russellienne de l’attente se révèle être largement erronée dans la mesure où elle se donne pour cible un concept qui n’est pas celui de Russell. Le quatrième point défendu par l’article est qu’une fois rétabli le concept de Russell, l’externalisme que celui-ci défend est doté d’arguments susceptibles de contrer efficacement la position internaliste et intentionnaliste de Wittgenstein.This paper carries out a comparison between the theories of the proposition — in its semantical and epistemic significance — elaborated respectively by Wittgenstein in Philosophische Bemerkungen and by Russell in The Analysis of Mind . Having recalled that time is endowed with a new semantical status by both theories through acknowledging there is a lapse between many of our utterances and their verification , it brings out that the notion of Erwartung by Wittgenstein and the notion of expectation by Russell are meant to bridge this temporal gap. But — this is the second point — those two notions have two different meanings and they belong to a different theoretical framework by each of those authors : while Wittgenstein’s goal is to extend the Tractarian notion of internal relations to temporal semantic relations in order to support a logical version of intentionalism, Russell aims at favoring an externalist view of those relations and to put forward cases in which they are non-intentional. For these respective purposes, the Erwartung notion elaborated by Wittgenstein is a “intentional” notion, whereas the notion of expectation that Russell adopts is a “non-intentional” notion. One chief consequence of this difference — this is the third point — is that Wittgenstein’s famous criticism of Russell’s analysis of expectation falls short because it targets a notion that is not Russell’s own notion. The fourth point of the paper is that acknowledging Russell’s notion provides externalism with some strong arguments to counter Wittgenstein’s internalist and intentionalist position. (shrink)

resumo Este artigo parte da constatação de que a análise jamesiana da consciência do tempo constituiu uma fonte comum fundamental das meditações husserlianas e wittgensteinianas relativas ao tempo, o specious present engendrando tanto o ursprüngliche Zeitfeld de Husserl quanto o fliehende Gegenwart do Wittgenstein de 1929. Em seguida, examino a possibilidade de apreender a articulação entre as concepções do tempo de Husserl e de Wittgenstein no nível de suas respectivas apropriações da análise de James. Respondendo de modo afirmativo, sustento de (...) início que essas apropriações se cruzam na crítica do presentismo jamesiano e da idéia segundo a qual a lembrança é uma imagem-cópia presente. Sustento, em seguida, que o anti-psicologismo dá lugar, no entanto, a desenvolvimentos muito diferentes em Husserl e em Wittgenstein. Aquele, com efeito, visa purificar o "núcleo fenomenológico" contido na análise jamesiana de seus resíduos psicológicos para revelar o que ele nos ensina acerca dos modos de aparecer temporais essenciais. De modo inteiramente diferente, Wittgenstein irá pôr em questão a própria imagem do fluxo do presente de consciência, ao descrever a genealogia dessa imagem a partir de erros acerca da linguagem ordinária. O resultado desse artigo é duplo: de um lado, se a análise jamesiana é realmente uma fonte comum às reflexões husserliana e wittgensteiniana acerca do tempo, no final das contas ela dá lugar a apropriações quase opostas; de outro, o debate James-Husserl-Wittgenstein permite confrontar as abordagens psicológica, fenomenológica e gramatical do tempo, e, desse modo, em particular, especificar esta última. palavras-chave James – Husserl – Wittgenstein – tempo - fenomenologia. (shrink)

Une relation causale appropriée à une scène vécue dans le passé est-elle nécessaire pour qu’une représentation de cette scène en soit le souvenir épisodique? Le présent article expose les réponses qui sont actuellement apportées à ce débat central en philosophie de la mémoire. Il introduit d’abord les conditions définitionnelles avancées par la théorie causale standard, avant d’examiner les critiques qui ont été formulées à leur encontre. L’article présente et discute alors deux familles de théories qui ont été proposées en réaction (...) à ces critiques : les théories causales réformatrices, d’une part, et la théorie anti-causale simulationniste, d’autre part. (shrink)

"Les indexicaux (ou déictiques) sont réputés avoir une signification linguistique sensible à leur contexte d'occurrence. Mais en quoi consiste cette sensibilité, et donc quelle est cette signification? Inspiré par les analyses de Bühler, l'ouvrage questionne un présupposé sémiotique commun à la plupart des théories actuelles de l'indexicalité linguistique, et soutient qu'en communication face-à-face, les occurrences indexicales déférent tout ou partie de l'opération référentielle à certaines de leurs propriétés perceptives. L'indexicalité apporte ainsi légitimité à la linguistique incarnée actuelle. L'ouvrage montre alors (...) que le même mécanisme de déférence rend également compte des autres usages, notamment anaphoriques, des indexicaux."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This paper is about the pragmatic inferences in play as conversational implicatures (Grice, P. 1989. Studies in the way of words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) occur. First, it constructs the deductivism versus abductivism debate that transpires from the extant literature but is rarely elaborated. Against deductivism, the paper argues that implicating inferences in conversational implicatures can instantiate an abductive logical form, as abductivism suggests. Against abductivism, however, it grants to deductivism that implicating inferences can have a deductive form provided (...) the latter is of a defeasible type. In sum, it thus argues for pluralist defeasibilism. Second, it turns to the issue of the ontological nature of implicating inferences and advocates normative inferentialism, on which these inferences are not primarily real psychological processes but rules of the practice of implicating. While this allows for the possibility of their psychological instantiation, to be sure, the paper also insists that psychological inferring processes in implicatures are neither necessarily isomorphic to the aforementioned rules nor even necessarily occur as an implicature occurs. (shrink)

L'ouvrage propose une analyse du phenomene du souvenir qui recourt non seulement aux auteurs classiques, mais egalement aux conceptions philosophiques les plus contemporaines et a la psychologie cognitive du souvenir. Dans cette perspective, il examine quatre problemes souleves par l'intentionnalite du souvenir. 1) Celui de son type, i.e. aussi bien de sa diversite interne entre souvenir episodique et souvenir semantique, que de sa specificite par rapport a la perception et a l'imagination. 2) Le probleme de l'objet du souvenir, qui questionne (...) ce dont nous avons conscience dans le souvenir. 3) Le probleme du caractere diachronique que nombre de souvenirs entretiennent avec leur objet, et donc de la conscience du temps qu'ils mettent en oeuvre. 4) Celui, enfin, de la connaissance que constitue le souvenir. L'essai est complete du commentaire d'un texte de D. Hume qui offre une formulation classique de la conception representationnaliste du souvenir, et de celui d'une defense contemporaine du realisme direct par C. Hoerl. (shrink)

Este artigo enfoca a questão da temporalidade no período intermediário de Wittgenstein. Primeiro, ele estabelece a evolução do tratamento que o filósofo dispensa à idéia “fenomenológica”, de origem empirista, de um presente da consciência incessantemente fluente: de início simplesmente adotada (em 1929) como uma descrição da experiência imediata, essa idéia é, em seguida, criticada em 1930-32 como a expressão de uma das tentações mais características do espírito filosófico. Depois, o artigo examina, num caso particular (o da lembrança), o modo pelo (...) qual Wittgenstein lida com os efeitos desse mito na reflexão filosófica. Endereçada sobretudo à concepção russelliana de 1921 da intencionalidade mnemônica, a crítica wittgensteiniana consiste em trazer à luz as confusões que levam a crer que a lembrança só pode manter uma relação externa com seu objeto. Ao restabelecer assim o papel das relações internas, Wittgenstein pretende romper o feitiço do mito do presente sobre a filosofia da memória. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ: Dans cette étude, je propose d’appliquer au cas du souvenir épisodique le débat qui oppose le simulationnisme à l’approche théorie-théorique. Après avoir critiqué l’approche théorie-théorique, je défends une solution simulationniste du problème du rapport entre la phénoménologie du souvenir épisodique et la conscience de soi qui s’y manifeste. Je soutiens que la subjectivité s’introduit dans le contenu même du souvenir épisodique, mais qu’elle le fait non pas en tant qu’élément du contenu mais sous la forme du caractère perspectif qu’elle (...) donne à celui-ci et qui permet la simulation de l’expérience passée. À l’appui de cette thèse, je procède à une analyse sémantique inspirée par J. Perry des penséesde sequi confère au sujet du souvenir épisodique une inhérence non-représentationnelle au contenu mnésique. (shrink)