Just simulating? Linguistic support for continuism about remembering and imagining

Review of Philosophy and Psychology:1-37 (forthcoming)
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Abstract

Much recent work in philosophy of memory discusses the question whether episodic remembering is continuous with imagining. This paper contributes to the debate between continuists and discontinuists by considering a previously neglected source of evidence for continuism: the linguistic properties of overt memory and imagination reports (e.g. sentences of the form 'x remembers/imagines p'). I argue that the distribution and truth-conditional contribution of episodic uses of the English verb 'remember' is surprisingly similar to that of the verb 'imagine' – even when compared to the distribution of other experiential attitude verbs like 'see', 'hallucinate', or 'dream'. This holds despite the presence of some remarkable truth-conditional differences between 'remember' and 'imagine'. I show how these differences can be explained by a continuist account of remembering on which remembering is past-directed, referential, and accurate experiential imagining.

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Kristina Liefke
Ruhr-Universität Bochum

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References found in this work

Attitudes de dicto and de se.David Lewis - 1979 - Philosophical Review 88 (4):513-543.
Generative memory.Kourken Michaelian - 2011 - Philosophical Psychology 24 (3):323-342.
Remembering.C. B. Martin & Max Deutscher - 1966 - Philosophical Review 75 (April):161-96.
Memory as mental time travel.Denis Perrin & Kourken Michaelian - 2017 - In Sven Bernecker & Kourken Michaelian (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory. New York: Routledge. pp. 228-239.

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