In the philosophy of memory, singularism is the view that episodic memories are singular mental states about unique personally experienced past events. In this paper, I present an empirical challenge to singularism. I examine three distinct lines of evidence from the psychology of memory, concerning general event memories, the transformation of memory traces and the minimized role temporal information plays in major psychological theories of episodic memory. I argue that singularist views will have a hard time accommodating this evidence, facing (...) a problem of transitional gradation. I then look at some potential consequences for the larger debate, highlighting the way in which singularism has featured in three important recent arguments in the philosophy of memory. (shrink)

The Hard Question of memory is the following: how are memory representations stored and organized so as to be made available for retrieval in the appropriate circumstances and format? In this essay, I argue that philosophical theories of memory should engage with the Hard Question directly and seriously. I propose that declarative memory is a faculty performing a kind of cognitive triage: management of information for a variety of uses under significant computational constraints. In such triage, memory representations are preferentially (...) selected and stabilized, but also systematically modified and integrated into generalized, model-like representational structures. Further, I propose a hybrid theory of remembering, which takes into account both the nature of the cognitive processes underlying remembering and the norms that govern representational success in relevant cognitive/epistemic contexts. (shrink)

This essay investigates the notion of simulation and the role it plays in Kourken Michaelian's simulation theory of memory. I argue that the notion is importantly ambiguous and that this ambiguity may threaten some of the central commitments of the theory. To illustrate that, I examine two different conceptions of simulation: a narrow one (simulation as replication) and a broad one (simulation as computational modeling), arguing that the preferred narrow conception is incompatible with the claim that remembering involves the simulation (...) of past episodes. Investigating possible solutions, I suggest that, despite some relatively serious consequences, the theory may be better off subscribing to the broad notion of simulation. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that causal theories of memory are typically committed to two independent, non-mutually entailing theses. The first thesis pertains to the necessity of appropriate causation in memory, specifying a condition token memories need to satisfy. The second pertains to the explanation of memory reliability in causal terms and it concerns memory as a type of mental state. Post-causal theories of memory can reject only the first (weak post-causalism) or both (strong post-causalism) theses. Upon this backdrop, I (...) examine Werning’s (2020) causalist argument from probabilistic correlation. I argue that it doesn’t establish the necessity of appropriate causation and thus it can only target strong post-causalist theories. I end up by presenting some general considerations, suggesting that memories may not always be causally linked to past experiences. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Cheng and Werning (2016) argue that the class of episodic memories constitutes a natural kind. Endorsing the homeostatic property cluster view of natural kinds, they suggest that episodic memories can be characterized by a cluster of properties unified by an underlying neural mechanism for coding sequences of events. Here, I argue that Cheng & Werning’s proposal faces some significant, and potentially insurmountable, difficulties. Two are described as most prominent. First, the proposal fails to satisfy an important (...) normative constraint on natural kind theorizing, not providing the requisite theoretical resources for arbitration between rival taxonomies of memory. Second, the proposal is in a direct tension with a foundational principle of the HPC view: the rejection of essentialism. This has far-reaching consequences, threatening to undermine the coherence of the proposal. (shrink)

Debates about causation have dominated recent philosophy of memory. While causal theorists have argued that an appropriate causal connection to a past experience is necessary for remembering, their opponents have argued that this necessity condition needs to be relaxed. Recently, Jordi Fernández has attempted to provide such a relaxation. On his functionalist theory of remembering, a given state need not be caused by a past experience to qualify as a memory; it only has to realize the relevant functional role in (...) the subject’s mental economy. In this comment, I argue that Fernández’s theory doesn’t advance the debate about memory causation. I propose that this debate is best understood as being about the existence of systems, which support kinds of interactions that map onto the relations dictated by theories. Since Fernández’s functionalism tells us very little about this empirical question, the theoretical gains from endorsing it are minimal. (shrink)

This paper offers a modeling account of episodic representation. I argue that the episodic system constructs mental models: representations that preserve the spatiotemporal structure of represented domains. In prototypical cases, these domains are events: occurrences taken by subjects to have characteristic structures, dynamics and relatively determinate beginnings and ends. Due to their simplicity and manipulability, mental event models can be used in a variety of cognitive contexts: in remembering the personal past, but also in future-oriented and counterfactual imagination. As structural (...) representations, they allow surrogative reasoning, supporting inferences about their constituents which can be used in reasoning about the represented events. (shrink)