Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T21:39:39.948Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

What Sort of Imagining Might Remembering Be?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2021

PETER LANGLAND-HASSAN Open the ORCID record for PETER LANGLAND-HASSAN [Opens in a new window]
PETER LANGLAND-HASSAN*
Affiliation:
UNIVERSITY OF [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay unites current philosophical thinking on imagination with a burgeoning debate in the philosophy of memory over whether episodic remembering is simply a kind of imagining. So far, this debate has been hampered by a lack of clarity in the notion of imagining at issue. Several options are considered and constructive imagining is identified as the relevant kind. Next, a functionalist account of episodic remembering is defended as a means to establishing two key points: first, one need not defend a factive (or causalist) view of remembering in order to hold that causal connections to past experiences are essential to how rememberings are typed; and, second, current theories that equate remembering with imagining are in fact consistent with a functionalist theory that includes causal connections in its account of what it is to remember. This suggests that remembering is not a kind of imagining and clarifies what it would take to establish the contrary.

Keywords

imaginationepisodic memoryfunctionalismsimulationismcontinuism
Type
Article
Information
Journal of the American Philosophical Association , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , Summer 2021 , pp. 231 - 251
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Philosophical Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Special thanks to Sarah Robins, Kourken Michaelian, and André Sant'Anna for generous feedback that improved this essay.

References

Addis, Donna Rose. (2020) ‘Mental Time Travel? A Neurocognitive Model of Event Simulation’. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 11(2), 233–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arcangeli, Margherita. (2018) Supposition and the Imaginative Realm: A Philosophical Inquiry. New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arcangeli, Margherita. (2020) ‘The Two Faces of Mental Imagery’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 101, 304–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Armstrong, D. M. (1968) A Materialist Theory of the Mind. New York: Routledge & Keegan Paul.Google Scholar
Atance, Cristina M. (2008) ‘Future Thinking in Young Children’. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17, 295–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beck, Jacob. (2018) ‘Marking the Perception–Cognition Boundary: The Criterion of Stimulus-Dependence’. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 96, 319–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bernecker, Sven. (2010). Memory: A Philosophical Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Byrne, Alex. (2007) ‘Possibility and Imagination’. Philosophical Perspectives, 21, 125–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cheng, Sen, and Markus Werning, M. (2016) ‘What Is Episodic Memory if It Is a Natural Kind?’ Synthese, 193, 1345–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Currie, Gregory, and Ravenscroft, Ian. (2002) Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Brigard, Felipe. (2014) ‘The Nature of Memory Traces’. Philosophy Compass, 9, 402–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Brigard, Felipe, Addis, Donna Rose, Ford, J. H., Schacter, Daniel L., and Giovanello, K. S.. (2013) ‘Remembering What Could Have Happened: Neural Correlates of Episodic Counterfactual Thinking’. Neuropsychologia, 51, 2401–14.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Debus, Dorothea. (2008) ‘Experiencing the Past: A Relational Account of Recollective Memory’. Dialectica, 62, 405–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Debus, Dorothea. (2014) ‘“Mental Time Travel”: Remembering the Past, Imagining the Future, and the Particularity of Events’. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 5, 333–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fernández, Jordi. (2019) Memory: A Self-Referential Account. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garry, Maryanne, Manning, Charles G., Loftus, Elizabeth F., and Sherman, Steven J.. (1996) ‘Imagination Inflation: Imagining a Childhood Event Inflates Confidence That It Occurred’. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 3, 208–14.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hassabis, Demis, Kumaran, Dharshan, Vann, Seralynne D., and Maguire, Eleanor A.. (2007) ‘Patients with Hippocampal Amnesia Cannot Imagine New Experiences’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104, 1726–731.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hassabis, Demis, and Maguire, Eleanor A.. (2009) ‘The Construction System of the Brain’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364, 1263–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kind, Amy. (2001) ‘Putting the Image Back in Imagination’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 62, 85–109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kind, Amy. (2016) Introduction: Exploring imagination. In Kind, Amy (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination (New York: Routledge), 1–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Langland-Hassan, Peter. (2015) ‘Imaginative Attitudes’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 90, 664–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Langland-Hassan, Peter. (2020) Explaining Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levin, Janet. (2018) ‘Functionalism’. In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/functionalism/.Google Scholar
Lewis, David. K. (1966) ‘An Argument for the Identity Theory’. Journal of Philosophy, 63, 17–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liao, Shen-yi, and Doggett, Tyler. (2014) ‘The Imagination Box’. Journal of Philosophy, 111, 259–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liao, Shen-yi, and Gendler, Tamar. (2019) ‘Imagination’. In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/imagination/.Google Scholar
Loftus, Elizabeth F., and Pickrell, Jacqueline E.. (1995) ‘The Formation of False Memories’. Psychiatric Annals, 25, 720–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maguire, Eleanor A., and Mullally, Sinéad L.. (2013) ‘The Hippocampus: A Manifesto for Change’. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 142, 1180–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, C. B., and Max Deutscher, M. (1966) ‘Remembering’. Philosophical Review, 75, 161–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, M. G. F. (2002) ‘The Transparency of Experience’. Mind and Language, 17, 376–425.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Michaelian, Kourken. (2011) ‘Generative Memory’. Philosophical Psychology, 24, 323–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Michaelian, Kourken. (2016a) ‘Against Discontinuism’. In Michaelian, Kourken, Klein, Stanley B., and Szpunar, Karl K. (eds.), Seeing the Future: Theoretical Perspectives on Future-Oriented Mental Time Travel (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 62–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Michaelian, Kourken. (2016b) ‘Confabulating, Misremembering, Relearning: The Simulation Theory of Memory and Unsuccessful Remembering’. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, article 1857.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Michaelian, Kourken. (2016c) Mental Time Travel: Episodic Memory and Our Knowledge of the Personal Past. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Michaelian, Kourken, and Robins, Sarah K. (2018) ‘Beyond the Causal Theory? Fifty Years After Martin and Deutscher’. In Michaelian, Kourken, Debus, Dorothea, and Perrin, Denis (eds.), New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory (London: Routledge), 13–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nanay, Bence. (2018) ‘Multimodal Mental Imagery’. Cortex, 105, 125–34.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Noordhof, Paul. (2002) ‘Imagining Objects and Imagining Experiences’. Mind and Language, 17, 426–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peacocke, Christopher. (1985) ‘Imagination, Possibility and Experience’. In Foster, John and Robinson, Howard (Eds.), Essays on Berkeley: a Tercentennial Celebration (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 19–35.Google Scholar
Perrin, Denis. (2016) ‘Asymmetries in Subjective Time’. In Michaelian, Kourken, Klein, Stanley B., and Szpunar, Karl K. (eds.), Seeing the Future: Theoretical Perspectives on Future-Oriented Mental Time Travel (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 39–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perrin, Denis, and Kourken, Michaelian. (2017) ‘Memory as Mental Time Travel’. In Bernecker, Sven and Michaelian, Kourken (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory (New York: Routledge), 228–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robins, Sarah K. (2016) ‘Representing the Past: Memory Traces and the Causal Theory of Memory’. Philosophical Studies, 173, 2993–3013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robins, Sarah K. (2017) ‘Memory Traces’. In Michaelian, Kourken and Bernecker, Sven (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory (London: Routledge), 76–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robins, Sarah K. (2020) ‘Defending Discontinuism, Naturally’. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 11, 469–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schacter, Daniel L., and Addis, Donna Rose. (2007) ‘The Cognitive Neuroscience of Constructive Memory: Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 362, 773–86.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schacter, Daniel L., Addis, Donna Rose, and Buckner, Randy L.. (2007) ‘Remembering the Past to Imagine the Future: The Prospective Brain’. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 8, 657–661.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Searle, John R. (1983) Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sutton, John. (1998) Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Szpunar, Karl K., Watson, Jason M., and McDermott, Kathleen B.. (2007) ‘Neural Substrates of Envisioning the Future’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(2), 642–47.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Van Leeuwen, Neil. (2013) ‘The Meanings of “Imagine” Part I: Constructive Imagination’. Philosophy Compass, 8, 220–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Leeuwen, Neil. (2014) ‘The Meanings of “Imagine” Part II: Attitude and Action’. Philosophy Compass, 9, 791–802.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williamson, Timothy. (2016) ‘Knowing by Imagining’. In Kind, Amy and Kung, Peter (eds.), Knowledge through Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 113–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar