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19 - Continuities and Discontinuities Between Imagination and Memory: The View from Philosophy

from Part III - Intentionality-Based Forms of the Imagination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 May 2020

By
Kourken Michaelian ,
Denis Perrin  and
André Sant’Anna
Edited by
Anna Abraham
Anna Abraham
Affiliation:
University of Georgia
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Summary

Though imagination and memory have much in common, philosophers of memory have so far had little to say about imagination. This has recently begun to change, as research on episodic memory as a form of imaginative mental time travel analogous to episodic future thought has threatened to undermine the view – standard in the philosophy of memory – that memory is sharply distinct from imagination. Covering a cluster of interrelated issues (including the objects of mental time travel, the reference of episodic thought, the epistemic openness of the future, the directness of our knowledge of the past, and immunity to error through misidentification in episodic memory and episodic future thought), this chapter surveys the debate between discontinuists, who argue that episodic remembering and episodic future thinking are processes of fundamentally different kinds, and continuists, who argue that the fact that they have distinct temporal orientations constitutes the only important difference between them – and hence that episodic memory is ultimately just a kind of episodic imagination.

Keywords

Episodic imaginationepisodic memorymental time travelcontinuismdiscontinuism
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination , pp. 293 - 310
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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