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Chapter 5 - Episodic Memory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2023

Muhammad Ali Khalidi
Affiliation:
City University of New York
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Summary

This chapter discusses the kind, episodic memory, which has recently garnered a great deal of attention from philosophers. In light of current empirical work, it has become increasingly challenging to accept an influential and intuitively plausible philosophical account of memory, namely the “causal theory of memory.” It is unlikely that each episodic memory can be associated with a trace or “engram” that can be shown to be linked by an uninterrupted causal chain to an episode in the thinker’s past. Some philosophers and psychologists have responded by effectively abandoning the category of episodic memory and assimilating memory to imagination or hypothetical thinking. But I argue that there is still room for a distinct cognitive kind, episodic memory, a cognitive capacity whose function it is to generate representational states that are connected to past episodes in the experience of the thinker, which bear traces of these episodes that are individuated not at the neural level but at the “computational level.”

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Chapter
Information
Cognitive Ontology
Taxonomic Practices in the Mind-Brain Sciences
, pp. 123 - 157
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • Episodic Memory
  • Muhammad Ali Khalidi, City University of New York
  • Book: Cognitive Ontology
  • Online publication: 15 January 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009223645.006
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  • Episodic Memory
  • Muhammad Ali Khalidi, City University of New York
  • Book: Cognitive Ontology
  • Online publication: 15 January 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009223645.006
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Episodic Memory
  • Muhammad Ali Khalidi, City University of New York
  • Book: Cognitive Ontology
  • Online publication: 15 January 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009223645.006
Available formats
×