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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*
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UNIVERSITY OF [email protected]
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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
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Philosophical Association

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Footnotes

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

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