This is the fifth symposium to appear in the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society (JINS). This symposium was developed in tandem with a Memory Disorders Research Society conference symposium on semantic memory in probable Alzheimer's disease (AD); the conference was held in Boston in October, 1998. Three of the conference presenters agreed to submit papers based on their talks to this JINS symposium. A concerted effort was made to solicit additional papers from researchers who have consistently weighed in on either the storage-loss or retrieval-difficulty side of the debate regarding semantic memory in AD, and from researchers who have obtained some evidence consistent with one view as well as some evidence consistent with the other view. In the end, not only was the theoretical continuum fairly well represented, but the methodological continuum, with regard to the types of tasks used and the degree to which the tasks required implicit versus explicit utilization of semantic knowledge, was also well covered.