Remembering events and representing time
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Remembering events and representing time Alexandria Boyle1,2 Received: 7 May 2020 / Accepted: 26 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Episodic memory—memory for personally experienced past events—seems to afford a distinctive kind of cognitive contact with the past. This makes it natural to think that episodic memory is centrally involved in our understanding of what it is for something to be in the past, or to be located in time—that it is either necessary or sufficient for such understanding. If this were the case, it would suggest certain straightforward evidential connections between temporal cognition and episodic memory in nonhuman animals. In this paper, I argue that matters are more complicated than this. Episodic memory is memory for events and not for the times they occupy. As such, it is dissociable from temporal understanding. This is not to say that episodic memory and temporal cognition are unrelated, but that the relationship between them cannot be straightforwardly captured by claims about necessity and sufficiency. This should inform our theoretical predictions about the manifestations of episodic memory in nonhuman behaviour. Keywords Episodic memory · Temporal cognition · Comparative psychology · Memory · Dependency thesis
1 Introduction Episodic memory—memory for personally experienced past events—seems to afford a kind of cognitive contact with the past not provided for by semantic memory. Episodic recollection characteristically involves ‘mentally reliving’ past events: when I remember falling over as a child and skinning my knee there is a sense of being ‘back there’, seeing what I saw and feeling what I felt. As Matthew Soteriou puts it, in episodic memory, the past is ‘made present’ (2018). Semantic memory, by contrast, is typically construed as a store of decontextualized general knowledge. When I recall that Ap Lei Chau is the third most densely populated island in the world, I’m recalling something
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Alexandria Boyle [email protected]
1
Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
2
Center for Science and Thought, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany
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Synthese
learned in the past, but the past doesn’t figure in the memory. My remembering does not mentally transport me to another time. Given that episodic memory affords this cognitive contact with the past, it’s tempting to think that episodic memory is centrally involved in our understanding of what it is for something to be in the past—or more generally, what it is for something to be located in time. Bertrand Russell expresses a version of this thought when he writes, ‘but for the fact of memory in this sense we should not know that there ever was a past at all, nor should we be able to understand the word “past”, any more than a man born blind can understand the word “light”’ (2001, p. 66). Similarly, Ludwig Wittgenstein claims that ‘a person learns the concept of the past by remembering’ (2009, pt. II §370).1 These claims express a pair of distinct but related ideas. The f
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