A post by Ying-Tung Lin, Chris McCarroll, Kourken Michaelian, Mike Stuart, and I-Jan Wang

How would you organize a workshop spanning many different time zones? You would need a good imagination to plan such an event. In order for the workshop to succeed, your imagining of the workshop would itself have to be successful. How would you write a blog post summarizing the content of ten workshop talks? You would need a good memory to tackle such a task. In order to accurately summarize the talks, your remembering of them would itself have to be successful.

Not coincidentally, the workshop on which we report here – Successful and Unsuccessful Remembering and Imagining, held online on November 14, 15, and 18 – was devoted precisely to these issues. The workshop was jointly organized by the Institute of Philosophy of Mind and Cognition (IPMC) at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (Taiwan) and the Centre for Philosophy of Memory (CPM) at Université Grenoble Alpes (France). The CPM is the only center of its kind devoted to research on memory, and the IPMC includes researchers working both on memory and on imagination. One of our motivations for organizing the meeting was to strengthen already-established links between these two groups. Another was to promote increased interaction between the philosophy of memory and philosophy of imagination communities more broadly.

Interaction between philosophers of memory and philosophers of imagination has been growing steadily over the last few years, but a great deal of work remains to be done at the intersection of the two fields. What features must a memory have in order to count as successful? If our imaginings are up to us, is there such a thing as unsuccessful imagining? While some cases of unsuccessful remembering may be categorized as mere imagining, philosophers continue to debate the markers that distinguish memory from imagination. The goal of the workshop was to encourage more systematic discussion of questions such as these. The workshop thus explored memory, imagination, and the relation between them from a broadly normative perspective, focusing on issues such as accuracy in remembering and imagining, the constraints to which memory and imagination are respectively subject, and similarities and differences between their respective correctness or satisfaction conditions.

We had an excellent line-up of speakers for the workshop, with talks by colleagues based in Canada, China, Estonia, France, Ireland, Japan, Switzerland, and the US. In the remainder of this post, we briefly summarize their talks in the order in which they gave them.

Margherita Arcangeli and Jérôme Dokic (both at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) asked whether it is possible to confuse an imagination with a memory. Arcangeli and Dokic began by distinguishing between confusions at two levels: the reflective level of self-ascription (what you think you’re doing) and the phenomenological level of feeling (what you feel like you’re doing). They then employed a series of versions of Martin and Deutscher’s famous painter case (in which a painter intends to imagine but accidentally remembers) to argue that it is possible to confuse memories with imaginations and imaginations with memories at both levels as well as at the ontological level.

Fabrice Teroni (Université de Genève) argued that our sense of identity over time connects to many things, including memories of the past, continuity of moral and personality traits, and emotions. Motivating it with empirical evidence, he introduced the idea of the “evaluative self”, which is centered on our values and on the weight that we assign to them in different situations. Emotions are then explained as the means by which we detect values and as what motivates our actions. Our moral and personality traits are centrally manifested in our emotions, and their continuity grounds our identity over time. This new account connects to memory in several ways. For example, our emotional state affects which memories we access, as well as how memories are stored.

Ruth Byrne (Trinity College Dublin) asked whether causal and counterfactual explanations are two sides of the same coin. Do people think about the same possibilities when they understand counterfactual and causal assertions? Do people focus on the same content in these forms of explanations? Her talk showed that people initially simulate dual possibilities when they understand a counterfactual, whereas they initially simulate a single possibility when they understand a causal assertion. It also showed that there are differences in content. In causal explanations, people focus on central causes (e.g., the drunk driver caused the accident); in counterfactuals they focus on background enabling conditions and decision choices of the protagonist (e.g., the accident wouldn’t have happened if the protagonist had taken his usual route home). Byrne closed by presenting new research on whether causal or counterfactual explanations were more helpful for understanding AI decisions: people judge counterfactual explanations to be more helpful, and they often predict decisions made on the basis of AI input better when drawing on counterfactual explanations.

Marya Schechtman (University of Illinois at Chicago) asked what it means to say that a mental simulation is successful. Considering a range of simulative phenomena – autobiographical immersive simulation (imagining oneself being in a particular context), simulating historical events through immersive museum experiences, and treasured memories of one’s personal past – she noted that success and failure in these varied simulative experiences is relative to one’s purpose. There are many and varied ways in which we use mental simulations: evoking experiences simply for entertainment, regulating our moods, guiding our actions, facilitating social bonding, acquiring self-knowledge, and so on. For this reason, there is no simple answer to the question of success or failure in remembering and imagining; success and failure depend on the use to which one puts a simulation.

Lu Teng (New York University Shanghai) looked at whether memory experiences provide prima facie justification for beliefs. In their attempts to answer this question, foundationalists and reliabilists respectively appeal to the phenomenal character and the level of reliability of the memory belief-forming process. Teng argues that neither of these approaches is satisfactory.  Foundationalism fails because the phenomenology of remembering can be influenced by other mental states (such as belief and desire). Reliabilism fails due to the pervasiveness of reconstruction in remembering. On Teng’s alternative proposal, the justificatory power of a memory experience depends on how it is generated. If it results from a personal-level process, it provides prima facie justification only if it has a good evidential basis. If a memory experience that P results from a subpersonal-level process, however, then it can provide prima facie reason for believing that P no matter whether the experience has a good evidential basis or whether there is a reliable belief forming process.

Daniel Munro (University of Toronto) began with the question: how are religious beliefs formed? Memory played a key role in his answer to this question. Munro first reviewed the so-called perceptual model, finding it to be incomplete. On the perceptual model, religious experiences – for example, apparent experiential awarenesses of God – cause religious beliefs directly, in the same way that perceptual experiences cause perceptual beliefs. Whether such religious beliefs are reliably produced then depends on whether the experience was veridical or hallucinatory. Noting that religious belief formation is typically a temporally extended process, Munro proposed a novel model. On his model, religious belief formation involves two components: first, apparent memories of religious experiences; second, reflection on whether the remembered experiences were veridical. The question whether religious beliefs are reliably formed then becomes a question about the reliability of the constructive memory process and about the reliability of the process of reflection. Munro argued that the former is likely reliable but that the latter may involve both reliable and unreliable elements.

Amy Kind (Claremont McKenna College) explored what it might mean for one imagination to be more accurate than another. She began by observing that, in some cases, accuracy might not be relevant to evaluating an imagination. When a child imagines himself to be a monster, for example, it would be meaningless to say that his imagination is inaccurate. Nonetheless, there are other contexts in which accuracy seems to be not only relevant but essential. Cases of empathic imagination, for example, seem to require accuracy for their success, as do imaginative explorations of choices one faces. In these contexts, accuracy is evaluated relative to aim. This means, however, that clarity regarding the aim of imagination is required. Drawing on the distinction between instructive and transcendent uses of imagination, Kind suggested that, in the former, the imaginer aims at very close possible worlds (in order to learn something about the world in which she lives), while, in the latter, the imaginer aims at more distant possible worlds (in order to escape the world in which she lives). Accuracy is relevant to both instructive and transcendent imagination, but, given that the aims of these uses of imagination are different, the constraints that it imposes are also different.

Changsheng Lai (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) took up one of the core issues in philosophy of memory, that of determining the precise relation between remembering and relearning. Is relearning fundamentally different from remembering, and, if so, how? Some authors think that remembering involves a distinct process different in kind from that involved in relearning because only the former involves an appropriate causal connection to a past event. Others dispute this; in their view, there is no difference in kind between the processes involved in remembering and relearning. Lai offered a novel perspective on this debate, outlining a gradualist account of the relationship between remembering and relearning. He noted that forgetting is a key element in the process of relearning and argued that, because forgetting comes in degrees, there is no clear cut-off point between remembering and relearning. The degree to which details about a past event are forgotten lies on a spectrum, and hence a yes-no answer to the question whether remembering is distinct from relearning cannot be given.

Kengo Miyazono (Hokkaido University) and Uku Tooming (University of Tartu) presented a new argument for generationism about memory and imagination. Does memory generate new justification? Does imagination? Miyazono and Tooming argued that a standard argument for generationism about memory – the argument from psychological generativity – fails and proposed a new argument – the argument from inaccessibility – for generationism about both memory and imagination. The argument from inaccessibility appeals to the claim that memory and imagination are constrained by constrainers that are inaccessible to other epistemic sources (such as inference). If their argument is successful, it provides both a new route to the conclusion that memory and imagination are epistemically generative and a new reason to think of them as being epistemically on a par with each other.

Peter Langland-Hassan (University of Cincinnati) focused on how one knows what one is imagining. When one imagines, is the content of one’s imagination entirely determined by one’s intentions? Can one be wrong about what one is imagining? The standard answer to this question is that one cannot be wrong, since one’s intentions completely determine the content of one’s imagination. This answer has led some philosophers to argue that nothing can be learned by imagining: one can only get out of an imagination what one has put in. Langland-Hassan began by noting an interesting sort of counterexample, in which one intends to imagine something but produces a mental image of the wrong thing. This counterexample would seem to challenge intentionalism about the content of imaginations, a view that Langland-Hassan favours. He pointed out that one can use a mental image to refer to just about anything one likes, which suggests that the intentions involved in imagining are more complicated than they initially seem to be. One can intend to represent X via a mental image, Y. The content of one’s imagination will thus be given by one’s intention to represent X. The properties of X, however, will be given by the image, Y. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that Y will be the “wrong” mental image, since a mental image is not like a photograph deriving from a single source, but more like a stage prop that changes over time and serves many purposes. Thus, what Y is depends on what one wants to do with it. The view that emerges in the end is a more sophisticated kind of intentionalism, on which two distinct intentions interact to determine the content of an imagination.

We’d like to end this post by thanking both the speakers and all those who participated in the workshop. We’d also like to draw the attention of readers of The Junkyard to a call for papers for a special issue to which the speakers have agreed to contribute. If you have work on the theme of successful and unsuccessful remembering and imagining, please consider submitting a paper for our special issue of Philosophy and the Mind Sciences! The deadline for manuscript submissions is February 20, 2023, and we expect the issue to be published in late 2023.