André Sant’Anna is a McDonnell Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy and the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program at Washington University in St. Louis and an Affiliated Member of the Centre for Philosophy of Memory at the Université Grenoble Alpes. His research interests are in philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology, focusing on the relationship between memory, perception, and imagination.
A post by André Sant’Anna
Remembering, many authors have argued, is an inherently constructive process.[1] It’s not a mere reproduction of past experiences, but rather a reconstruction of them based on various sources of information. This has motivated some authors, most notably Michaelian (2016), to claim that remembering is just a form of imagining the past (see also Addis 2020). The question of whether remembering is a form of imagining has thus become a central one in philosophy of memory.[2] But despite its centrality, not much has been said about what exactly it means to say that remembering is or isn’t a form of imagining.
In recent work, Langland-Hassan (2021, forthcoming) suggests that we interpret this debate in terms of whether remembering is ‘constructive imagining’ (Van Leeuwen 2013). Constructive imagining, as Van Leeuwen (2013) defines it, is a “temporally-extended constructive process of assembling mental representations” (p. 221, italics in the original). While thinking of remembering as constructive in this way seems prima facie plausible, I’ll argue that construction in remembering differs in an important way from construction in imagining. More specifically, I’ll argue that the conscious control we exercise over the constructive processes in each case is different. This is because, I’ll suggest, they’re constrained in different ways at the level of consciousness.
Conscious control in remembering
Is remembering under our control? If so, what is the exact sense in which it is under our control? There are at least three different ways in which we can understand these questions. A first way is in terms of whether we can willingly initiate and terminate acts of remembering. A second way is in terms of whether we can choose the subject matter of an act of remembering. And a third way is in terms of whether (and if so how) we can intervene in the process as it unfolds. Let us consider each question in turn.
First, can we willingly initiate and terminate acts of remembering? The answer here seems positive. Various occurrences of remembering in everyday life are voluntary. We can willingly recall events from our past, such as one’s wedding, what one had for dinner yesterday, or the last conference one attended. We can also decide whether and when to terminate those memories. This doesn’t, of course, apply to all occurrences of remembering. Some of them, such as memories of traumatic experiences (McNally 2005), don’t seem to be under our control in either of these ways. Others, such as remembering an event or period from your past upon hearing a song, will come to us unbidden (Berntsen 2010), but can still be terminated at our own will. Thus, the claim here is not that these are necessary features of remembering, but rather typical ones.
Next, consider the second question, whether we can choose the subject matter of an act of remembering. And here, again, the answer seems positive. As mentioned above, we can willingly recall different events from our past. For instance, when reminiscing about the past with childhood friends, we can willingly remember various things about that period of life, such as where we used to hang out, the kind of food we used to have, and the things we used to talk about. Again, I don’t mean to suggest that this is a necessary feature of remembering. As cases of involuntary recall and traumatic memory make it clear, this isn’t the case. Rather, the suggestion is that having control over the subject matter of a memory is, if not typical of most everyday occurrences of remembering, a feature that is shared by a large part of them.
Finally, consider the third question: can we (and if so how) intervene in the process of remembering as it unfolds? This is where, I believe, there’s a crucial difference between remembering and imagining. To better see this, it’s important to distinguish between two ways in which we might try to intervene in the process of remembering. One is by determining how a subject matter is represented. Consider an example as an illustration. Suppose that you set out to remember your tenth birthday. This event is the subject matter of your memory. There are different ways in which you can represent it, all of which will equally count as a memory of that event. For instance, you might start by representing yourself playing football with your friends, then representing yourself having chocolate cake, and finally representing Aunt Betty singing karaoke. Alternatively, you might start by representing Aunt Betty singing karaoke, then playing football with your friends, and finally represent yourself having chocolate cake. As long as you’re not trying to accurately represent the temporal sequence of those events, it seems that the order in which they are represented is under your control. That such is the case is not surprising given that memories of the same event can be triggered by different types of cues (e.g., “What kind of cake did you have in your tenth birthday party?”; “Did you have fun at the party?”, etc.). How you represent the subject matter of remembering is, therefore, under your control.
Another way in which we might try to intervene in remembering is by choosing the content that will figure in the representation of a subject matter. By ‘content’ I mean the sensory information used to represent an event; in other words, the building blocks of what is often called ‘episodic’ or ‘scene’ construction (Schacter & Addis 2007; Hassabis & Maguire 2009).[3] Understood in this way, it’s not the case that we have control over the contents of remembering. As Robins (forthcoming) notes, “[t]he person who is remembering a past event does not consider multiple ways the past event might have gone and then select amongst them to establish what happened”. Rather, the information that figures in remembering is given to us by retrieval and cannot be altered by us. That is, if what you remember is your Aunt Betty singing karaoke, you can’t voluntarily remember her reciting a poem. You can, of course, imagine how things would’ve been if Aunt Betty had recited a poem, but the fact that we’re no longer willing to call this process ‘remembering’, but rather ‘imagining’, already suggests that the absence of control over the contents of the former is a crucial feature of it.
Conscious control in imagining
This exploration of the different ways in which we can and cannot exercise control over the process of remembering allows us to draw a more nuanced comparison to constructive processes in imagining.
Remembering and imagining are alike when it comes to the control we have over the initiation/termination and the subject matter of those processes. That is, we can voluntarily initiate acts of imagining whose subject matters have been chosen by us. For instance, I can, right now, voluntarily imagine different events, such the talk I’m giving next week or my next trip back home. Barring a few exceptions, it also seems to be a typical feature of imaginings that we can terminate their occurrences at our own will. Moreover, imagining and remembering are also alike in the sense that some of the interventions we make on them are under our control. In imagining, just like in remembering, how a subject matter is represented is under our control. Unless, of course, our goal is to represent specific temporal relations, the order in which we represent the various features of a future event doesn’t seem to matter.
As noted above, however, there is also a crucial difference in terms of whether some other interventions are possible. In remembering, once a content is given to us by retrieval, it cannot be deliberately altered by us. This doesn’t apply to imagining. When we imagine, we can either select a content that is going to be retrieved to become a part of a representation, or, if a content is just given to us as a result of retrieval, we can choose whether to include it in the representation. For instance, when you imagine your next birthday party, you may wonder if, decades later, Aunt Betty will still insist on singing karaoke. As a result, you may imagine her singing karaoke because this is what she has done in all past family birthday parties. However, even if this is what is initially given to you when you imagine this event, you may still decide to imagine things differently. That is, because you no longer like karaoke, you might, before forming a representation of the event in question, decide not to represent any individuals singing karaoke. Thus, unlike remembering, the contents of imagining are under our control.
Conclusion
We’ve seen that there’s an important way in which the constructive processes in remembering and imagining differ with respect to the control we exercise over them. This, I want to suggest, is due to the fact that those processes are constrained in different ways.[4] Remembering aims to represent things that were the case in the world. In contrast, imagining aims to represent things that could be the case in the world.[5] To put it differently, only remembering is responsive to, and hence constrained by, how the world is.[6] And given that how the world is isn’t under our control, it’s not surprising that, at least in some respects, the processes we engage in to represent it are also not under our control.
Notes:
[1] For defenses of this view in the philosophical literature, see, e.g., Sutton (1998), De Brigard (2014), Michaelian (2016). For a more systematic discussion of the empirical evidence, see Schacter et al. (2012) and Addis (2020).
[2] Since my focus here will be on debates about the (dis)continuity between remembering and imagining that have largely unfolded in recent discussions in the philosophy of memory (see Michaelian et al. 2022 for a recent survey), I’ll focus on the cases of remembering and imagining discussed in this literature. Thus, ‘remembering’ will refer to cases of episodic or recollective memory, that is, memories of events that we experienced in the past and that typically involve rich sensory phenomenology. ‘Imagining’, in contrast, will refer to cases of future-oriented episodic imaginings, that is, sensory imaginings of possible events in the future. The (dis)continuism dispute is, therefore, over whether there are differences between the processes of remembering and future-oriented imagining other than their temporal orientation. As Michaelian et al. (2022) summarize the debate, “[a]ccording to continuism (e.g., Michaelian 2016a; Addis 2020), there is, aside from their distinct temporal orientations, no fundamental difference between episodic memory and episodic future thought. Discontinuism is the denial of this claim: according to discontinuism (e.g., Debus 2014; Perrin 2016), there is a fundamental difference between episodic memory and episodic future thought. The continuist-discontinuist debate has focused primarily on remembering and imagining understood as processes […].” (p. 2, italics in the original)
[3] Thus, the content of memory doesn’t fix its ‘reference’. For a similar view, see Robins (2020), who distinguishes between the ‘target’ (which fixes its reference) and the ‘content’ of remembering.
[4] Langland-Hassan (2021) suggests a similar approach, arguing that the question of whether remembering is constructive imagining is better understood in terms of whether remembering and imagining are typically caused by memory traces. For reasons of space, I can’t discuss his approach in detail here. There are, however, important points of connections that are worth exploring in future work. For instance, one way in which one might try to account for the fact that the control we exercise over remembering and imagining is different is because only remembering is typically caused by memory traces.
[5] I don’t mean to deny that there are cases of imagining that are about how things were in the past or how they are in the present. Since my focus from the start has been debates in the philosophy of memory, where imagining is assumed to be about the possible, in particular the possible future, I’ve set cases of actual imaginings, as we might call them, aside (see note 2). There is, however, an interesting question about whether remembering and actual imagining are constructive processes of the same type and what this means for recent debates concerning the ‘continuity’ of those processes (see, e.g., Munro 2021 for recent discussion).
[6] Again, I don’t mean to deny that there are some cases of imagining that are constrained by how the world is (Kind 2016). This is, arguably, one important way in which imaginings may be epistemically generative (Badura & Kind 2021). While a full discussion of how cases of ‘constrained’ imaginings relate to remembering is not possible here, one important difference between them that is worth highlighting is the fact that whether an imagining aims to represent the world as it is is under our control. Moreover, the specific constraints that apply to an occurrence of imagining are also under our control. They can be lifted or changed as the imaginative act unfolds. None of this is true of remembering. Whether remembering is constrained and how it is constrained are both not under our control.
References:
Addis, D. R. (2020). Mental time travel? A neurocognitive model of event simulation. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 11(2), 233–259.
Badura, C. & Kind, A. (2021). Introduction: The Epistemic Role of Imagination. In C. Badura & A. Kind (Eds.), Epistemic Uses of Imagination. Oxford University Press.
Berntsen, D. (2010). The unbidden past: Involuntary autobiographical memories as a basic mode of remembering. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(3), 138-142.
Debus, D. (2014). “Mental time travel”: Remembering the past, imagining the future, and the particularity of events. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 5(3), 333–350.
De Brigard, F. (2014). Is memory for remembering? Recollection as a form of episodic hypothetical thinking. Synthese, 191(2): 155–185.
Hassabis, D., & Maguire, E. A. (2009). The construction system of the brain. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364(1521), 1263-1271.
Kind, A. (2016b). Imagining Under Constraints. In A. Kind & P. Kung (Eds.). (2016). Knowledge Through Imagination. Oxford University Press.
Langland-Hassan, P. (2021). What sort of imagining might remembering be?. Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 7(2), 231-251.
Langland-Hassan, P. (Forthcoming). Remembering, imagining, and memory traces: Toward a continuist causal theory. In A. Sant’Anna, C. J. McCarroll, K. Michaelian (Eds.), Current Controversies in Philosophy of Memory. Routledge.
Michaelian, K. (2016). Mental Time Travel: Episodic Memory and Our Knowledge of the Personal Past. MIT Press.
Michaelian, K., Perrin, D., Sant’Anna, A., & Schirmer dos Santos, C. (2022). ‘Mental time travel.’ In V. P. Glaveanu (Ed.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible. Palgrave Macmillan.
McNally, R. J. (2005). Remembering Trauma. Harvard University Press.
Munro, D. (2021). Remembering the past and imagining the actual. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 12(2), 175-197.
Perrin, D. (2016). Asymmetries in subjective time. In K. Michaelian, S. B. Klein, & K. K. Szpunar (Eds.), Seeing the Future: Theoretical Perspectives on Future-Oriented Mental Time Travel (pp. 39–61). Oxford University Press.
Robins, S. K. (2020). Mnemonic confabulation. Topoi, 39(1), 121-132.
Robins, S. K. (Forthcoming). Episodic memory is not for the future. In A. Sant’Anna, C. J. McCarroll, K. Michaelian (eds.). Current Controversies in Philosophy of Memory. Routledge.
Schacter, D. L., & Addis, D. R. (2007). The cognitive neuroscience of constructive memory: remembering the past and imagining the future. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 362(1481), 773-786.
Schacter, D. L., Addis, D. R., Hassabis, D., Martin, V. C., Spreng, R. N., & Szpunar, K. K. (2012). The future of memory: remembering, imagining, and the brain. Neuron, 76(4), 677-694.
Sutton, J. (1998). Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism. Cambridge University Press.
Tulving, E. (1972). Episodic and Semantic Memory. In: E. Tulving & W. Donaldson (Eds.), Organization of Memory. Academic Press.
Tulving, E. (1985). Elements of Episodic Memory. Oxford University Press.
Van Leeuwen, N. (2013). The meanings of “imagine” part I: Constructive imagination. Philosophy Compass, 8(3), 220-230.