André Sant’Anna is a Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Cologne Center for Contemporary Epistemology and the Kantian Tradition (CONCEPT) at the University of Cologne and an Affiliated Member of the Centre for Philosophy of Memory at the Université Grenoble Alpes.
This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Anja Berninger and Íngrid Vendrell Ferran’s (eds.) recent book: Philosophical Perspectives on Memory and Imagination. On Monday, we began with an introduction from Anja Berninger and Íngrid Vendrell Ferran. Today we have our first commentary from André Sant’Anna. Additional commentaries will appear the rest of the week.
The (dis)continuism debate—the debate over whether there is a difference of kind between memory and imagination—has been at the heart of many recent disputes in the philosophy of memory and imagination (Michaelian et al., 2022). The five chapters in Part I of Berninger and Vendrell Ferran’s excellent new edited collection Philosophical Perspectives on Memory and Imagination tackle key questions concerning the nature of memory and imagination, and, as a result, make important contributions to the ongoing dispute between continuists and discontinuists.
Langland-Hassan considers the relationship between memory and imagination in terms of the attitudes involved in them. He relies on a functional understanding of the notion of an “attitude” to argue for what he calls a “minimalist” continuist approach. On this view, episodic memory and future-oriented and counterfactual imaginings are all thought to be “judgment-imagining” (JIG) attitudes—attitudes of judging whose contents are partly propositional and partly imagistic (Langland-Hassan, 2020). Despite identifying remembering proper with a JIG attitude, Langland-Hassan argues that remembering is typically accompanied by another attitude, an attitude of judging (JUD), whose content informs subjects about the causal origin of their memories.[1] This combination of JIG plus JUD, Langland-Hassan argues, allows us not only to make sense of both the backward-looking and forward-looking functional roles of remembering, but also aligns well with existing empirical facts about the mechanisms responsible for it. Given that he finds the existing discontinuist options to be problematic in these respects, he concludes that his minimalist continuist approach is the best overall alternative.
McCarroll approaches the attitudinal (dis)continuism debate from a different perspective. He focuses on the direction of fit of memories and imaginings. According to McCarroll, while remembering has a mind-to-world direction of fit, imaginings have mind-to-world and/or world-to-mind directions of fit. For McCarroll, conative imaginings, as he refers to imaginings with world-to-mind directions of fit, play an important role in our mental lives. They are, for instance, crucial for navigating intertemporal choices—choices that have consequences over time. The existence of imaginings with a world-to-mind direction of fit leads McCarroll to claim that, at least insofar those types of imaginings are concerned, there is a deep attitudinal discontinuity between remembering and imagining. Although remembering, as McCarroll notes, also plays an important motivational role in our mental lives, this is best explained in terms of its content rather than its attitude. Remembering motivates us insofar as what we remember helps us to figure out what we want in the present and in the future. Moreover, while there may be a discontinuity between remembering and conative imaginings, McCarroll notes that this is not incompatible with remembering being continuous with cognitive imaginings (Munro, 2021), namely, those that have a mind-to-world direction of fit.
Barner develops a discontinuist account of the relationship between collective remembering and collective imagining. She focuses on future-oriented imagination and notes that existing accounts (e.g., Michaelian & Sutton, 2019), which favor continuism, assume an “actuality-oriented” account of its nature, according to which its goal is to represent the actual world. Barner rejects this account as being too narrow, favoring instead a “possibility-oriented” account, according to which future-oriented imagining aims to represent possible scenarios. The possibility-oriented account sets the stage for Barner’s discontinuist account of the relationship between collective remembering and collective imagining. Collective remembering, she argues, is actuality-oriented; it aims to represent the past accurately. An act of collective remembering requires, in particular, that subjects share memories—that is, they must have been formed in the same context of encoding and their contents must converge at retrieval. This, Barner argues, contrasts with the requirements on collective imagination. Because collective imagining is possibility-oriented, a group of individuals will count as collectively imagining the same event even if how they imagine that event at the individual level is different. While one individual may imagine it with the goal of representing the event accurately, another may imagine different possible emotional reactions to it. Collective imagining does not, therefore, require that subjects share individual imaginings. For Barner, this highlights the existence of a key metaphysical difference between collective remembering and collective imagining.
Michaelian addresses a recent objection levelled at the simulation theory of memory (STM). The central claim made by STM is that remembering is a form of imagining, which has led Michaelian to deny that successful remembering requires the retention of content originating in a past experience (Michaelian, 2016). This striking claim has, in its turn, motivated critics to argue that simulationists are unable to account for forgetting (McCarroll, 2020). Michaelian distinguishes between three potential interpretations of this criticism. The first is that STM cannot say what forgetting is. The second is that STM cannot explain why forgetting occurs. The third is that STM cannot explain why forgetting occurs with the frequency that it does. He argues that none of these are problematic when examined more closely. Regarding the first interpretation, Michaelian notes that simulationists can easily avail themselves of existing definitions of forgetting (e.g., Frise, 2018). In response to the second and third interpretations, Michaelian argues that simulationists are not bound to offer symmetric accounts of remembering and forgetting. The fact that they make no reference to content originating in past experiences when accounting for remembering does not imply that they may not make such reference in their accounts of forgetting. Moreover, he notes that it is not illegitimate for simulationists to appeal to memory traces in their accounts of remembering and forgetting. Simulationists do not deny that successful remembering involves memory traces, but only that those traces necessarily originate in experiences of the events remembered. Thus, if Michaelian is right, forgetting does not pose a special challenge to simulationism.
Noordhof considers the prospects of what he calls “relationist” or naïve realist approaches to memory (Debus, 2008; Aranyosi, 2021; Barkasi & Sant’Anna, 2022). In its most general form, relationism says that episodic or recollective memories (Noordhof speaks of “sensuous memory”) are fundamentally nonrepresentational relations of awareness to past events. He discusses the main motivations for the view—in particular, that it allegedly explains the epistemic authority of memory and how it grounds demonstrative thought about the past—and argues that a relationist representational account is in a better position to make sense of them. There are many moving parts in Noordhof’s argument, so I will focus on his positive proposal and its implications for the (dis)continuism debate. Crucial to Noordhof’s representationalist proposal is the notion of an “activation routine”, which corresponds roughly to the more standard notion in philosophy of memory of a “dispositional trace” (De Brigard, 2014). Noordhof argues that a form of representationalism on which memory results from the deployment of activation routines is able to explain its epistemic authority and its status as grounds for demonstrative thought without incurring the problems faced by relationism. Moreover, Noordhof claims that this view of the nature of memory leads to a moderate form of discontinuism. Because memory results from the deployment of activation routines, it is experienced as being about the mind-independent world. Consequently, its content is not under our control. This contrasts with the experience of imagining, which is neutral on how the world is, a result of which is that its contents are typically under our control.
For reasons of space, I will restrict myself to a couple of more general commentaries on the (dis)continuism debate inspired by the contributions in the volume. First, I think that the chapters in Part I nicely highlight the fact that there are different layers to the (dis)continuism debate. In its contemporary inception, the debate focused primarily on memory and imagination understood as processes (Michaelian et al., 2022), but it is now clear that there are other dimensions of their relationship that need to be taken into account. Langland-Hassan’s and McCarroll’s chapters, which focus on attitudes, contribute to an emerging trend in the literature that has given centrality to conceiving of memory and imagination as mental states (Robins, 2020; Munro, 2021; Sant’Anna, 2021). Barner advances the debate concerning the collective dimension of remembering and imagining, which is a welcome contribution to a topic that has not received much attention. Noordhof’s contribution adds to what I think is an important but underappreciated perspective from which we can consider the relationship between memory and imagination: that is, in terms of their experiential nature (Debus, 2014). Finally, Michaelian offers further support for his continuist approach to the nature of remembering and imagining understood as processes.
Despite there being some clarity now about the existence of these different dimensions, there is relatively less clarity about how they relate to one another. One question that one may ask is, for instance, about the extent to which we should expect similar answers to the different (dis)continuity questions. If one is a process continuist, should one also be an attitudinal continuist? Can one be an attitudinal discontinuist and still hold a form of collective continuism? Settling these questions is crucial for determining whether (and if so, to what extent) we should expect meaningful answers to the more general question of what the relationship between memory and imagination is. If it turns out that the existing (dis)continuity debates can be pursued independently, there might not be, in the end, much that we can learn by theorizing about the relationship between memory and imagination at a more general level.
Second, and also to conclude, I think that recent developments in the (dis)continuism debate have an important but somewhat underappreciated implication for the philosophy of memory in particular. Although the last fifteen years have seen a rapid increase of interest on memory as a topic of philosophical interest, there has not been much explicit discussion (and hence not much agreement) about what a more comprehensive philosophical theory of memory should look like. Much of this is, of course, due to diverging methodological choices made by those working in the area, but since I think most philosophers of memory, regardless of methodological orientation, will agree that a good philosophical theory of memory should have something convincing to say about its relationship to imagination, the ongoing (dis)continuism debate (or debates) offers them a good starting point for thinking more systematically about this issue. In particular, if the contributions in this volume are any guide (and I think they are), then we should expect more comprehensive philosophical theories of remembering to have things to say about its nature as an attitude, as a cognitive process, as an experiential state, and as a collective phenomenon.
Notes
[1] Importantly, JUD accompanies but does not constitute remembering. For Langland-Hassan, the JIG alone suffices for there to be remembering. This is why he labels his view a “minimalist” one.
References
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