A post by Daniel D. Hutto

How is episodic remembering related to imagining? Where once philosophers had little to say on this question, today much ink is being spilled in efforts to answer it (see, e.g., Berninger & Ferran’s excellent 2023 collection). This is perhaps unsurprising since in the wake of constructivist and simulationist theories of episodic memory and mental time travel, we have been confronted with the philosophically juicy possibility that “to remember, it turns out, is just to imagine the past” (Michaelian 2016, p. 14, p. 120, see also Gerrans & Kennett 2010, De Brigard 2014).

With respect to current discussions in the literature, several authors are asking just how continuous or discontinuous episodic remembering might be with respect to imagining. I am not convinced that framing this question in terms of continuity is all that helpful. But if we are interested in meaningfully asking how episodic remembering relates to imagining or in what way or ways it is involved in episodic remembering then we need clarity on the kind of imagining we have in mind – is it imagistic, reconstructive, attitudinal, all of the above, or something else?

Perhaps a more open way of approaching the question would be to ask, simply: Where, and how, does imagining come into the story of episodic remembering? Is it that episodic remembering is a kind of imagining? Or is it, rather, merely that they share the same cognitive basis? Or do they, in essence, involve taking up essentially the same kind of mental attitude toward possible happenings in one’s personal life – even though episodic remembering is necessarily backward-facing whereas imagining can be more temporally free-ranging (Langland-Hassan 2015, 2023)?

Indelibly, what all this exciting new research shows us is that there is every reason to think that our getting clear about episodic remembering hangs on our getting clear about our own imaginings, in more ways than one. In particular, if we are to understand episodic remembering then we need to scrutinize and get clear not only about what we imagine the character of the imaginings putatively involved in episodic remembering are like, but also we need to get clear about, and justify, what we imagine to be going on, cognitively, when we engage in episodic remembering.

Setting off on a positive foot, let’s engage our philosophical imaginations with a couple of ‘what if’ scenarios. ‘What if’ episodic remembering is rare rather than ubiquitous on the face of the earth? ‘What if’ episodic remembering is only possible for those who have mastered the skills for participating in distinctive kinds of narrative practices?

How seriously should we take these possibilities? “Very seriously”, I would say. They are live possibilities. Consider that the target phenomenon – episodic remembering in the strict sense – is quite demanding: it requires being able to recall, as Mahr (2023) puts it, specific and discrete, Particular, Past, Actual, and Personal events, or PPAP events (p. 152). Mahr carefully distinguishes the capacity to episodically remember PPAP events in one’s personal past, such as what happened in a particular class in one’s high school on a particular day, from the more generalised capacity to remember ‘going to high school’.

Bearing this in mind, there is robust empirical and theoretical support for thinking that episodic remembering in humans – which involves remembering specific events from one’s personal past – just is autobiographical remembering of the sort that requires the mastery of socio-cultural narrative practices and the exercise of narrative skills. While there may be many cognitive capacities that are closely related to episodic remembering and which may support it, we may reasonably doubt that such capacities, either separately or collectively, suffice for episodic remembering in the strict sense defined above.

In previous work, Hutto (2017), I outlined reasons for favouring a Social Interactionist Theory, or SIT for short. It holds that autobiographical remembering of PPAP events is a distinctive kind of remembering which requires the development and exercise of socio-culturally acquired narrative capacities (See, e.g., Fivush 1991, 1997, Fivush & Nelson 2004, Fivush et al. 2011, Nelson 2003, Nelson 2007, Nelson & Fivush 2004, Hoerl 2007). I am now exploring the possibility that episodic remembering, stricto sensu, depends on capacity for narratively structured, autobiographical remembering. 

As I also noted in Hutto (2017), one can adopt strong or weak versions of SIT. Weak SIT assumes that mastery of narrative practices puts children in a position to enhance and improve their retention and recall of PPAP events without assuming that the former is required to enable the latter (Barnier & Sutton 2008, p. 179). Strong SIT goes the other way, assuming that prior to mastering the relevant narrative practices, there is no autobiographical PPAP remembering of PPAP events, and hence no episodic remembering.

Strong SIT, if true, has profound implications. In the wake of Tulving (1972), it has become a staple of contemporary psychology to divide long-term memory into two categories, distinguishing procedural and declarative memory, and to sub-divide the latter into two further kinds: semantic memory and episodic memory. Additionally, it is standardly assumed that each of these kinds of memory are supported by distinct neuro-cognitive systems.

Relatedly, to take Strong SIT seriously requires reimagining the cognitive basis of episodic remembering in a way that breaks faith with the standard cognitivist options. In particular, to embrace Strong SIT requires rejecting the existence of so-called ‘episodic memory systems’ – those of the very sort which mainstream cognitivists assume best explain our episodic remembering capacities.

Why so? Well, it cannot both be the case the episodic remembering is only possible once we have mastered certain narrative practices and also – at the same time – that some sub-personal neuro-cognitive system, in fact, does our episodic remembering for us, producing contentful representations of PPAP events, without our noticing.  

Rather than following cognitivists in positing episodic memory systems that trade in such mental representations, we might follow Keven (2016) in assuming that the processes by which a sequence of events is bound into an episode of the sort needed for episodic remembering requires narrative binding. Keven (2023) further maintains, in line with Strong SIT, that our ability to bind events into episodes is “closely tied to our uniquely human storytelling capacities. These types of narratively bound episodes are the primary bearers of the inferential content of episodic memory” (p. 122).

Yet, one might wonder, given that Strong SIT is incompatible with Weak SIT, whether there is any compelling reason for+ the former over the latter? Otherwise, why wouldn’t one just opt, conservatively, for the current mainstream view? Why go against the grain here? Well, there are independent reasons for thinking that the positing of episodic memory systems – understood through the familiar lens of information-processing, representational-cum-computational theories of mind – is a theoretical non-starter. For unless certain foundational challenges – such as the Hard Problem of Content – can be answered there is reason to suspect that episodic memory systems (and the contentful states of mind that are assumed to comprise them) are philosophical fictions (Hutto & Myin 2013, 2017, Hutto 2023).

To make the options vivid, let’s focus on two rival explanations – one cognitivist, one enactivist – of what imaginative simulation, of the sort needed for episodic remembering, might involve.

Sarah Robins (2023) gives a helpful thumbnail description of the neurocognitive system – constructive episodic simulation (CES) – that cognitivists claim enables us to episodically remember (and to engage in other kinds of imagining too). She writes:

The system includes information acquired from past events that is stored in the memory system, and various simulation processes that act on this stored information. Information storage in the CES system is organised so as to facilitate this constructive process—i.e., information from particular past events is stored in a distributed manner that allows, and even encourages, flexible recombination of event details across simulations. … In simulations, the CES constructs representations by flexibly retrieving and recombining the event information in its memory system. (p. 167).

This description raises a wealth of questions – and, for me, several red flags (see Hutto 2023). First, we might wonder about where the end products of these simulative activities – the representations produced by the CES – obtain their contents. Second, we might wonder, more fundamentally, how information, if understood in a scientifically respectable way, is the sort of thing that can be stored at all (let alone stored in a distributed manner), organised, and recombined to generate coherent representations of an appropriate content in the first place.

If information is understood, as it standardly is, as a kind of contentless covariation between states of affairs then it is not any sort of thing and, hence, not the sort of thing that can be stored, organised, and recombined. If such information-processing talk proves to be metaphorical (and I strongly suspect that it will) then we should only take it robustly seriously in our scientific explanations if the metaphors it uses can be fully discharged (pace defenders of mental fictionalism – see, e.g, Demeter, Parent, & Toon 2022). Until that happens, to imagine that such descriptions have any real explanatory power it is to be subject to an illusion, sponsored by the fact that the theory-guided imaginings of what goes on in the CES are internally coherent and can be understood within the assumed framework.

Here’s another, enactivist, alternative. According to the simulation of perception hypothesis, imagination is recreative – it is a kind of perceptual re-enactment (Currie & Ravenscroft 2003, Hutto 2008, 2015, Medina 2013). Imagining, on this view, does not fully replicate perceiving – it is differently inspired and there is only a partial overlap in the neural activity. Goldman (2006) defines enactment or E-imagination as an attempt to re-enact or re-experience a particular feeling or state. To E-imagine is to “recreate the feeling of a state, or to conjure up the feeling of what-it-is-like to be in that state – in a sense, to enact that very state” (Goldman & Jordan 2013, p. 456, see also Goldman 2006, ch. 7).

Crucially, for enactivists who adopt this account, episodic remembering will be influenced by and adjusted in light of one’s past experience. Yet, pace cognitivists, the simulations in question are not imagined to be constructed out of stored information or memory traces bearing preserved contents. This is because it is assumed that enactive imaginings do not involve processes of storing and retrieving information or preserved contents in the first place.

Notice that which framework we adopt, cognitivist or enactivist, also influences how we imagine what goes on cognitively, and indeed, what must go on cognitively, when we imagine episodes of episodic remembering. Here, I turn to Robins (2023), once again. She writes:

If I want to think about what I might be doing at this time of the year a few years in the future, my thoughts about that possible future will likely be derived from my detailed knowledge of how events in my life (particularly during this time of year) have gone before, updated so as to reflect how they might be combined and reconfigured in the future. In fact, it is unclear what the alternative hypothesis would be. Where would the components of our thoughts about future events come from, if not from past event information? (p. 172, emphases added).

To see the point vividly let’s make Robins’ example more concrete – one that even more strongly favours the idea that future imaginings depend on one’s past experiences. Imagine that I am imagining what it would be like to attend a high school reunion at my old high school, more than 40 years after graduating. Indeed, imagine that I am just trying to imagine what my old school would look like after all these years.

Why should that capacity depend on deriving detailed knowledge that is itself derived from component information derived from prior representation of PAPP events? Why couldn’t we be getting by in these cases by relying on a gisty, perhaps ephemeral and rather vague, generalised sense of what the old school looked like based on a conglomerate of experiences but not a series of representations of discrete PAPP events? Unless we are simply assuming cognitivism true, there is no obvious evidential, empirical or phenomenological, reason to suppose that we have a natural capacity to represent such events in the first place.

For all we know, in nature there is a greater need for a general kind of remembering that is not properly episodic rather than having specific detailed knowledge of specific PAPP events in our past. Maybe, ‘general beats specific’ is a rule that wins out when it comes to how our ancestors forged their living in the wild and it is possible that most creatures still get by without any capacity for episodic memory. Imagine that.

References

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