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A minimalist approach to memory causality| title | A minimalist approach to memory causality |
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| start_date | 2023/12/07 |
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| schedule | 16h15-17h45 |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | on Zoom |
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| summary | Our common sense conception of memory involves the idea that when you recall an event from your past, you can do so only because you previously witnessed that event, or were involved in it as an agent or participant. It is all but irresistible to account for this dependence in causal terms: your recollection is explained causally by your earlier experience of the event of which it is a recollection. However, the idea that memory always involves a causal connection to the past has come under attack in recent philosophical work. A ‘simulationist’ view of memory holds that there is no important difference between remembering the past and imagining future or counterfactual scenarios, and that a successful and genuine recollection of a past occurrence need not causally originate in an experience of that occurrence. The principal motivation for this view is the rejection, based on findings in the cognitive neuroscience of memory, of the idea of a ‘memory trace’ that faithfully preserves the content of the original experience and is retrieved in recall. In this paper I argue against throwing the causal baby out with the bathwater. The discovery that there is no such thing as a memory trace should not lead us to conclude that the ordinary causal conception of memory is ill-grounded. The need to posit memory traces arises principally from the ambition to give nontrivial necessary and sufficient conditions that must be added to a neutral notion of ‘representing an event’ to make it a genuine memory. Yet there are grounds for scepticism about the viability of this analytic project that are not themselves grounds for doubting the causal character of remembering. A minimalist approach to memory causality recognises this basic causal character while rejecting the demand for a reductive account of what the causal mechanism consists in. I address the potential objections that the minimalist approach involves some kind of spooky temporal action-at-a-distance, and that it fails to give an adequate explanation of the singularity of episodic recall. |
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| responsibles | Righetti, Werning, Kourken, Andonovski |
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Workflow history| from state (1) | to state | comment | date |
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| submitted | published | | 2023/11/30 13:21 UTC |
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