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Is there an language of episodic thought?| title | Is there an language of episodic thought? |
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| start_date | 2024/01/25 |
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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 | Episodic memory and imagination (or, in my terms, ‘episodic thought’) are most commonly thought of as prime examples of capacities that don’t have propositional contents. Consequently, episodic thought has not been seriously analyzed from the perspective of cognition as relying on a ‘language of thought’. Here, I will propose that the fact that episodic representations seem to have at least partly imagistic contents is compatible with the idea that they display central features of sententiality. On this view, episodic retrieval consists of two separate types of processes, each of which have both a compositional semantics and a combinatorial syntax. On the one hand, the construction of event content relies on the composition of discrete representational primitives inherited from perception and semantic knowledge. Such construction can be guided by a memorial index pointing to a compositional representation encoded during experience and/or by knowledge structures like event and scene syntaxes. On the other hand, event content can be predicated so as to play various cognitive roles (e.g., as an imagination of a future event or a memory of a general routine). These predicates are discrete and abstract but compose according to syntactic rules determining the well-formedness of the episodic thought as a whole. Beyond being an integrative computational-level theory of episodic retrieval, my proposed view has various philosophical upshots. Most prominently, while holding that episodic thought is a natural kind, it is compatible with some versions of process discontinuism and all versions of attitudinal discontinuism between memory and imagination. |
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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 | | 2024/01/16 15:36 UTC |
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