A post by Christopher Jude McCarroll

Episodic memory and sensory imagination are very similar intentional states. On some views, they are in fact fundamentally the same (Michaelian 2016). On this type of view, episodic memory is continuous with sensory imagination: any difference between them is a matter of degree, rather than marking a distinct kind of mental state. Such simulationist theories typically stand in opposition to causal theories of memory (Martin and Deutscher 1966), which emphasise that episodic memory is a distinct kind of state to imagination, because remembering necessarily involves an appropriate causal connection to the remembered event. Remembering, not imagining, necessarily involves a memory trace, which connects the present memory and the past experience in the right way. Remembering, according to the causalist, is discontinuous with imagining (Perrin 2016). This is the so-called (dis)continuism debate about the relation between memory and imagination.

The necessity of an appropriate causal connection is one way of thinking about the relation between memory and imagination. In this post I offer a different way of thinking about the (dis)continuism debate. Rather than focusing on the content of such states, and whether this content is appropriately causally connected to a past event or not, I adopt an approach that is gaining ground in recent literature (Robins 2020; Sant’Anna 2021; Langland-Hassan forthcoming; Barner, manuscript), and focus on the attitudes involved in remembering and imagining.