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)?