Today's post is by Ali Boyle . Ali is a research associate in Kinds of Intelligence at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence in Cambridge and the Center for Science and Thought in Bonn. Her research focusses on non-human minds and the methods used to study them. In this post, she is going to summarise her recent paper, The impure phenomenology of episodic memory , appeared in Mind & Language. One question under investigation in comparative psychology is whether nonhuman animals have episodic memory – the kind of memory involved in recollecting past experiences. A problem for this research is that on many accounts, the defining feature of episodic memory is that it involves an experience of ‘mentally reliving’ past events. But if that’s right, then asking whether animals have episodic memory amounts to asking whether they have this distinctive experience. Many researchers think this renders the question unanswerable, since we have no experimental way...
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