Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Juan F. Álvarez (Université Grenoble Alpes) on his recent paper " Remembering and relearning: against exclusionism " ( Philosophical Studies , 2024). Juan F. Álvarez Distinguishing remembering from other related cognitive processes, such as imagining and relearning, occupies a central place in the philosophy of memory. While the remembering-imagining distinction is a topic of heated debate, philosophers tend to agree that no instance of relearning qualifies as a case of remembering. In this paper, I argue that this view, which I call “exclusionism”, requires closer examination because it does not follow from leading naturalistic theories of remembering. The theories in question are simulationism ( Michaelian 2016 ), distributed causalism ( Sutton and O’Brien 2023 ), and trace minimalism ( Werning 2020 ).  Relearning occurs when a subject acquires information about an event through experience, forgets about the event, reacquires information about the sa...

We’re continuing our series of post s on “Philosophical Perspectives on Confabulation” - our special issue in the journal Topoi this week. In today’s post,  Sarah Robins , Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas, introduces her paper “ Mnemonic Confabulation ”. The motivation for this paper was the following question: How are discussions of confabulation in the philosophy of memory related to discussions of confabulation in empirical and clinical work? At first pass, it’s easy to suppose that they’re closely related. After all, both focus on confabulatory remembering. For philosophers of memory, confabulation is one of many memory errors (alongside misremembering, forgetting, relearning, etc.) that needs to be distinguished from successful remembering.  In clinical work, interest in confabulation began with Korsakoff (1885) and Wernicke’s (1906) observations of bizarre false memory reports in patients with amnesia and dementia. Despite the s...

Today's post is by Jordi Fernández . He is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Adelaide . Jordi's research interests are mainly in philosophy of mind, epistemology and metaphysics. He is particularly interested in self-knowledge and memory.  He is the author of Transparent Minds (2013), a monograph on self-knowledge, and he is currently working on a monograph on memory. He is also interested in cognitive science and continental philosophy. Jordi's post is the second of a series on chapters from the New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory collection. (See here for the first in the series.) He discusses his chapter " The functional character of memory ". Consider the question of what is to remember something, as opposed to imagining it. This is a question that I have tackled in a recent article. I try not to appeal to the phenomenology of memories, or the content of memories, or the kind of knowledge that memories provide. The rea...

In this blog post, Kourken Michelian introduces his new book Mental Time Travel: Episodic Memory and Our Knowledge of the Personal Past . I'm a lecturer in the philosophy department at the University of Otago. Before moving to New Zealand last year, I worked for several years at Bilkent University in Turkey and at the Institut Jean-Nicod in France. My work is mostly on memory. Everyone -- including philosophers -- knows that memory doesn't work like a tape recorder, but philosophers have a way of forgetting this fact. When working on other topics, they often assume that it's an acceptable idealization to treat memory as if it did work that way. If they then happen to read research by psychologists or others that reminds them that remembering really doesn't work like a tape recorder -- that it's a thoroughly reconstructive process, rather than simple reproductive one -- they react with surprise. If remembering isn't a reproductive process, then what'...