Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Remembering the Past and Imagining the Actual

  • Published:
Review of Philosophy and Psychology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Recently, a view I refer to as “hypothetical continuism” has garnered some favour among philosophers, based largely on empirical research showing substantial neurocognitive overlaps between episodic memory and imagination. According to this view, episodically remembering past events is the same kind of cognitive process as sensorily imagining future and counterfactual events. In this paper, I first argue that hypothetical continuism is false, on the basis of substantive epistemic asymmetries between episodic memory and the relevant kinds of imagination. However, I then propose and defend an alternative form of continuism, according to which episodic memory is continuous with a capacity I call “actuality-oriented imagination.” Because of the deep epistemic affinities between episodic memory and actuality-oriented imagination, it makes sense to think of them as cognitive processes of the same kind.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. It’s controversial exactly how to characterize this phenomenology in more detail; for discussion, see Dokic (2014) and Fernández (2019, ch. 4).

  2. For a historical review of this distinction by the psychologist who popularized it, see Tulving (2002).

  3. The term “continuism” was coined by Perrin (2016), who formulated it as a claim about remembering the past and imagining the future (in line with its roots in the “mental time travel” paradigm from psychology—cf. Tulving 2002; Schacter et al., 2007; Suddendorf and Corballis 2007). But psychologists have increasingly shifted to investigating memory in relation to the more general category of hypothetical imagination (e.g., Schacter et al. 2012; Mullally and Maguire 2014; Addis 2018), as have philosophers who endorse continuist-type views (e.g., De Brigard, 2014; Sant’Anna and Michaelian 2019; Michaelian et al., forthcoming). So, I take it that the current “state-of-the-art” continuist view is about memory and hypothetical imagination, even if it’s sometimes put as a claim just about memory and future imagination.

  4. There are also some measurable differences between the two, e.g., their neural overlap isn’t total; memories are typically more detailed than imaginings; and imagining typically requires more effort. Continuists see such differences as matters of degree, not as evidence for processes of different kinds (Michaelian 2016a; Addis 2018).

  5. This is somewhat ambiguous about the relationship between memory imagery and belief—specifically, whether the image is itself literally a belief, versus the belief being an attitude, distinct from the image, which one has towards (some part of) the image’s content (cf. Langland-Hassan 2011; Arcangeli 2019). I think that, while the latter fits better with what I go on to argue below, both are consistent with my arguments. What matters is just that it’s in the process of remembering that a belief comes into occurrent thought.

  6. I take this to be the standard contemporary view of the epistemology of imagination, due to prominent work by, e.g., Williamson (2016) and Kind (2018). There are skeptics (e.g., Spaulding 2016), but they’re a minority.

  7. Lackey (2005) takes this to be the orthodox view of the epistemology of memory (citing Plantinga 1993; Dummett 1994; Audi 1995; Owens 2002). But she also argues that memory can both generate and justify belief. She argues that memory generates justification when a subject starts out believing a defeater for another belief she has stored in memory, then later forgets the defeater: after forgetting, the subject gains justification for the belief stored in memory. I think Senor (2007) successfully responds to this—see his argument regarding the prima facie/ultima facie justification distinction (Lackey 2007 responds to Senor, but doesn’t criticize the substance of this response regarding this first kind of case). Lackey also argues that memory can generate beliefs when a subject acts as if she believes P but also has some information stored in memory which she could bring to mind to form the contradictory belief that Q: if the subject retrieves this information, she’d be using memory to revise her belief from P to Q. I think such cases involve subjects with inconsistent beliefs. One can both have a belief that P which manifests in one’s behaviour and, simultaneously, a contradictory stored belief that Q.

  8. There are various existing discontinuist arguments I don’t have space to review here, both metaphysical (e.g., Debus 2014) and epistemological (e.g., Perrin 2016). Michaelian (2016a) compellingly handles many of these.

  9. Future and counterfactual imagining are non-factive, since one can genuinely imagine that P even if P is false. Is this difference enough to conclude that hypothetical continuism is false? I don’t think it’s sufficient to show that memory and hypothetical imagining are distinct kinds of processes. Consider the relation between another state typically thought to be factive, seeing, and a closely related non-factive state, visually hallucinating. The asymmetry in factivity doesn’t clearly imply that they’re discontinuous. Perhaps this asymmetry is because genuine seeing succeeds in perceptually hooking one up to the world, while hallucinating is basically “seeing” that fails to do so. (This is especially plausible on recent “constructive” models of perception, where the two are psychologically very similar—cf. Hohwy 2016.) This would make hallucinating a kind of defective seeing. That’s consistent with only the latter being factive and the two being the same kind of psychological process.

  10. The way I’ve just set things up assumes that episodic memories have propositional contents (following, e.g., Fernández 2006; Byrne 2010). This is not uncontroversial (see Sant’Anna 2018 for arguments against it), but it’s beyond my scope to comment on this debate here. I accept the view that perception has propositional contents (as per, e.g., Dretske 1997; Byrne 2009), and I take it that memory images inherit their representational format from perception and therefore also have propositional contents.

  11. Note that since GEN-REM is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one, I leave open whether a subject can satisfy GEN-REM yet fail to genuinely remember because she fails to meet some other necessary condition(s).

  12. I don’t mean to have just given a sharp definition, or set of necessary conditions, for possessing an implicit belief. Rather, I’m noting some possible ways of possessing implicit beliefs in hopes of gesturing toward an intuitive category of belief. For more detailed discussions of standing and implicit beliefs, see, e.g., Hawthorne (2000); Schwitzgebel (2002); Gertler (2011).

  13. This takes various more specific forms, but it typically includes the claim that knowledge involves or entails some modal notion like reliability or “safety” (cf. Williamson 2000, sec. 5.3).

  14. For work relevant to this general question, see Nagel (2013, 2017) and Dasti and Phillips (2010).

  15. The idea that memories must represent particular events has recently been challenged by Andonovski (2020), who argues that at least some episodic memories are generalizations of multiple, similar past events. Still, Andonovski recognizes that the particularity condition is a widespread assumption among philosophers, so I’ll assume it to be true here. Even if we reject it, though, the kind of generalized memories Andonovski describes still concern the past; so, if I’m right that cases like PARTY can involve present-tensed mental images, we’d still have to distinguish such general memories from actuality-oriented imaginings. However, one might also be tempted to think that Olive’s mental image of the restaurant is past-tensed while she forms a present-tensed belief based on it—i.e., that the present-tensed part of her thoughts about the restaurant comes only in a belief formed subsequently to a memory. However, even if it’s true that we do sometimes form beliefs via such a process, it seems doubtful that we can’t engage in the kind of present-tensed imagining I described Olive as performing. In fact, as I go on to note, actuality-oriented imagining seems like a common feature of day-to-day life. The possibility of actuality-oriented imagining cases is all I need to make my argument in this section. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising the objections I just addressed.

  16. Depending on one’s view about the metaphysics of future events, one might think of imagining the future as imagining the actual. However, I think Debus (2014, 2016) is correct that the future at least seems genuinely open from the perspective of the imagining subject, such that what one imagines is, to the imaginer, to some extent merely hypothetical.

  17. For a more detailed positive account of actuality-oriented imagination, including more about its relation to different types of memory, see Munro (forthcoming).

  18. One way actuality-oriented imagining is unlike remembering, and like hypothetical imagining, is that it isn’t factive. Beliefs about the past which one formed via past perceptual experience remain true until one brings them to mind via remembering, because the past doesn’t change after one perceives it. With actuality-oriented imagining, though, a part of the world can change between the time one perceives and forms a belief about it and the time one imagines it. It could be that, for example, the restaurant removed its large booth between the time Olive last saw it and the time she imagines it. But see fn. 9 above for why I don’t think differences in factivity are enough of a basis on which to conclude that two cognitive processes are discontinuous.

References

  • Addis, Donna Rose. 2018. Are episodic memories special? On the sameness of remembered and imagined event simulation. Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand 48 (2–3): 64–88.

    Google Scholar 

  • Andonovski, Nikola. 2020. Singularism about episodic memory. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 11: 335–365.

    Google Scholar 

  • Arcangeli, Margherita. 2019. "The two faces of mental imagery." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

  • Aronowitz, Sara. 2018. Retrieval is central to the distinctive function of episodic memory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41: 16–17.

    Google Scholar 

  • Aronowitz, Sara. 2019. Memory is a modeling system. Mind & Language 34 (4): 483–502.

    Google Scholar 

  • Audi, Robert. 1995. Memorial justification. Philosophical Topics 23 (1): 31–45.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bernecker, Sven. 2008. The metaphysics of memory. New York: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Byrne, Alex. 2009. Experience and content. The Philosophical Quarterly 59 (236): 429–451.

    Google Scholar 

  • Byrne, Alex. 2010. Recollection, perception, imagination. Philosophical Studies 148 (1): 15–26.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dasti, Matthew, and Stephen H. Phillips. 2010. Pramāṇa are Factive—A response to Jonardon Ganeri. Philosophy East and West 60 (4): 535–540.

    Google Scholar 

  • De Brigard, Felipe. 2014. Is memory for remembering? Recollection as a form of episodic hypothetical thinking. Synthese 191 (2): 155–185.

    Google Scholar 

  • De Brigard, Felipe, and Bryce S. Gessell. 2016. Time is not of the essence. In Seeing the future: Theoretical perspectives on future-oriented mental time travel, ed. Kourken Michaelian, Stanley B. Klein, and Karl K. Szpunar, 153–179. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Debus, Dorothea. 2014. ‘Mental time travel’: Remembering the past, imagining the future, and the particularity of events. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 5 (3): 333–350.

    Google Scholar 

  • Debus, Dorothea. 2016. Temporal perspectives in imagination. In Seeing the future: Theoretical perspectives on future-oriented mental TimeTravel, ed. Kourken Michaelian, Stanley B. Klein, and Karl K. Szpunar, 217–240. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dokic, Jérôme. 2014. Feeling the past: A two-tiered account of episodic memory. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 5 (3): 413–426.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dorsch, Fabian. 2016. Knowledge by imagination—How imaginative experience can ground factual knowledge. Teorema: Revista Internacional De Filosofía 35 (3): 87–116.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dretske, Fred. 1997. Naturalizing the mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dummett, Michael. 1994. Testimony and memory. In Knowing from words, ed. Bimal K. Matilal and Arindam Chakrabarti, 251–272. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Egeland, Jonathan. 2019. "Imagination cannot justify empirical belief." Episteme.

  • Fernández, Jordi. 2006. The intentionality of memory. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 84 (1): 39–57.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fernández, Jordi. 2019. Memory: A self-referential account. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gertler, Brie. 2011. Self-knowledge and the transparency of belief. In Self-knowledge, ed. Anthony Hatzimoysis, 125–145. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hawthorne, John. 2000. Implicit belief and a priori knowledge. The Southern Journal of Philosophy 38: 191–210.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hohwy, Jakob. 2016. The self-evidencing brain. Noûs 50 (2): 259–285.

    Google Scholar 

  • Irish, Muireann, and Olivier Piguet. 2013. The pivotal role of semantic memory in remembering the past and imagining the future. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience 7: 27.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kind, Amy. 2018. How imagination gives rise to knowledge. In Perceptual imagination and perceptual memory, ed. Fiona Macpherson and Fabian Dorsch, 227–246. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lackey, Jennifer. 2005. Memory as a generative epistemic source. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 70 (3): 636–658.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lackey, Jennifer. 2007. Why memory really is a generative epistemic source: A reply to Senor. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (1): 209–219.

    Google Scholar 

  • Langland-Hassan, Peter. 2011. A puzzle about visualization. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 10 (2): 145–173.

    Google Scholar 

  • Langland-Hassan. 2016. On choosing what to imagine. In Knowledge through imagination, ed. Amy Kind and Peter Kung, 61–84. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Maguire, Eleanor A., and Sinéad L. Mullally. 2013. The Hippocampus: A manifesto for change. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 142 (4): 1180–1189.

    Google Scholar 

  • Martin, Charles B., and Max Deutscher. 1966. Remembering. The Philosophical Review 75 (2): 161–196.

    Google Scholar 

  • McCormick, Cornelia, Morris Moscovitch, Taufik A. Valiante, Melanie Cohn, and Mary Pat McAndrews. 2018. Different neural routes to autobiographical memory recall in healthy people and individuals with left medial temporal lobe epilepsy. Neuropsychologia 110: 26–36.

    Google Scholar 

  • Michaelian, Kourken. 2016a. "Against Discontinuism: Mental time travel and our knowledge of past and future events." In Seeing the Future: Theoretical Perspectives on Future-Oriented Mental Time Travel, edited by Kourken Michaelian, Stanley B. Klein and Karl K. Szpunar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • Michaelian, Kourken. 2016b. Mental time travel: Episodic memory and our knowledge of the personal past. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Michaelian, Kourken, Denis Perrin, and André Sant'Anna. forthcoming. "Continuities and Discontinuities between Imagination and Memory: The View from Philosophy." In The Cambridge Handbook of Imagination, edited by Anna Abraham: Cambridge University Press.

  • Morton, Neal W., Katherine R. Sherrill, and Alison R. Preston. 2017. Memory integration constructs maps of space, time, and concepts. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 17: 161–168.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mullally, Sinéad L., and Eleanor A. Maguire. 2014. Memory, imagination, and predicting the future: A common brain mechanism? The Neuroscientist 20 (3): 220–234.

    Google Scholar 

  • Munro, Daniel. forthcoming. "Imagining the Actual." Philosophers' Imprint.

  • Nagel, Jennifer. 2013. Knowledge as a mental state. Oxford Studies in Epistemology 4: 275–310.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nagel, Jennifer. 2017. Factive and Nonfactive mental state attribution. Mind & Language 32 (5): 525–544.

    Google Scholar 

  • Owens, David. 2002. Reason without freedom: The problem of epistemic normativity. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Perrin, Denis. 2016. Asymmetries in subjective time. In Seeing the future: Theoretical perspectives on future-oriented mental time travel, ed. Kourken Michaelian, Stanley B. Klein, and Karl K. Szpunar, 39–61. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Perrin, Denis and Kourken Michaelian. 2017. "Memory as mental time travel." In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory, edited by Sven Bernecker and Kourken Michaelian 228–239. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Plantinga, Alvin. 1993. Warrant and proper function. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Robin, Jessica, and Morris Moscovitch. 2017. Details, gist and Schema: Hippocampal–neocortical interactions underlying recent and remote episodic and spatial memory. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 17: 114–123.

    Google Scholar 

  • Robins, Sarah. 2016. Representing the past: Memory traces and the causal theory of memory. Philosophical Studies 173 (11): 2993–3013.

    Google Scholar 

  • Robins, Sarah. 2020. Mnemonic confabulation. Topoi 39 (1): 121–132.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sant’Anna, André, and Kourken Michaelian. 2019. Thinking about events: A pragmatist account of the objects of episodic hypothetical thought. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 10 (1): 187–217.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sant'Anna, André. 2018. Episodic memory as a propositional attitude: A critical perspective. Frontiers in Psychology 9: 1220.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schacter, Daniel L., Donna Rose Addis, and Randy L. Buckner. 2007. Remembering the past to imagine the future: The prospective brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 8 (9): 657–661.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schacter, Daniel L., Donna Rose Addis, Demis Hassabis, Victoria C. Martin, R. Nathan Spreng, and Karl K. Szpunar. 2012. The future of memory: Remembering, imagining, and the brain. Neuron 76 (4): 677–694.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schellenberg, Susanna. 2017. The origins of perceptual knowledge. Episteme 14 (3): 311–328.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schwitzgebel, Eric. 2002. A phenomenal, dispositional account of belief. Noûs 36 (2): 249–275.

    Google Scholar 

  • Senor, Thomas D. 2007. Preserving Preservationism: A reply to Lackey. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (1): 199–208.

    Google Scholar 

  • Spaulding, Shannon. 2016. Imagination through knowledge. In Knowledge through imagination, ed. Amy Kind and Peter Kung, 207–226. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Suddendorf, Thomas, and Michael C. Corballis. 2007. The evolution of foresight: What is mental time travel, and is it unique to humans? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (3): 299–313.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tulving, Endel. 2002. Episodic memory: From mind to brain. Annual Review of Psychology 53 (1): 1–25.

    Google Scholar 

  • Van Leeuwen, Neil. 2016. The imaginative agent. In Knowledge through imagination, ed. Amy Kind and Peter Kung, 86–110. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Werning, Markus, and Sen Cheng. 2017. Taxonomy and Unity of memory. In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory, ed. Sven Bernecker and Kourken Michaelian, 7–20. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Williamson, Timothy. 2000. Knowledge and its limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Williamson, Timothy. 2016. Knowing by Imagining. In Knowledge through imagination, ed. Amy Kind and Peter Kung, 113–123. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

This paper was awarded the 2020 Philosophy of Memory Essay Prize organized by the Centre for Philosophy of Memory at the Université Grenoble Alpes. For comments on earlier drafts, thank you to David Barnett, Jennifer Nagel, Gurpreet Ratan, Catherine Rioux, Evan Westra, and two anonymous reviewers. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto, 170 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario, M5R 2M8, Canada

    Daniel Munro

Authors
  1. Daniel Munro
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Daniel Munro.

Additional information

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Munro, D. Remembering the Past and Imagining the Actual. Rev.Phil.Psych. 12, 175–197 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-020-00499-1

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-020-00499-1

Search

Navigation