The mechanisms of time: delineating the systems for episodic memory and imagination

Abstract

Episodic memory is a mental state in which the subject has an imagistic representation of some event from his or her personal past. Such representation is usually rich in perceptual, emotional, and phenomenological details, and is crucial to our notion of personal identity over time. Since Aristotle, philosophers have wondered about the nature of memory, in particular about its relationship with imagination. In the last century, the question of whether episodic memory is a type of imagination has gained considerable prominence, mainly due to findings from cognitive neuroscience that remembering the past and imagining the future employ the same brain regions. This issue, known today as the (dis)continuist problem, has divided researchers between continuists, who argue that there is no fundamental difference between memory and imagination, and discontinuists, who argue that memory and imagination are fundamentally distinct mental states and processes. However, in contemporary literature little attention has been devoted to the meaning of the term “fundamentally distinct”, nor to what criteria are relevant for delimiting the mechanisms of episodic memory and imagination. The present dissertation fills this gap by drawing a dialogue between the philosophy of memory and the philosophy of cognitive science. Through three independent papers, I argue that the concept of “mechanism” is a fruitful tool for understanding and answering the (dis)continuist problem. Starting from this mechanistic analysis, I argue that there are no criteria free of pragmatic interests for the delineation of neurocognitive mechanisms. Therefore, any solution to the (dis)continuist problem is contingent on a particular framework of research, and we should be pluralists about the delimitation between episodic memory and imagination.