A factividade da memória episódica: traçando a diferença entre memória e imaginação através de veritadores

Abstract

The main problem that will be addressed here is the problem of how we can determine if a memory that the subject experiences in her mind is really a memory, if she remembers an episode that actually happened in her personal past. We will discuss the element that makes it most difficult for usto find the answer to such a question, which isthe fact that episodic memory is extremely similar to another type of mental state: imagination. There are many similarities between memory and imagination at the qualitative, experiential, and neural levels, resulting in the difficulty in determining whether memory and imagination are, in fact, neural processes of different types or whether they are the same type of neural process. The central thesis of this essay is the Factivity Thesis, according to which memory differs from imagination by being necessarily factive, that is, by accurately representing a past event experienced by the subject. In contrast, imagination can be factive, since the subject can imagine an actual event. However, I argue that, in this case, the subject is remembering the event. Imagination creates new scenarios in our mind, which represent possible events. The foundation of the Factivity Thesis, which explains how something can guarantee the existence or not of this external relation between the subject’s mental state – the memory – and the world, is the Truthmakers Theory, according to which contingent truths are true only because there is something in the world that makes them true; this something is the truthmaker of the mental state in question. Applying this theory to memory, the thesis presented here implies that a true memory possess a truthmaker in the world, which is the past event with which the subject has come into contact and experienced. The correspondence relation between the remembered mental state and the event is what makes the memory a genuine one, that is, the past event is the truthmaker of the memory. It is what makes it a genuine memory. Imaginative states, by contrast, can have no truthmakers in the world, since they are not necessarily in a correspondence relationship with any actual event, but are only mental states completely internal to the subject, due to the fact that they derive from the process of constructing a new mental representation that has never been experienced. So I argue that this is the metaphysical difference between memory and imagination, namely that memory states necessarily have an appropriate relation to the required truthmakers, while imagination states do not.