Abstract
The questions of whether episodic memory is a propositional attitude, and of whether it has propositional content, are central to discussions about how memory represents the world, what mental states should count as memories, and what kind of beings are capable of remembering. Despite its importance to such topics, these questions have not been addressed explicitly in the recent literature in philosophy of memory. In one of the very few pieces dealing with the topic, Fernández (2006) provides a positive answer to the initial questions by arguing that the propositional attitude view of memory, as I will call it, provides a simple account of how memory possesses truth-conditions. A similar suggestion is made by Byrne (2010) when he proposes that perception and episodic memory have the same kind of content, differing only in degree. Against the propositional attitude view, I will argue that episodic memory does not have propositional content, and therefore, that it is not a propositional attitude. My project here is, therefore, mainly critical. I will show that, if empirical work is to inform our philosophical theories of memory in any way, we have good reasons to deny, or at least to be skeptical, of the prospects of the propositional attitude view of episodic memory.
Highlights
The view that mental content is propositional is still very prominent in contemporary philosophy of mind
While the above does not establish that the PA view cannot explain perspective switching, it gives us good reasons to be skeptical of its prospects to provide a comprehensive account of memory content
The suggestion made is that, because entertaining mental states with propositional content requires the possession of more sophisticated cognitive capacities that are not present in infants and non-human animals, the PA view precludes them from having episodic memory
Summary
The view that mental content is propositional is still very prominent in contemporary philosophy of mind. In the philosophy of perception, for example, many philosophers endorse the view that perception is a form of propositional attitude and, that perceptual content is propositional (e.g., Dretske, 1997; Byrne, 2001; Tye, 2002; Chalmers, 2004; Speaks, 2009) While not all these views understand the nature of propositions in the same way, they share the common intuition that taking perceptual content to be propositional provides a simple account of how perception, and our mental states more generally, establish truth-conditions. My approach here will be circumscribed, in the sense that I will tackle this question indirectly As it will become clear later, I will argue against the idea that the contents of episodic memory are propositional, which is a necessary—but not sufficient—condition for taking episodic memory to be a propositional attitude. I will conclude that the content of episodic memory is best understood as not being propositional and that episodic memory is best understood as not being a propositional attitude
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