Abstract
The paper develops an account of minimal traces devoid of representational content and exploits an analogy to a predictive processing framework of perception. As perception can be regarded as a prediction of the present on the basis of sparse sensory inputs without any representational content, episodic memory can be conceived of as a “prediction of the past” on the basis of a minimal trace, i.e., an informationally sparse, merely causal link to a previous experience. The resulting notion of episodic memory will be validated as a natural kind distinct from imagination. This trace minimalist view contrasts with two theory camps dominating the philosophical debate on memory. On one side, we face versions of the Causal Theory that hold on to the idea that episodic remembering requires a memory trace that causally links the event of remembering to the event of experience and carries over representational content from the content of experience to the content of remembering. The Causal Theory, however, fails to account for the epistemic generativity of episodic memory and is psychologically and information-theoretically implausible. On the other side, a new camp of simulationists is currently forming up. Motivated by empirical and conceptual deficits of the Causal Theory, they reject not only the necessity of preserving representational content, but also the necessity of a causal link between experience and memory. They argue that remembering is nothing but a peculiar form of imagination, peculiar only in that it has been reliably produced and is directed towards an episode of one’s personal past. Albeit sharing their criticism of the Causal Theory and, in particular, rejecting its demand for an intermediary carrier of representational content, the paper argues that a causal connection to experience is still necessary to fulfill even the minimal requirements of past-directedness and reliability.
Highlights
The current debate in the philosophy of memory, with reverberations in psychology and neuroscience, is dominated by two camps
One might appeal to the conditions of Causal Link, Representational Content, Strong or Weak Content Preservation and Reliability to secure the truth-conduciveness of episodic memory
Having already presented the arguments against the Causal Theory (CT and CT*), I will further defend Trace Minimalism against Simulationism by arguing that Simulationism is likely to fail with regard to its own criterion of reliability if it rejects the necessity of a causal link between remembering and experience
Summary
The current debate in the philosophy of memory, with reverberations in psychology and neuroscience, is dominated by two camps. Motivated by empirical and conceptual deficits of the Causal Theory and its modifications, simulationists reject the necessity of preserving representational content, and the necessity of a causal link between experience and remembering They instead view episodic memory in continuity with imagination. For simulationists, the truth-approximating reliability of its production history in conjunction with the personal past directedness of its content is the only property that distinguishes remembering from psychological phenomena such as future, counterfactual, hypothetical, and fictitious imagination.. For simulationists, the truth-approximating reliability of its production history in conjunction with the personal past directedness of its content is the only property that distinguishes remembering from psychological phenomena such as future, counterfactual, hypothetical, and fictitious imagination.2 In this spirit, simulationists often apostrophize episodic memory as being merely a peculiar instance of a psychological capacity of mental time (and world) travel, peculiar only with regard to the direction of the time arrow and the actual or another possible world as target.. Since Trace Minimalism views episodic memory as a natural kind, it supports a discontinuist position with regard to the relationship between episodic memory and imagination.
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