AbstractMuch recent work in philosophy of memory discusses the question whether episodic remembering is continuous with imagining. This paper contributes to the debate between continuists and discontinuists by considering a previously neglected source of evidence for continuism: the linguistic properties of overt memory and imagination reports (e.g. sentences of the form ‘x remembers/imagines p’). I argue that the distribution and truth-conditional contribution of episodic uses of the English verb remember is surprisingly similar to that of the verb imagine – even when compared to the distribution of other experiential attitude verbs like see, hallucinate, or dream. This holds despite the presence of some remarkable truth-conditional differences between remember and imagine. I show how these differences can be explained by a continuist account of remembering, on which remembering is past-directed, referential, and accurate experiential imagining.
Read full abstract