Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: According to the traditional approach in philosophy of memory, when all goes well, our episodic memories of particular events in our personal past constitute firsthand knowledge of the who , what , where , and what-was-it-like of those events. That is, according to the traditional approach, episodic memory is at bottom a capacity for a specific kind of knowledge . However, it’s now becoming increasingly common to treat the core epistemic dimension of episodic memories as present but non-essential, that is, as secondary to whatever episodic memory exists to do. What are the grounds for this “non-epistemic turn” in the philosophy of memory? We identify three based on the empirical study of memory: “the argument from construction” appeals to evidence that the contents of episodic memory are constructed rather than stored; “the argument from error” appeals to evidence that episodic memory is highly error-prone; and, finally, “the argument from animals” appeals to evidence that some nonhuman animals can episodically remember. We argue that all three fail.
Authors: Alison Springle, Seth Goldwasser
Institution: University of Miami
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,090
OpenAlex ID: W4409954409