Remembering is an imaginative project

Episodic remembering—recalling specific past events from one's own life—is a form of mental action, not a passive occurrence. It belongs to the same category as active imagining, because both involve deliberately constructing imagistic content in the mind. An agent can bring an episodic memory to mind simply by intending or trying to do so, and the ability to actively remember depends on controlling the construction of the remembered scene. This scene construction is a process of exploring one's personal past as a limited region of possible experience, aimed at accurately representing what actually happened.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Abstract This essay defends the claim that episodic remembering is a mental action by arguing that episodic remembering and sensory- or experience-like imagining are of a kind in a way relevant for agency. Episodic remembering is a type of imaginative project that involves the agential construction of imagistic-content and that aims at (veridically) representing particular events of the personal past. Neurally intact adults under normal conditions can token experiential memories of particular events from the personal past (merely) by intending or trying to. An agent’s ability to actively remember depends not only on her being able to determine that some memory event occurs but on her ability to construct the relevant scene at will as well. I claim that the ability to guide construction with respect to imagistic-content is distinctive feature of a subset of active imagining. Episodic remembering is of a kind with that subset of active imagining by being a process of agential construction of imagistic-content, in this case, scene construction that aims at (veridically) representing the personal past. Agential scene construction in the context of remembering is the agent’s exploring her personal past as a highly circumscribed region of modal space.