Imagining the past reliably and unreliably: towards a virtue theory of memory

• Published in: Synthese (Dordrecht) 2021-12, Vol.199 (3/4), p.7477-7507
• Main Author: Michaelian, Kourken
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Causality; Education; Epistemology; Evidence; Humanities and Social Sciences; IMAGINATION AND ITS LIMITS; Logic; Memory; Metaphysics; Philosophy; Philosophy of Language; Philosophy of Science; Simulation; Theory
• ISSN: 0039-7857; 1573-0964
• DOI: 10.1007/s11229-021-03125-4

Philosophers of memory have approached the relationship between memory and imagination from two very different perspectives. Advocates of the causal theory of memory, on the one hand, have motivated their preferred theory by appealing to the intuitive contrast between successfully remembering an event and merely imagining it. Advocates of the simulation theory, on the other hand, have motivated their preferred theory by appealing to empirical evidence for important similarities between remembering the past and imagining the future. Recently, causalists have argued that simulationism is unable to accommodate the difference between successful remembering and forms of unsuccessful remembering or mere imagining such as confabulating. This paper argues that, while these arguments fail, simulationism, in its current form, is indeed unable to provide a fully adequate account of unsuccessful remembering. Rather than suggesting a return to causalism, the paper proposes a new form of simulationism, a virtue theory of memory modelled not on the process reliabilist epistemology that has so far served as the inspiration for the simulation theory but instead on virtue reliabilist epistemology, and shows that this new theory grounds a more adequate account of unsuccessful remembering.