Is remembering constructive imagining?

Synthese (2023) 202:141 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04338-5 ORIGINAL RESEARCH Is remembering constructive imagining? André Sant’Anna1 Received: 24 September 2022 / Accepted: 7 September 2023 © The Author(s) 2023 Abstract The (dis)continuism debate—the debate over whether remembering is a form of imagining—is a prominent one in contemporary philosophy of memory. In recent work, Langland-Hassan (2021) has argued that this debate is best understood as a dispute over whether remembering is a form of constructive imagining. In this paper, I argue that remembering is not a form of constructive imagining because constructive processes in remembering and imagining are constrained, and hence controlled, in different ways at the level of consciousness. More specifically, I argue that remembering and imagining differ in terms of the interventions we can make on the constructive processes as they unfold. If this is correct, then a form of discontinuism is vindicated: remembering and imagining are, on this view, processes of different kinds. Keywords Remembering · Imagining · Control · Construction · Discontinuism 1 Introduction Remembering, many have argued, is an inherently constructive process.1 To remember is, on this view, to reconstruct representations of past experiences based on various sources of information, which includes, but is not limited to, information originating in the past experiences themselves. This way of thinking about remem1 For defenses of this view in the philosophical literature, see, e.g., Sutton (1998), De Brigard (2014), and Michaelian (2016). For a more systematic discussion of the empirical evidence, see Schacter et al. (2012) and Addis (2020). André Sant’Anna 1 Department of Philosophy, University of Geneva, 5 rue De-Candolle, Genève 4 CH-1211, Switzerland 13 141 Page 2 of 28 Synthese bering has motivated some authors, most notablyMichaelian (2016c), to claim that it is just a form of imagining the past (see also Addis, 2020). Given the centrality enjoyed by this view in recent discussions, the question of whether remembering is a form of imagining has become a central one for contemporary philosophers of memory.2 As a result, two types views have been developed in response to it. On the one hand, defenders of continuism have argued that, other than their temporal orientation, there is no fundamental difference between remembering and imagining.3 On the other hand, proponents of discontinuism have appealed to various phenomenological, epistemological, and metaphysical considerations to argue that remembering and imagining differ in fundamental ways.4 The dispute between the proponents of these two views has come to be known as the (dis)continuism debate (Perrin & Michaelian, 2017; Michaelian et al., 2020, 2022). Its centrality notwithstanding, there is a lot of ambiguity associated with how we should interpret the central terms used in formulating the question that gives rise to the (dis)continuism debate. What exactly do we mean by ‘remembering’ and ‘imagining’ when we ask whether the former is the latter? In recent work, Langland-Hassan (2021, Langland-Hassan, 2023) has attempted to remedy this situation by discussing how ‘imagining’ should be interpreted.5 According to him, the (dis)continuism debate is a dispute over whether remembering is a form of constructive imagining: namely, a “temporally-extended constructive process of assembling mental representations” in novel ways (Van Leeuwen, 2013, pp. 224-5; see also Langland-Hassan, 2021, pp. 238-9). Building on this notion, Langland-Hassan argues that the (dis)continuism debate can be settled by determining whether constructive processes in remembering and imagining are constrained in the same way. If they are, then continuists will triumph. Otherwise, discontinuism will prevail. In addition to clarifying the sense of ‘imagining’ that is relevant for the debate, Langland-Hassan makes a more concrete suggestion as to how we should go about resolving the dispute. According to him, the question of whether remembering is constructive imagining can be answered by considering the role that memory traces play in those processes. More specifically, his view is that looking at the functional role that memory traces have in both remembering and imagining allows us to determine whether they are constrained in the same way. There are, however, two important limitations with this proposal. First, it gives centrality to a notion that is notoriously difficult to define and account for, namely, the notion of a ‘memory trace’.6 Thus, if Langland-Hassan is right, the question of whether remembering is constructive imagining can only be properly addressed when we settle the debate about the nature 2 See Michaelian et al. (2020, 2022) for a recent overview and Sant’Anna et al. (2020) for a collection of articles exploring the subject. 3 For defenses of continuism, see De Brigard (2014) Michaelian (2016a, b). 4 For defenses of discontinuism, see, e.g., Debus (2014), Perrin (2016), Robins (2020b). 5 For an attempt to define ‘remembering’ in the context of this debate, see Schirmer dos Santos et al. (2023). See also Sect. 2. 6 For different approaches to the nature of memory traces, see, e.g., Robins (2016); Werning (2020); Hutto (2023); Sutton and O’Brien (2023); Langland-Hassan, 2022, 2023). See De Brigard (2014b); Robins (2017) for overviews. 13 Synthese Page 3 of 28 141 of memory traces.7 Second, and more importantly, it takes for granted a notion of ‘remembering’, according it which it is identified with the unconscious retrieval of information previously acquired through experience, that discontinuists are not necessarily committed to. According to these discontinuists, remembering is a process that comprises not only unconscious processes responsible for retrieving information, but also conscious processes of manipulating retrieved information to represent events in different ways (see Sect. 2). Thus, similar to ‘imagining’, there is also an ambiguity in how ‘remembering’ is used in the (dis)continuism debate that needs to be taken into account. In this paper, I consider an alternative way of determining whether constructive processes in remembering and imagining are constrained in the same way, one that does not rely on the notion of a ‘memory trace’ and that takes its conscious dimension into account. More specifically, this alternative consists in looking at the conscious control we exercise over those processes. I argue that, unlike imagining, remembering is not under our control when it comes to the interventions we can make on its content. This is because it is constrained in a distinctive way at the level of consciousness. Building on this, I argue for a discontinuist view of the relationship between the two: because the constraints that operate on mnemonic constructive processes are different from the constraints that operate on imaginative constructive processes, rem (...truncated)