A Case for Procedural Causality in Episodic Recollection 1

Perrin, Denis

doi:10.4324/9781315159591-3

Cited by 28 publications

(24 citation statements)

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“…In the first systematic discussion of the relationship between radical enactivism and mainstream philosophical theories of memory, Hutto and Peeters (2018) argue that the account that emerges when radical enactivism is applied to memory poses a significant challenge to current causal and postcausal theories. This paper aims to get beyond Hutto and Peeters' "radical" rhetoric in order to draw out the implications of their account for a cluster of (post)causal theories: the classical causal theory (Martin and Deutscher, 1966) and a neoclassical variant thereof (Bernecker, 2010), the simulation theory (Michaelian, 2016b), and the recently-proposed procedural causal theory (Perrin, 2018). 1 There are, of course, other theories on which we might have focused, but this particular cluster constitutes a natural starting point.…”

Section: Radical Enactivism Meets the Philosophy Of Memorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Radical enactivists understand content in semantic terms, that is, as being that in virtue of which a memory would stand for or be about something in the world. Philosophers of memory, in contrast, arguably understand it in componential terms (Perrin 2018), that is, as pertaining to the elements or building blocks in virtue of which a memory is experienced in a certain way; the idea is that if, for example, one remembers one's birthday party last year, one's memory will include various bits of information, such as "cake", "people", and "drinks", which determine, at least in part, how one experiences the memory. It is not entirely clear whether the fact that memory has content in the componential sense entails that it has content in the semantic sense.…”

Section: The Simulation Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The resulting "constructive causal theory" continues to take the contentful conception of traces for granted, treating storage as distributed but content as effectively local. The constructive causal theory thus operates with a "componential" understanding of causation (Perrin, 2018), an understanding on which the causal link (allegedly) necessary for the occurrence of genuine remembering is to be analyzed in terms of the transmission of discrete "packets" of content from experience to retrieved representation. The packets of content left behind by experience can, in Michaelian's view, be shaped during encoding and consolidation, modified by ongoing experience during reconsolidation, and transformed and recombined in various ways during retrieval, thus accounting for a range of aspects of reconstruction.…”

Section: The Procedural Causal Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…That the package of views that Bernecker and Michaelian each offers uscombining the distributed conception of traces with the contentful conceptionmay be incoherent has recently started to become clear. Perrin (2018), in partic-ular, has argued that, once we adopt the distributed conception, we are bound to abandon the componential understanding of causation in memory in favour of an alternative "procedural" understanding in line with De Brigard's characterization of traces as dispositions. In order to illustrate the nature of the causal link that may obtain between a (contentful) retrieved memory and a (contentful) earlier experience even in the absence of stored content, Perrin offers the following metaphor.…”

Section: The Procedural Causal Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Memory without content? Radical enactivism and (post)causal theories of memory

Michaelian

Sant’Anna

2019

Synthese

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Radical enactivism, an increasingly influential approach to cognition in general, has recently been applied to memory in particular, with Hutto and Peeters (2018) providing the first systematic discussion of the implications of the approach for mainstream philosophical theories of memory. Hutto and Peeters argue that radical enactivism, which entails a conception of memory traces as contentless, is fundamentally at odds with current causal and postcausal theories, which remain committed to a conception of traces as contentful: on their view, if radical enactivism is right, then the relevant theories are wrong. Partisans of the theories in question might respond to Hutto and Peeters' argument in two ways. First, they might challenge radical enactivism itself. Second, they might challenge the conditional claim that, if radical enactivism is right, then their theories are wrong. In this paper, we develop the latter response, arguing that, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, radical enactivism in fact aligns neatly with an emerging tendency in the philosophy of memory: radical enactivists and causal and postcausal theorists of memory have begun to converge, for distinct but compatible reasons, on a contentless conception of memory traces. * Thanks for feedback to audiences at the Naturally Evolving Minds conference at the University of Wollongong in February 2018 and the Memory and Perception: Fishing for Connections workshop at the University of Otago in May 2018. Thanks also for written comments to Carl Craver and John Sutton and for extremely interesting reports to two referees.

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Section: Radical Enactivism Meets the Philosophy Of Memorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Simulation Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Procedural Causal Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Procedural Causal Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Memory without content? Radical enactivism and (post)causal theories of memory

Michaelian

Sant’Anna

2019

Synthese

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“…Some criticisms only target its strong version CT, others also its weak version CT * . As examples one can mention the widely discussed psychological evidence against a strong content preservationism, arguments in favor of a constructivist view on episodic memory (for review: Michaelian 2016; Michaelian and Robins 2018; Roediger and DeSoto 2015), and proposals of memory traces that dispense with a classical view of representational content (Hutto and Peeters 2018;Perrin 2018). Adding to those, I would like to briefly discuss two further objections: (i) CT and CT * contradict the apparent epistemic generativity of episodic memory.…”

Section: A Tool In Taxonomymentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting the Past from Minimal Traces: Episodic Memory and its Distinction from Imagination and Preservation

Werning

2020

Rev.Phil.Psych.

103

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The paper develops an account of minimal traces devoid of representational content and exploits an analogy to a predictive processing framework of perception. As perception can be regarded as a prediction of the present on the basis of sparse sensory inputs without any representational content, episodic memory can be conceived of as a "prediction of the past" on the basis of a minimal trace, i.e., an informationally sparse, merely causal link to a previous experience. The resulting notion of episodic memory will be validated as a natural kind distinct from imagination. This trace minimalist view contrasts with two theory camps dominating the philosophical debate on memory. On one side, we face versions of the Causal Theory that hold on to the idea that episodic remembering requires a memory trace that causally links the event of remembering to the event of experience and carries over representational content from the content of experience to the content of remembering. The Causal Theory, however, fails to account for the epistemic generativity of episodic memory and is psychologically and information-theoretically implausible. On the other side, a new camp of simulationists is currently forming up. Motivated by empirical and conceptual deficits of the Causal Theory, they reject not only the necessity of preserving representational content, but also the necessity of a causal link between experience and memory. They argue that remembering is nothing but a peculiar form of imagination, peculiar only in that it has been reliably produced and is directed towards an episode of one's personal past. Albeit sharing their criticism of the Causal Theory and, in particular, rejecting its demand for an intermediary carrier of representational content, the paper argues that a causal connection to experience is still necessary to fulfill even the minimal requirements of past-directedness and reliability.

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Autonoesis and episodicity: Perspectives from philosophy of memory

Sant’Anna,

Michaelian,

Andonovski

2023

WIRES Cognitive Science

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The idea that episodic memory is distinguished from semantic memory by the fact that it involves autonoetic consciousness, initially introduced by Tulving, has been influential not only in psychology but also in philosophy, where a variety of approaches to autonoesis and to its relationship to episodicity have been developed. This article provides a critical review of the available philosophical approaches. Distinguishing among representational, metacognitive, and epistemic accounts of autonoesis, it considers these in relation to objective and subjective conceptions of episodicity and assesses them against immediacy and source criteria that any philosophical account of autonoesis should arguably aim to satisfy.This article is categorized under: Philosophy > Psychological Capacities Philosophy > Consciousness Psychology > Memory

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A Case for Procedural Causality in Episodic Recollection 1

Cited by 28 publications

References 1 publication

Memory without content? Radical enactivism and (post)causal theories of memory

Memory without content? Radical enactivism and (post)causal theories of memory

Predicting the Past from Minimal Traces: Episodic Memory and its Distinction from Imagination and Preservation

Autonoesis and episodicity: Perspectives from philosophy of memory

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