Alison Springle

Building off of a recent account of intentionality, the action-forward framework, we introduce a novel account of episodic memory and defend its plausibility as a how-possibly account of such memory. According to our account, episodic remembering consists in acts of performative retelling of the remembering subject’s initial experience of an event where such retelling activates connected capacities for perceptual recognition of the event and its constituents. When such acts are overt, the remembering subject expresses their memory, say, verbally, imagistically, through performance, etc. where doing so reactivates those recognitional capacities. When such acts are covert, the remembering subject merely activates capacities for such expressions without going on to overtly express where doing so reactivates the relevant recognitional capacities. In §2, we introduce two desiderata on accounts of episodic memory. In §3, we give an overview of the action-forward framework for intentionality. In §4, we introduce our account of episodic memory. In §5, we show how the account satisfies the desiderata. We conclude by saying how the account differs from standard accounts in the literature while retaining what we take to be their insights.

Most representationalist accounts of visual perception hold that visual representations are belief—or judgement-like sensory staates with veridicality or accuracy conditions. In a word: visually perceiving is seeing something as being some way. I propose an alternative account on which visual representations are intention-like and have “appropriateness” rather than veridicality or accuracy conditions. In a word: visually perceiving is seeing what to do. According to this view, visual representations are a species of “embodied instructive representation.” After sketching the general account of embodied instructive representations and saying a bit about why they deserve to be called representations, I’ll argue that visual perceptual representations may be fruitfully understood as embodied instructive representations.

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.

Public discourse implicitly appeals to what we call the “Traumatic Untrustworthiness Argument” (TUA). To motivate, articulate, and assess the TUA, we appeal to Hawley’s (2019) commitment account of trust and trustworthiness. On Hawley’s account, being trustworthy consists in the successful avoidance of unfulfilled commitments and involves three components: the actual avoidance of unfulfilled commitments, sincerity in one’s taking on elective commitments, and competence in fulfilling commitments one has incurred. In contexts of testimony, what’s at issue is the speaker’s competence and sincere intention to speak truthfully. The TUA targets trauma victims’ competence rather than their sincerity. According to the TUA, empirical evidence shows that trauma undermines victims’ trustworthiness with regard to speaking truthfully about their trauma by undermining their competence to remember the relevant event. We argue that what the evidence shows is rather that remembering traumatic events involves a distinct “mode of manifesting” the competence to remember particular events from the personal past. Trauma victims are competent to speak truthfully about their trauma and ought to be trusted at least with regard to the central details of the event. By suggesting otherwise, the TUA threatens an insidious form of epistemic injustice which Hawley’s account helps us locate.

According to ‘orthodox’ representationalism, perceptual states possess constitutive veridicality (truth, accuracy, or satisfaction) conditions. Typically, philosophers who deny orthodox representationalism endorse some variety of anti-representationalism. But we argue that these haven’t always been, and needn’t continue to be, the only options. Philosophers including Descartes, Malebranche and Helmholtz appear to have rejected orthodox representationalism while nonetheless endorsing perceptual representations of a fundamentally practical kind not captured by orthodox representationalism. Moreover, we argue that the perceptual science called on by contemporary philosophers to defend orthodox representationalism instead motivates a return to this older view, and we suggest that contemporary philosophers may conceptualize fundamentally practical perceptual representations as _‘de agendo’_ representations, a species of representation that has constitutive appropriateness rather than veridicality conditions.