Jonida Kodra

Episodic memories, like perceptions, possess a distinctive justificatory force: subjects naturally take their contents to be or to have been the case. This epistemic affinity between memory and perception, and their shared contrast with imagination, has received insufficient attention in the philosophy of memory. Existing accounts emphasize phenomenological components such as pastness, self, familiarity, and singularity, but none of these fully explains the justificatory force characteristic of memory. Drawing on the phenomenological conception of experiential justification, according to which justificatory force is grounded in phenomenal character, I argue in this paper that the missing explanatory component is the sense of reality, understood as the experience of the represented object or event as independent of one’s representation of it. Building on work on perceptual objectivity, I propose that the sense of reality consists in two constitutive experiences, constancy and coming-into-view, and that episodic memory exhibits both. I further argue that the sense of reality involves two distinguishable dimensions: an existence aspect and an identity aspect, covering both whether and, if so, how objects and events are experienced as mind-independent. This distinction also sheds light on imagination. While imagination can involve partial degrees of the sense of reality, it is fundamentally characterized by a contrasting sense of creativity: the subject’s freedom to determine and modify the imagined content. The sense of reality thus explains both the justificatory force shared by memory and perception and their contrast with imagination.

Since Clark and Chalmers advanced “The Extended Mind” in 1998, a persistent dispute evolved on how our tool interactions shape the kind of cognition we have. Extended cognition generally views us as cognitively augmented and enhanced by our tool practices, which shall render our cognitive constitution extended to those tools. Bounded and embedded cognition have primarily criticized this metaphysical claim. However, another contender may arise from considering how we use more intelligent tools. We arguably employ advanced technologies that capture, mimic, and then replace our cognitive skills, which we then no longer need to exercise ourselves. This precedes any metaphysical debate, since such practices might stand in a more fundamental conflict with extended cognition. The counter-hypothesis of extracted cognition states that we primarily tend to use tools that initially attain and eventually displace our cognitive responsibilities and involvements. This paper evaluates extended and extracted cognition by comparing theoretical, practical, and ethical arguments respectively. If extracted cognition describes most convincingly how such tool interactions shape our kind of cognition, then we may also endorse “The Extracted Mind”.