Kristina Liefke

Much work in philosophy of memory (at least implicitly) assumes the ‘Dogma of Extensionality’ (DoE). According to DoE, all episodic memory contents are actual [= about real-world individuals] and particular [= about certain individuals]. Some recent work has argued that memories of multiple and non-veridical experiences (e.g. my memory of my daily bike ride to school; my memory of my dream last night) should also be treated as episodic memories. The present paper shows that the inclusion of these cases confronts philosophical theories of memory with serious challenges. Specifically, while causal theories of memory fail to account for memories with non-actual contents (like memories from dreams), the simulation theory of memory fails to account for some memories with non-particular contents. The paper suggests a way out of this impasse that uses the various representational properties of concept neurons (e.g. previous acquaintance, counterfactuality, associativity) and their possible role in episodic construction.

This paper explores the striking conceptual parallel between contemporary accounts of episodic memory (see e.g., Addis, De Brigard, Michaelian) and picture semantics (Abusch, Greenberg, Maier). It argues that picture semantics captures many familiar distinctions from philosophy of memory, while providing some additional—highly useful—tools and concepts (e.g., a mechanism for representation-to-content conversion and a general notion of situation that is independent of a given perspective). The paper uses these tools to (re-)structure and advance debate in contemporary philosophy of memory. Specifically, it (i) shows how these tools can be employed to defend the propositional nature of episodic memory contents, (ii) gives a sophisticated account of non-actual and non-particular episodic memory objects, and (iii) provides a new argument for pluralism about accuracy concepts and standards. Along the way, it defends a liberal version of the pictorial view of mnemic imagery, reveals faithfulness about accuracy as a (very) weak variant of radical authenticism, and explains different intuitions about the possibility of observer-perspective memories from dreams. The paper closes by suggesting, inversely, the import of these applications for picture semantics.

Episodic memories are widely regarded as factive: Linguistic reports of a memory make the presupposition that the memory refers to an actually existent object and that the properties remembered of the object actually apply to it. Focusing on memories from perceptions—where factivity can indeed be assumed—the two main historical strands in the philosophy of memory, intentionalism and relationalism, disagree, amongst others, over (i) whether memory reports should be analyzed as de re or de dicto, (ii) to what type of entity agents are related when they episodically remember, and (iii) how the time gap between experience and remembering is bridged. However, what about memories from dreams or hallucinations, where factivity is violated? Here, we can still distinguish remembering from misremembering and confabulation. We show that the intentionalist as well as the relationalist faces insurmountable problems in those cases. We develop a new account according to which reference in episodic memory is parasitic on the reference relation in the primary experience—the host attitude. Accordingly, we replace de re and de dicto analyses of memory reports with a de hospite analysis. Referential parasitism overcomes the problems of intentionalism and relationalism. We argue that referential parasitism obviates the need to transmit representational content from experience to remembering, as postulated by the Causal Theory of Memory. Minimal traces without representational content suffice. Trace minimalism (Werning 2020) paired with referential parasitism provides a uniform, non-disjunctivist explanation of remembering and misremembering from veridical and non-veridical experiences.

The paper argues for a non-disjunctivist account of reference in episodic memory. Our account provides a uniform theory of reference for episodic memories that root in veridical and non-veridical experiences. It is independent from the particular mechanisms that subserve the respective source experiences. We reject both relationalist and intentionalist analyses of memory and build our approach on Werning and Liefke’s theory of referential parasitism and Werning’s theory of trace minimalism. The motivation for our non-disjunctivist account is the assumption that perceptual and non-perceptual memories with an episodic character share a uniform underlying causal mechanism and thus make up one and the same natural kind.

It is our pleasure to present the Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 28– the first-ever SuB to be held by the growing group of semanticists at Ruhr University Bochum (RUB), Germany. SuB28 took place at RUB’s Convention Center from September 5-9, 2023. The conference was jointly organized by the RUB Institute for Linguistics, the Linguistic Data Science Lab, the Institute for German Language and Literature, and the Departments of Philosophy I and II. The conference featured a three-day main session (Sept. 6-8) and a one-day special session on ‘The Semantics and Pragmatics of Co-Speech Communication’ (Sept. 5, organized by Tatjana Scheffler). The main session comprised 45 contributed talks and two poster sessions (plus lightning talks, with 14 posters each) as well as three invited talks (by Dorothy Ahn, Hazel Pearson, and Graham Priest). The special session hosted seven contributed talks plus one invited talk (by Cor-nelia Ebert). As is common for SuB, the Proceedings include contributions from the invited, contributed, and poster sessions alongside contributions to the workshop.

This paper explores the striking conceptual parallel between contemporary accounts of episodic memory (see e.g. Addis, De Brigard, Michaelian) and picture semantics (Greenberg, Abusch, Maier). It argues that picture semantics captures many familiar distinctions from philosophy of memory, while providing some additional – highly useful – tools and concepts (e.g. a mechanism for representation-to-content conversion and a general notion of situation that is independent of a given perspective). The paper uses these tools to (re-)structure and advance debate in contemporary philosophy of memory. Specifically, it (i) shows how these tools can be employed to defend the propositional nature of episodic memory contents, (ii) gives a sophisticated account of non-actual and non-particular episodic memory objects, and (iii) provides a new argument for pluralism about accuracy concepts and standards. Along the way, it defends a liberal version of the pictorial view of mnemic imagery, reveals faithfulness about accuracy as a (very) weak variant of radical authenticism, and explains different intuitions about the possibility of observer-perspective memories from dreams. The paper closes by suggesting, inversely, the import of these applications for picture semantics.

Much work in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience has argued for continuism about remembering and imagining (see, e.g., Addis J R Soc N Z 48(2–3):64–88, 2018). This view claims that episodic remembering is just a form of imagining, such that memory does not have a privileged status over other forms of episodic simulation (esp. imagination). Large parts of contemporary philosophy of memory support continuism. This even holds for work in semantics and the philosophy of language, which has pointed out substantial similarities in the distribution of the verbs remember and imagine. Our paper argues against the continuist claim, by focusing on a previously neglected source of evidence for discontinuism: the semantics of episodic memory and imagination reports. We argue that, in contrast to imagination reports, episodic memory reports are essentially diachronic, in the sense that their truth requires a foregoing reference-fixing experience. In this respect, they differ from reports of experiential imagination, which is paradigmatically synchronic. To defend our claim about this difference in diachronicity, we study the truth-conditions of episodic memory and imagination reports. We develop a semantics for episodic uses of remember and imagine that captures this difference.

Much recent work in philosophy of memory discusses the question whether episodic remembering is continuous with imagining. This paper contributes to the debate between continuists and discontinuists by considering a previously neglected source of evidence for continuism: the linguistic properties of overt memory and imagination reports (e.g. sentences of the form 'x remembers/imagines p'). I argue that the distribution and truth-conditional contribution of episodic uses of the English verb 'remember' is surprisingly similar to that of the verb 'imagine' – even when compared to the distribution of other experiential attitude verbs like 'see', 'hallucinate', or 'dream'. This holds despite the presence of some remarkable truth-conditional differences between 'remember' and 'imagine'. I show how these differences can be explained by a continuist account of remembering on which remembering is past-directed, referential, and accurate experiential imagining.

Propositionalism is the view that all intensional constructions (including nominal and clausal attitude reports) can be interpreted as relations to truth-evaluable propositional content. While propositionalism has long been silently assumed in semantics and the philosophy of language, it has only recently entered center stage in linguistic research. This article surveys the properties of intensional constructions, which require the introduction of fine-grained semantic values (intensions). It contrasts two ways of obtaining such values: through the introduction of either Russellian propositions or Frege-Church-style senses. The article identifies propositionalism with a specific variant of the Russellian strategy, reviews key arguments for propositionalism, and compares familiar varieties of propositionalism on the basis of instructive examples. It closes by discussing various challenges for propositionalism and suggesting a generalization of propositionalism that meets some of these challenges. Because of the association of propositions with semantic information, the article also addresses the more general question of whether all information content (including mental and pictorial content) is propositional.

Montague (1970) interprets a small fragment of English through the use of two basic types of objects: individuals and propositions. My dissertation develops an alternative semantics that only uses one basic type (hence, *single-type semantics*). Such a semantics has been conjectured by Partee (2006) as a ‘minimality test’ for the Montagovian type system, which captures the lowest ontological requirements on any successful semantics for Montague’s fragment. The development of this semantics answers a number of important open questions about the salience of the Montagovian type system, the robustness of semantic theories w.r.t. their basic-type choice, and the classification of these theories according to their objects’ informational strength.

We outline a novel theory of natural language meaning, Rich Situated Semantics [RSS], on which the content of sentential utterances is semantically rich and informationally situated. In virtue of its situatedness, an utterance’s rich situated content varies with the informational situation of the cognitive agent interpreting the utterance. In virtue of its richness, this content contains information beyond the utterance’s lexically encoded information. The agent-dependence of rich situated content solves a number of problems in semantics and the philosophy of language (cf. [14, 20, 25]). In particular, since RSS varies the granularity of utterance contents with the interpreting agent’s informational situation, it solves the problem of finding suitably fine- or coarse-grained objects for the content of propositional attitudes. In virtue of this variation, a layman will reason with more propositions than an expert.

Attitudinal propositionalism is the view that all mental attitude content is truth-evaluable. While attitudinal propositionalism is still silently assumed in large parts of analytic philosophy, recent work on objectual attitudes (i.e. attitudes like ‘fearing Moriarty’ and ‘imagining a unicorn’ that are reported through intensional transitive verbs with a direct object) has put attitudinal propositionalism under explanatory pressure. This paper defends propositionalism for a special subclass of objectual attitudes, viz. experiential attitudes. The latter are attitudes like seeing, remembering, and imagining whose grammatical objects intuitively denote (events or) scenes. I provide a propositional analysis of experiential attitudes that preserves the merits of propositionalism. This analysis uses the possibility of representing the target-scenes of experiential attitudes by the intersection of all propositions that are true in these scenes. I show that this analysis makes available the usual (Russellian) account of intensionality and the common (Boolean) logic for entailments.

This comment discusses Emar Maier’s argument against the characterization of unreliable filmic narration as (first-)personal narration. My comment focuses on two assumptions of Maier’s argument, viz. that the narrating character’s mental states can be described independently of other mental states/experiences and that personal filmic narration can only proceed from a de se perspective (as captured by first-person shots). I contend that the majority of movies with unreliable narration represents an experientially parasitic mental state (typically, the character’s remembering – or ‘reliving’ – a defining personally experienced event). Since these states are well-known to involve perspective-shifting and various kinds of semantic enrichment, unreliable filmic representation is perfectly compatible with the presence of a personal narrator.

One can remember events and one can remember facts: to remember an event (e.g. the barista's pouring my coffee this morning), one needs to have personally witnessed this event. To remember a fact (e.g. that the barista was trained in Italy), it suffices to have learned this fact from some other source. The distinction between event-directed (i.e. experiential) and fact-directed (or propositional) attitudes is an established distinction in philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science that is also exemplified by other attitudes (incl. seeing, imagining, and dreaming). Until recently, semantics and the philosophy of language have assumed that experiential attitudes can be more or less straightforwardly reduced to propositional attitudes. However, new work has identified some key properties of experiential attitudes that cast doubt on this reducibility. The present paper discusses the most notable of these properties, focusing on experiential attitude reports. It links these properties to recent developments in formal and philosophical semantics in an effort to foster the development of a rigorous, empirically adequate account of experiential attitudes.

Intertheoretic relations are an important topic in the philosophy of science. However, since their classical discussion by Ernest Nagel, such relations have mostly been restricted to relations between pairs of theories in the natural sciences. In this paper, we present a model of a new type of intertheoretic relation, called 'Montague Reduction', which is assumed in Montague's framework for the analysis and interpretation of natural language syntax. To motivate the adoption of our new model, we show that this model extends the scope of application of the Nagelian (or related) models, and that it shares the epistemological advantages of the Nagelian model. The latter is achieved in a Bayesian framework.

Intertheoretic relations are an important topic in the philosophy of science. However, since their classical discussion by Ernest Nagel, such relations have mostly been restricted to relations between pairs of theories in the natural sciences. This paper presents a case study of a new type of intertheoretic relation that is inspired by Montague’s analysis of the linguistic syntax-semantics relation. The paper develops a simple model of this relation. To motivate the adoption of our new model, we show that this model extends the scope of application of the Nagelian models and that it shares the epistemological advantages of the Nagelian model. The latter is achieved in a Bayesian framework.