Rebecca Copenhaver

Simulationism is a leading philosophical theory of remembering characterized by three ideas: continuism (remembering and imagining are constituted by one and the same natural kind), anticausalism (one may remember an event without an appropriate causal connection to it), and mnemic reliabilism (successful remembering requires process reliability). At the heart of this radical trio of claims is identity-of-process: a single simulative process just is the psychological basis of both remembering and imagining. Though simulationism has faced much criticism, this has seldom engaged with the theory on its own methodological terms. In this paper, we argue that commitment to identity-of-process generates a dilemma. If simulationists take identity-of-process seriously, they eliminate remembering as a natural kind, undermining the very explanatory ambitions of a naturalistic theory of remembering, and lose their grip on mnemic success and error. If they abandon identity-of-process, however, simulationism becomes a discontinuist view, one compatible with causalism, thus jeopardizing its status as a distinct or radical proposal. We conclude by examining strategies for escaping the dilemma and reflect on its implications for broader debates concerning (dis)continuism and the individuation of mental kinds, (anti)causalism, and naturalistic methodology in philosophy of memory.

This chapter provides an account of the basic emotions and their expression. Emotions are experiences that have the function of indicating how we are faring in our environment. Emotions are also objects of experience: our perceptual systems are sensitive to the expression of emotion in our environment by features that have the function of indicating emotions. Thus, we come to have to knowledge of emotions by perceptually representing properties that function to indicate them. The chapter applies this account to expression in art. What does it mean to say that an artwork expresses sadness? Is perceiving joy in an artwork the same kind of experience as perceiving joy in a friend’s face? How may artworks express emotions without having emotions? The chapter offers a representationalist account of the basic emotions on which exteroceptive and interoceptive systems combine to constitute a system whose states—emotions—indicate how we are faring. Building on the work of Dominic Lopes (2005) and Mitchell Green (2007), the chapter offers a teleosemantic account of emotional expression in art that is impersonal and continuous with a representationalist account of the basic emotions. Features in the environment express emotions even in conditions in which there is no person to whom the emotion is attributable. We experience emotions in two ways: we may have emotions, and we experience emotions as represented properties of the environment. In both cases, experiencing emotions is a matter of experiencing how things are in the world and thus provides perceptual knowledge.