Event Timeslots (1)

Monday
4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
When you remember your first day at university, are you learning anything new, or just retrieving something you already knew? The traditional answer is that memory preserves and transmits something you learned through another source. Memory, on this "preservationist" view, is like a storehouse: whatever justification or knowledge you take out, you must first have deposited through perception or reasoning. Recent work in cognitive science has put the preservationist view under pressure. A growing number of cognitive scientists hold that memory is a form of episodic simulation, alongside imagination. Episodic simulations are constructive processes by which humans assemble representations of events, drawing on various informational resources. Since episodic simulation combines information in somewhat creative ways, some philosophers have argued that memory, as a form of past-oriented episodic simulation, can generate new justification and knowledge of the past. The same reasoning has been extended to imagination: if imagining is itself a form of constructive simulation, it too may be a source of knowledge. If these "generationist" views are right, treating episodic simulation as a storehouse that only preserves what we already knew is a misstep in the philosophical and scientific study of the mind. But is it? This course addresses recent developments in this preservationist-generationist debates in the epistemology of memory and the epistemology of imagination, by applying insights from the sciences of episodic simulation. We will investigate what it would even mean for a psychological capacity to generate knowledge rather than preserve it, whether memory can do this, whether imagination can, and what difference the constructive picture from cognitive science makes to any of these questions. Along the way we will look at specific cases that pull hard in one direction or the other, such as memories of early childhood and imaginings of experiences that other people had. No prior acquaintance with the literature is assumed. The relevant philosophical debates and the empirical work they draw on will be introduced as we go. By the end of the course you should be able to state the opposing positions clearly, weigh the arguments and the evidence on each side, and defend a view of your own. Language of the course: English. Readings will be posted before the course begins. Office hours: by appointment (please send me an email). Evaluation: students are required to give an in-class presentation of one of the readings. Depending on the credit requirements of their degree program, students will also write a short essay.