Abstract
Is it possible to confuse one’s own memories with imaginings? And what about confusing one’s own imaginings with memories? The extensive literature in psychology on memory errors and confabulation suggests positive answers to these questions. However, things are more complicated, and the notion of confusion deserves a more detailed analysis. In this paper, we will do so and provide several scenarios showing that these two types of confusion can occur on two different levels: reflective (the level of self-ascription) and phenomenological (the level of what it is like to be in a certain mental state). To strengthen our case, we will relate at least some of our hypothetical scenarios to known conditions affecting memory or imagination. The genuine possibility of these conditions opens the door to a systematic exploration of the implications of the falsity of the impossibility claims for the adequate account of the relationship between memory and imagination.
References
Arcangeli, M. (2018). Supposition and the imaginative realm: A philosophical inquiry. Routledge.
Balcerak Jackson, M. (2016). On the epistemic value of imagining, supposing, and conceiving. In A. K. & P. Kung (Ed.), Knowledge through imagination (pp. 41–60). Oxford University Press.
Bortolotti, L. (2020). The epistemic innocence of irrational beliefs. Oxford University Press.
Byrne, A. (2011). Recollection, perception, imagination. Philosophical Studies, 148(1), 15–26. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9508-1
Campbell, J. (2001). Memory demonstratives. In C. H. & T. McCormack (Ed.), Time and memory (pp. 169–186). Oxford University Press.
Dokic, J. (2014). Feeling the past: A two-tiered account of episodic memory. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 5(3), 413–426. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0183-6
Dokic, J. (2022). Episodic remembering and affective metacognition. Acta Scientiarum. Human and Social Sciences, 43(3). https://doi.org/10.4025/actascihumansoc.v43i3.61022
Evans, J. S. B., & Frankish, K. E. (2009). In two minds: Dual processes and beyond. Oxford University Press.
Goldman, A. (2006). Simulating minds: The philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience of mindreading. Oxford University Press.
Hirstein, W. (2005). Brain fiction: Self-deception and the riddle of confabulation. MIT Press.
Hopkins, R. (2018). Imagining the past: On the nature of episodic memory. In F. D. & F. Macpherson (Ed.), Perceptual imagination and perceptual memory (pp. 47–70). Oxford University Press.
Klein, S. B., & Nichols, S. (2012). Memory and the sense of personal identity. Mind, 121(483), 677–702. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzs080
Loftus, E. F. (2005). Planting misinformation in the human mind: A 30-year investigation of the malleability of memory. Learning & Memory, 12(4), 361–366. https://doi.org/10.1101/lm.94705
Maar, M. (2017). The two lolitas. Verso Books.
Martin, C. B., & Deutscher, M. (1966). Remembering. Philosophical Review, 75, 161–196. https://doi.org/10.2307/2183082
Mazzoni, G., Clark, A., & Nash, R. A. (2014). Disowned recollections: Denying true experiences undermines belief in occurrence but not judgments of remembering. Acta Psychologica, 145, 139–146. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2013.11.007
Mazzoni, G., Scoboria, A., & Harvey, L. (2010). Nonbelieved memories. Psychological Science, 21(9), 1334–1340. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610379865
McCarroll, C. J., & Sant’Anna, A. (2023). Cryptomnesia: A three-factor account. Synthese, 201(1), 23. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-04002-4
Michaelian, K. (2016). Mental time travel: Episodic memory and our knowledge of the personal past. MIT Press.
Michaelian, K., Perrin, D., & Sant’Anna, A. (2020). Continuities and discontinuities between imagination and memory: The view from philosophy. In A. Abraham (Ed.), The cambridge handbook of the imagination (pp. 293–310). Cambridge University Press.
Perrin, D., & Michaelian, K. (2017). Memory as mental time travel. In S. Bernecker & K. Michaelian (Eds.), The routledge handbook of philosophy of memory (pp. 228–239). Routledge.
Ricoeur, P. (2004). Memory, history, forgetting. (K. Blamey & D. Pellauer, Trans.). The University of Chicago Press.
Robins, S. K. (2016). Misremembering. Philosophical Psychology, 29(3), 432–447. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2015.1113245
Robins, S. K. (2020). Defending discontinuism, naturally. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 11(2), 469–486. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-020-00462-0
Sartre, J.-P. (2005). L’imaginaire (J. M. Webber, Trans.). Routledge.
Schacter, D. L., & Addis, D. R. (2007). The cognitive neuroscience of constructive memory: Remembering the past and imagining the future. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 362(1481), 773–786. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2007.2087
Sierra, M. (2009). Depersonalization: A new look at a neglected syndrome. Cambridge University Press.
Simons, J. S., Garrison, J. R., & Johnson, M. K. (2017). Brain mechanisms of reality monitoring. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21(6), 462–473. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2017.03.012
Tulving, E. (2001). Episodic memory and common sense: How far apart? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 356(1413), 1505–1515. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2001.0937
Zeman, A. (2020). Aphantasia. In A. Abraham (Ed.), The cambridge handbook of the imagination (pp. 692–710). Cambridge University Press.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright (c) 2024 Margherita Arcangeli, Jérôme Dokic