From Perception to Memory: Naïve Realism and the Nature of Episodic Memory

Memories of events in our personal past, or simply episodic memories, play a central role in our mental lives, making them an important subject of philosophical research. Despite being the focus of much recent work in the philosophy of memory, recent attempts to account for episodic memory have focused on the processes or mechanisms responsible for it. This has pushed considerations about the nature of episodic memory understood as a mental state to the background. Against this backdrop, this project aims to develop a novel approach to the nature of episodic memory, called ‘naïve realism’, by drawing inspiration from naïve realist views about the nature of perceptual experiences. Naïve realism about memory says that, understood as a mental state, episodic memory is fundamentally a relation to past events. As such, it has several implications for debates concerning the nature of the conscious experience of remembering, the nature of past events and their relation to memory, and the relationship between memory and imagination. By articulating naïve realism and exploring the implications that its adoption has for current debates in the philosophy of memory, the project thus expects to advance our understanding of episodic memory in crucial ways and promote future philosophical research on the subject.