Mnemic scenarios as pictures

Abstract

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.