Imagining the Past

What kind of mental state is episodic memory? This chapter defends the claim that it is, in key part, imagining the past, where the imagining in question is experiential imagining. To remember a past episode is to experientially imagine how things were, in a way controlled by one’s past experience of that episode. This view is motivated by appeal both to patterns of compatibilities and incompatibilities between various states, and to phenomenology. The bulk of the chapter defends the account against four objections. Imagining and remembering seem to differ in whether they are active or passive, in the forms of singular content they involve, in their relations to observation, and in their relations to belief. The chapter argues that these differences can be accommodated, and some even explained, once we flesh out what else is involved in episodic memory, in addition to imagining the past.