In Defense of the Essentially Epistemic Nature of Episodic Memory

Abstract According to the traditional approach in philosophy of memory, when all goes well, our episodic memories of particular events in our personal past constitute firsthand knowledge of the who , what , where , and what-was-it-like of those events. That is, according to the traditional approach, episodic memory is at bottom a capacity for a specific kind of knowledge . However, it’s now becoming increasingly common to treat the core epistemic dimension of episodic memories as present but non-essential, that is, as secondary to whatever episodic memory exists to do. What are the grounds for this “non-epistemic turn” in the philosophy of memory? We identify three based on the empirical study of memory: “the argument from construction” appeals to evidence that the contents of episodic memory are constructed rather than stored; “the argument from error” appeals to evidence that episodic memory is highly error-prone; and, finally, “the argument from animals” appeals to evidence that some nonhuman animals can episodically remember. We argue that all three fail.