How pictorial are mnemic scenarios?

Abstract In “Mnemic Scenarios as Pictures”, Kristina Liefke has offered a substantive, powerful and insightful account of episodic memory based on a version of picture semantics. Despite its ingenuity and sophistication, I am going to suggest that the scope of this account is much more limited than the author has suggested. More specifically, I will develop the following three interrelated points: (1) even if we consider visual-based episodic memory only, it is seldom the case that such experiences are pictorial in the relevant sense; (2) it is even more doubtful that non-visual-based episodic memory is pictorial as the author understands it and (3) most (if not all) cases of episodic memory are multisensory or multimodal. The upshot is that even if Liefke’s pictorial appropriation is by and large cogent for certain cases, the scope of such an account is much more limited than it might appear to be.