Just simulating?

Much recent work in philosophy of memory discusses the question whether episodic remembering is continuous with imagining. This paper contributes to the debate between continuists and discontinuists by considering a previously neglected source of evidence \(\underline {for}\) continuism: the linguistic properties of overt memory and imagination reports (e.g. sentences of the form \(\it 'x\) remembers/imagines \(\it p'\)). I argue that the distribution and truth-conditional contribution of episodic uses of the English verb \(\it remember\) is surprisingly similar to that of the verb \(\it imagine\) – even when compared to the distribution of other experiential attitude verbs like \(\textit {see, hallucinate}\), or \(\it dream\). This holds despite the presence of some remarkable truth-conditional differences between \(\it remember\) and \(\it imagine\). I show how these differences can be explained by a continuist account of remembering, on which remembering is past-directed, referential, and accurate experiential imagining.