The Sensory Dimension of Episodic Recollection

Abstract Episodic recollection often involves some kind of awareness of the sensory features or properties of what is remembered. Episodically recollecting that sunset last summer on the Greek island of Ios, involves some kind of awareness of how it looked, that is its deep blood-red colour. This is suggestive that for those episodic recollections that possess this sensory phenomenology, it is not a mere accompaniment, that is something those types of experiences could do without and maintain their identity as precisely those types of experiences. Rather their sensory phenomenology is constitutive of there being the type of experiences they are. If such thoughts are along the right lines, then getting clearer about the character of the sensory phenomenology of episodic recollection is essential to better understanding these types of memory experiences. We can frame the pertinent question as follows: in what does the sensory dimension of episodic recollection consist. My goal here is to detail the problems with the existing imagistic-representationalist and Relationalist accounts of the sensory dimension of episodic recollection and develop a positive alternative, the Sensory Absence View. The guiding idea of my positive proposal will be that episodic recollection involves a positive phenomenology of sensory absence, whereby we represent, from our current temporal perspective, the lack or absence of a sensory perception of the relevant object and its properties, such that what is remembered is absent-qua-past, as I will put it.