Generalised remembering

Recollections of our personal past are often impressionistic, not so much for lack of detail but for a certain generality of subject matter. If you’ve made a journey many times, you may ‘relive’ it through memory without reliving any specific occasion. I offer an account of this phenomenon—often labelled ‘general event memory’—that treats it as fundamentally semantic. It is, at least across many instances, the construction of an event representation that is temporally imprecise in virtue of referential indeterminacy. I present an account of indeterminacy for memory, one that allows us to explain generalised remembering while preserving its particularity, its past-directedness, and the possibility of unmediated recollective awareness. It also affords a formal account of accuracy conditions. Finally, it captures psychological continuities between generalised and event-specific recollection. I motivate the account in part by showing that even systems-oriented approaches (namely, those positing an episodic system specialised in encoding event-specific details) cannot shelve generalised remembering as an afterthought. It is one face of the very phenomenon—remembering—we have long tried to explain.