What Memory Teaches: Experiential Knowledge, Imagination, and Accuracy in Remembering

Abstract This paper clarifies and then indicates a conflict between, on the one hand, influential and longstanding ideas in the epistemology of imagination and, on the other, an emerging view of the accuracy conditions of remembering and the content of episodic memory—namely, alethism . Although we explore several ways to resolve the conflict, we take the most plausible to be to reject alethism. Drawing on assumptions made on both sides of debates about the epistemic limits of imagination, the paper constitutes an extended argument in favour of (‘strong’) authenticism about the accuracy conditions of remembering. Authenticists can maintain that experience is necessary for certain forms of imagining and also that episodic memory is what supports and explains this fact by virtue of providing a privileged store of experiential knowledge.