What kind of mental state is episodic memory? I defend the claim that it is, in key part, imagining the past, where the imagining in question is experiential imagining. To remember a past episode is to experientially imagine how things were, in a way controlled by one’s past experience of that episode. Call this the Inclusion View. One form of rival account claims that, while episodic memory and experiential imagining have a conscious mental state as a common component, neither involves the other. (The most plausible common component is imagery.) Another claims that the two states do not overlap at all.

I motivate the Inclusion View in two ways. First, I note patterns of compatibilities and incompatibilities between various states. For instance, while I can visually remember something while seeing something else, and while I can visually remember while imagining in the auditory mode, I cannot visually remember while visually imagining. I argue that the Inclusion View is better positioned than its rivals to explain these patterns. Second, I discuss the phenomenology of imagining and remembering. While it is unclear exactly how the two states compare in that respect, it is clear that the two are strikingly similar in this respect, as neither is similar to perception. Again, the Inclusion View sits more naturally with these observations than its rivals.

The rest of the paper defends the account against three objections. First, imagining is subject to the will: what we imagine is under our control. Memory, however, is a guide to the past. How can a state the contents of which we control lie at the core of a state that informs us about the past? Second, imagining does not generally guide belief, whereas the default is that memory does so. How can this be, if memory is, at heart, imagining? Third, imagining does not allow for observation. Memory, in contrast, might be thought to allow us to do something like observe the past. Again, how can this be, if the Inclusion View is true?

To address these objections, I first develop an account of what else, other than experiential imagining, is involved in episodic memory. I develop some conditions on memory, concerning its origin in an earlier experience of the remembered episode, and its deriving from that earlier experience in the appropriate way. That done, the problematic features on which the objections turn can be shown to be due to those other features, and to be quite consistent with the state at memory’s core being imagining. I close by considering a liberalising move. The role of imagining in episodic memory is to provide a representation of the past, one meeting the further conditions just mentioned. Prima facie other representations might play that role. Examples include pictures, gestures and thought-like mental states. Would a state with those representations at its core count as episodic memory? The liberaliser says yes, and I am weakly inclined to agree.

Abstract will be posted soon.

Abstract will be posted soon.