Theories of remembering: causalism, simulationism, and functionalism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5902/2179378640445Keywords:
Remembering, Memory, Causalism, Simulationism, FunctionalismAbstract
What is it to remember? When can we say that a subject remembers an event from the past? These are two central questions in philosophy of memory, an area that has witnessed a rapid expansion in the past few years. For almost fifty years, the causal theory of memory, initially proposed by Martin and Deutscher (1966), dominated the attempts to answer the two initial questions. More recently, however, the causal theory has been widely criticized, which has motivated philosophers to develop two new theories of the nature of remembering: the simulation theory and the functionalist theory. In this paper, we discuss these three theories in more detail with the goal of clarifying their commitments, as well as their motivations and problems.
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