Christoph Hoerl
Affiliation: University of Warwick
Category: Philosophy
Keywords: Episodic memory, Spatial cognition, Temporal cognition, Mental time travel, Perceptual experience
Date: Wednesday 3rd of September
Time: 17:00
Location: Room 154 (154)
View the full session: Temporal Consciousness
In both philosophy and psychology, there has been a surge of renewed interest in episodic memory, especially in the context of a re-conceptualization of episodic memory as but one manifestation of a broader capacity for ‘mental time travel’ (see, e.g., De Brigard & Gessell, 2016; Michaelian, 2016; Schacter, Addis, & Buckner, 2007; Suddendorf & Corballis, 1997). One recent development in this context (see, e.g., Arzy & Dafni-Merom, 2020; Gauthier & van Wassenhove, 2016) has been work exploring the extent to which mental time-travel, including episodic memory, can be modelled as a form of perspective-taking in time structurally similar, at least in certain respects, to capacities for perspective-taking in space, which have already been quite extensively studied (see below). Amongst other things, authors have argued that this might shed light on the central role the hippocampus seems to play in spatial as well as temporal cognition.
In my talk, I consider how exactly talk about one’s mentally occupying an alternative perspective on space and an alternative perspective on time, respectively, might be understood, and how this might bear in particular on discussions about the nature of episodic memory. I proceed in three main steps:
(1) I first discuss some of the ways in which perspective-taking in space has been explored. In fact, this has been done in the context of two somewhat different literatures, using two different sets of terminology (as discussed, e.g., by Surtees, Apperly, & Samson, 2013): When researchers have used the term ‘spatial perspective-taking’, it has typically been in the context of investigating the development and nature of aspects of spatial cognition (Newcombe, 1989; Newcombe & Huttenlocher, 2000). However, in parallel to this there is also a literature on ‘visual perspective-taking’, paradigmatic cases of which involve considering the perspective of a person in another spatial location, but with the latter being construed in this literature as an exercise of a theory of mind (Flavell, Everett, Croft, & Flavell, 1981).
(2) I distil from these two literatures a more general distinction between ‘indexical perspective-taking’ and ‘experiential perspective-taking’. As the names indicate, the former is concerned with considering deictic relations that obtain from another vantage point, whereas the latter is concerned with considering the difference occupying another vantage point would make to one’s experience. Thus understood, the distinction can also be applied to the idea of perspective-taking in other domains – in particular that of time. However, I show that doing so, at the same time, also reveals several important structural differences between space and time: perhaps most fundamentally as regards the ways in which space and time figure in experience itself. In particular, one’s perspective on space, including the deictic relations in which one stands to other parts of space, are manifest to one within perceptual experience in a way that has no parallel in the case of time. This, in turn, also has some important implications when it comes to the question as to what is involved in perspective-taking in space and time, respectively.
(3) Having sketched some of the relevant differences between perspective-taking in space and time, respectively, I turn to the literature on episodic memory, and suggest that they can help shed light on two notable features of recent contributions to that literature: The first is a preoccupation with cases of spontaneous or involuntary episodic recollection, which are treated as something like a default case, thus ruling out accounts on which episodic recollection is constitutively a type of activity (see, e.g., Mahr, 2020; Perrin & Sant’Anna, 2022); the second is a preoccupation with the epistemological question as to how the remembering subject can tell remembering apart from imagining, where this is moreover being seen as the question at stake in giving an account of the phenomenology of episodic memory (see, e.g.,Teroni, 2017). Both of these preoccupations, I will argue, do reflect some fundamental ways in which perspective-taking in time is different from perspective-taking in space, but end up drawing unwarranted conclusions from them.
The overall aim of my talk is to lay the ground for an account of episodic recollection as a type of perspective-taking in time, which can provide an alternative to currently dominant approaches to episodic memory, but which preserves some of the intuitions that can be seen to inform them, such as the idea that episodic recollection involves an element of ‘simulation’ or ‘scene construction’ as well as an element of ‘mental time travel’.
(See submitted version for references)