Memory and Causation

The emergence of the philosophy of memory as a distinct area of study coincided with a renewed focus on causation. In this chapter, I provide an overview of the debates about the relationship between episodic memory and causation. In the first part, I introduce the classical causal theory of memory and examine three anti-causalist arguments, devoting particular attention to simulationism. In the second part, I examine a family of recent causalist views, highlighting their methodological basis in philosophical naturalism. On a naturalist construal of the causalist thesis, episodic memory is a natural kind that constitutively involves the formation, storage, and retrieval of memory traces. The new causalists see the thesis as foundational to the science of episodic memory, thereby providing a basis for a principled response to simulationism.