Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Juan F. Álvarez (Université Grenoble Alpes) on his recent paper " Remembering and relearning: against exclusionism " ( Philosophical Studies , 2024). Juan F. Álvarez Distinguishing remembering from other related cognitive processes, such as imagining and relearning, occupies a central place in the philosophy of memory. While the remembering-imagining distinction is a topic of heated debate, philosophers tend to agree that no instance of relearning qualifies as a case of remembering. In this paper, I argue that this view, which I call “exclusionism”, requires closer examination because it does not follow from leading naturalistic theories of remembering. The theories in question are simulationism ( Michaelian 2016 ), distributed causalism ( Sutton and O’Brien 2023 ), and trace minimalism ( Werning 2020 ).  Relearning occurs when a subject acquires information about an event through experience, forgets about the event, reacquires information about the sa...

Today's post is by Radu Bumbăcea on his recently published paper " Imagining Emotions " ( Erkenntnis ). Radu Bumbăcea We all want to understand other people, and a central part of this understanding involves imagining their emotions ‘from the inside’. A key idea in the philosophy of emotions is that an emotion modifies the emoter’s experience of its object, that the emotion  ‘colours’   the world : someone who is afraid of a dog experiences that dog as fearsome. In imagining an emotion E, therefore, the imaginer is supposed to gain some access into how the world is coloured by emotion E without having E oneself. So far, the main approach to imagining emotions has been the simulationist one. According to such an approach, imagining an emotion is essentially having that emotion offline. In further metaphorical terms, we can say that imagining an emotion would involve building in one’s mind a copy of that emotion that is somehow marked as not-the-real-thing.  This idea is o...