Simulationism and Memory Traces

In the philosophy of memory there is a tension between a preservationist and a constructivist view of memory reflected in the debate between causalism and simulationism. Causalism is not only committed to the claim that there must be an appropriate causal connection between the remembered event and the content represented at retrieval but also that such connection is possible because of a content-preserving memory trace. Simulationism, by contrast, rejects the need for an appropriate causal condition and, thereby, makes the appeal to memory traces unnecessary. In this paper I argue that while the are strong conceptual arguments and empirical evidence to support a constructivist view of memory, the empirical evidence also suggest that the initial formulation of simulationism needs to be revised. In particular, I argue, first, that simulationism’s commitment to a single cognitive system for mental time travel is likely wrong, and second, that simulationism cannot get rid of memory traces altogether, as they are still explanatorily indispensable when it comes to explaining a large number of memory-related phenomena. At the end, I end up suggesting a way of thinking about memory traces that, I think, is compatible with simulationism and a constructivist view of memory. If the view I put forth is on the right track, then an updated version of simulationism can help to dispel the dichotomy between causalism and simulationism as a false one

Attitudes: A Memory Systems Perspective

This dissertation develops and defends the memory systems pluralist (MSP) theory of attitudes. This holds that there are a relatively large number of species of attitudes (hence &lsquo;pluralism&rsquo;), each of which is subserved by a distinct causal mechanism best conceived of as a memory system (hence &lsquo;memory systems&rsquo;). On the MSP theory, attitudes are mental states that cause a special class of behaviors known as evaluative responses. Though this perspective is compatible with memory systems models on which all attitudes are of the same representational format, I will argue that data from both cognitive neuroscience of memory and social cognition research best supports a version of MSP according to which some types of attitude are associations, and some types of attitude are propositional structures. For these reasons, I suspect that the most successful MSP models will be those that license pluralism both in regard to attitudes qua class of psychological entities and in regard to their representational format. Moreover, I will tentatively conclude, contra social psychological orthodoxy, that the best available evidence does not warrant the view that implicit attitudes are categorically distinct from explicit attitudes. The central argument for this version of MSP theory takes the form of an inference to best explanation. In particular, I argue that the MSP theory has the best prospects for resolving two sets of anomalies that have long plagued social psychological theorizing on attitudes. One set of anomalies, which I call the core anomalies, suggests that measures of implicit attitudes have low predictive validity, weakly correlate with other measures of (putatively) the same phenomenon, and suffer from unacceptably low levels of test-retest reliability. The other set of anomalies, which I call the format anomalies, suggest that implicit attitudes paradoxically possess the defining features characteristic of both associations and propositionally structured representations.</p