Autonoesis and belief in a personal past: An evolutionary theory of episodic memory indices. Klein, S. B. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 5(3):427–447, 2014.
Autonoesis and belief in a personal past: An evolutionary theory of episodic memory indices [link]Paper  doi  abstract   bibtex   
In this paper I discuss philosophical and psychological treatments of the question "how do we decide that an occurrent mental state is a memory and not, say a thought or imagination?" This issue has proven notoriously difficult to resolve, with most proposed indices, criteria and heuristics failing to achieve consensus. Part of the difficulty, I argue, is that the indices and analytic solutions thus far offered seldom have been situated within a well-specified theory of memory function. As I hope to show, when such an approach is adopted, not only does a new, functionally-grounded answer emerge; we also gain insight into the adaptive significance of the process proposed to underwrite our belief in the memorial status of a mental state (i.e., autonoetic awareness). What justifies our feeling that the content of awareness refers to the past? How do we determine that our phenomenology is a veridical (or even partly compromised) repre-sentation of our past and not, say, a thought or act of imagination? Such questions have vexed philosophers and psychologists for almost as long as attention has been directed toward the (uniquely human; e.g., Suddendorf and Corballis 2007; Tulving 2005) act of recollection.
@article{Klein2014a,
abstract = {In this paper I discuss philosophical and psychological treatments of the question "how do we decide that an occurrent mental state is a memory and not, say a thought or imagination?" This issue has proven notoriously difficult to resolve, with most proposed indices, criteria and heuristics failing to achieve consensus. Part of the difficulty, I argue, is that the indices and analytic solutions thus far offered seldom have been situated within a well-specified theory of memory function. As I hope to show, when such an approach is adopted, not only does a new, functionally-grounded answer emerge; we also gain insight into the adaptive significance of the process proposed to underwrite our belief in the memorial status of a mental state (i.e., autonoetic awareness). What justifies our feeling that the content of awareness refers to the past? How do we determine that our phenomenology is a veridical (or even partly compromised) repre-sentation of our past and not, say, a thought or act of imagination? Such questions have vexed philosophers and psychologists for almost as long as attention has been directed toward the (uniquely human; e.g., Suddendorf and Corballis 2007; Tulving 2005) act of recollection.},
author = {Klein, Stanley B.},
doi = {10.1007/s13164-014-0181-8},
file = {:Users/michaelk/Library/Application Support/Mendeley Desktop/Downloaded/Klein - 2014 - Autonoesis and belief in a personal past An evolutionary theory of episodic memory indices.pdf:pdf},
issn = {1878-5158},
journal = {Review of Philosophy and Psychology},
number = {3},
pages = {427--447},
title = {{Autonoesis and belief in a personal past: An evolutionary theory of episodic memory indices}},
url = {http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s13164-014-0181-8},
volume = {5},
year = {2014}
}

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