BROASA-8v1.pdf — page 21

Aphantasia, SDAM, and Episodic Memory
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relevant. Varieties of memory in the same row or column in table 3 share inductively
and explanatory relevant properties, but those properties are related to what it says
in the row and column headers and have little to do with a supposed category of
episodic memory. That is, varieties of modal memory or of aﬀective memory (and so
forth) share explanatorily and inductively relevant properties.
Rather than a natural kind, episodic memory is a composite faculty. Diﬀerent
cells in table 3 are diﬀerent combinations of diﬀerent mental faculties or diﬀerent
“modules”, and some of these modules (i.e. the column and row headers) may not
be natural kinds themselves. I doubt that either personal memory or aﬀective mem-
ory is a natural kind—more likely they are aspects or applications of more general
mental faculties. And similarly, modal memory is probably just a particular use or
function of a more general faculty of modal imagination (e.g. Michaelian 2016), and
even that might not be a single faculty. The fact that non-total aphantasics report
to have mental imagery in some modalities but not in others suggests that modal
imagination—and therefore, modal memory—is not a single kind, but a collection of
faculties (taking into account that the list of kinds of mental imagery diﬀers from the
list of sense modalities, as mentioned in section 2 above)16.
A case could be made that episodic memory is a natural kind if supposed key
properties of episodic memory—such as the involvement of mental imagery and sub-
jective identiﬁcation—are properties of that kind and share an underlying causal
mechanism. But there doesn’t appear to be such an underlying causal mechanism,
and the key properties of episodic memory are not properties of that kind, but of
diﬀerent, other faculties that can work together, but don’t always have to. The in-
volvement of mental imagery and subjective identiﬁcation are properties of modal
memory and personal memory, respectively (although subjectivity may also connote
aﬀect), but modal memory and personal memory are independent mental faculties.
There are few if any inductively and explanatorily relevant properties that all of
the supposed forms and varieties of episodic memory—that is, everything but (a) in
table 3—share. Rather, these diﬀerent kinds, uses, or functions of memory are better
explained by the properties of the modules they involve: modal memory, personal
memory, and aﬀective memory. And memory that has some but not all of the sup-
posed properties of episodic memory is not a defective or deﬁcient form of episodic
memory, but just a diﬀerent combination of these memory modules.
16 On the other hand, aphantasics typically report the lack of imagery in multiple modal-
ities, suggesting that there may be some kind of underlying faculty tying these to-
gether, but this may be an artifact of reporting. Perhaps, there are many people who
lack just one or two kinds of imagery and who never realized that because those kinds
of imagery are less obvious, or because the lack of just one or two kinds of imagery
doesn’t seem particularly noticeable. Or perhaps only people who lack object imagery,
the paradigmatic kind of imagery, realize that they are lacking something.
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