Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

People with episodic amnesia are commonly described as stuck in time, trapped in a permanent present tense, and altogether lacking a subjective sense of temporality. These claims are grounded in the well-characterized inability of persons with episodic amnesia to perform much above floor on standard questionnaire tests assaying their ability to remember past personal episodes and to imagine vividly what one might do in the future. I will discuss some of our experimental work demonstrating the persistence of several distinct varieties of temporal knowledge and sensitivity in people with acquired or developmental cases of episodic amnesia. These studies raise doubts about whether the sense of time, mental time travel, and (indeed) episodic memory constitute well-formed psychological kinds. I suggest that episodic memory and episodic future projection might, at base, have very little to do with the human sense of time. These findings raise doubts about both psychological and philosophical theses concerning the role of episodic memory in human agency and the sense of an enduring self.