Title: Proximal Functions and the Distribution of Episodic Memory
By Arieh Schwartz (London School of Economics and Political Science, Philosophy)
Date: Thursday, April 10, 2025
Time: 1530-1700
Room: H232
Abstract: Most textbook discussions of memory include a tree diagram distinguishing different memory systems. Episodic memory is distinguished from semantic memory. These are distinguished from procedural memory, and so on. There is broad, (though not universal) agreement about the taxonomy of human memory systems. But controversy abounds about what memory systems non-human animals have. This paper focuses on the debate over the distribution of episodic memory (Davies & Clayton, 2024). One way to make progress, I suggest, is to get clear about the conception of biological function that matters in this context.
Some theorists suppose that non-human animals have episodic memory just in case they have a trait that performs episodic memory’s distal proper functions (e.g., Mahr & Csibra, 2018). I pose several problems for this view. As episodic memory has many distal proper functions, or so I argue, the distal approach doesn’t give us clear guidance after all about how to assess episodic memory’s distribution. Further, the distal approach risks denying animals episodic memory for reasons that seem to have little to do with memory, (e.g., because animals lack language). Last, the distal approach is in tension with experimental work testing for episodic memory in species, (e.g., in the subclass, Coleoidea,) whose evolutionary trajectories are known to have diverged widely from our own (Schnell et al., 2021). A better approach, I submit, is to assess episodic memory’s distribution based on the distribution of traits with episodic memory’s proximal proper functions. If this is right, the same approach can be used to assess the distribution of other memory systems, and perhaps of other cognitive systems more generally.
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