Is remembering constructive imagining?

Abstract

Abstract The (dis)continuism debate —the debate over whether remembering is a form of imagining—is a prominent one in contemporary philosophy of memory. In recent work, Langland-Hassan (2021) has argued that this debate is best understood as a dispute over whether remembering is a form of constructive imagining . In this paper, I argue that remembering is not a form of constructive imagining because constructive processes in remembering and imagining are constrained , and hence controlled , in different ways at the level of consciousness. More specifically, I argue that remembering and imagining differ in terms of the interventions we can make on the constructive processes as they unfold. If this is correct, then a form of discontinuism is vindicated: remembering and imagining are, on this view, processes of different kinds.