Kourken Michaelian, Director of Centre for Philosophy of Memory, professor at the Université Grenoble Alpes. His research is mainly in the philosophy of memory. In opposition to the causal theory, according to which remembering an event requires an appropriate causal connection with an earlier experience of the remembered event, He has defended a simulation theory, according to which remembering an event does not require such a causal connection and is, instead, simply a matter of imagining it.
Recent Publications Authored book [1] Michaelian, K. (2016). Mental time travel: Episodic memory and our knowledge of the personal past. MIT Press. Edited volumes [1] Gregory, D., & Michaelian, K. (Eds). (2024). Dreaming and memory: Philosophical issues. Springer. [2] Lin, Y.-T., McCarroll, C., Michaelian, K., & Stuart, M. (Eds.). (2024). Successful and unsuccessful remembering and imagining [Special issue]. Philosophy and the Mind Sciences. [3] Sant'Anna, A., McCarroll, C. J., & Michaelian, K. (Eds.). (2023). Current controversies in philosophy of memory. Routledge. [4] McCarroll, C. J., Michaelian, K., & Arango-Mun?oz, S. (Eds.). (2021). Memory and perception [Special issue]. Estudios de Filosofi?a 64. [5] Sant'Anna, A., Michaelian, K., & Perrin, D. (Eds.). (2020). Memory as mental time travel [Special issue]. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 11(2).
Despite the fact that they generally suppose that episodic remembering involves reference to past events, philosophers of memory have only recently begun to turn their attention to mnemic reference. The work that they have done so far, like most recent research in philosophy of memory, has largely taken the framework of the causalist-simulationist debate for granted. According to the causal theory of memory, what makes the difference between genuine and merely apparent remembering is the presence of an appropriate causal connection between the apparent memory and the apparently remembered event, where appropriate causation is understood as trace causation. According to the simulation theory of memory, on the other hand, appropriate causation is not required for genuine remembering—what is required is merely that the apparent memory be produced by a reliable episodic construction system. Simulationism is thus a noncausal theory. Influenced by the popularity of causal theories of reference, according to which reference is fixed by appropriate causal connection, philosophers of memory have generally assumed, first, that causalism is particularly well placed to explain mnemic reference and, second, that simulationism is particularly ill placed to do so. Openshaw and Michaelian (2024) have argued against the first assumption, showing that simulationism in fact grounds a plausible account of mnemic reference. The goal of this talk is to argue against the second assumption—to show that causalism faces significant difficulties with respect to mnemic reference. It does so by distinguishing among causalist accounts of mnemic reference on the basis of their endorsement of a conception of traces as either contentful or contentless and as either promiscuous or monogamous and showing that the accounts in question are either empirically inadequate, internally incoherent, or intuitively implausible.
