Markus Werning & Sofia Pedrini (RUB)
The problem of mnemic justification: How can episodic memories provide genuine (internalist) epistemic justification for factual beliefs?

Abstract: The paper addresses a problem that arises from four independently justifiable but, as it appears, mutually inconsistent propositions: (H1) Episodic remembering and experiential imagining are principally alike in their representational content and their phenomenal character. (H2) Episodic remembering is apt to serve as a genuine (internalistic) epistemic justification for factual beliefs that can be derived from the mnemic content. (H3) Experiential imagining is not apt to serve as a genuine (internalistic) epistemic justification for any factual beliefs that can be derived from the imaginative content. (H4) The (internalistic) epistemic justificatory force of an experiential mental state is either grounded in its representational content or its phenomenal character (or a combination of both). We discuss and reject several potential solutions to the problem before developing our own approach to addressing it. The paper explicitly investigates the nature of mnemic content in comparison to imaginative content. It builds on semantic, phenomenological, and naturalistic arguments. A key notion to be addressed is the “sense of realness” that episodic remembering shares with perception. We combine a predictive processing approach with trace minimalism to account for this sense of realness.