Volume 19, Issue 2, July 2018
The Philosophy of Memory
Nikola Andonovski
Pages 178-195
Is Episodic Memory a Natural Kind?
In a recent paper, Sen Cheng and Markus Werning argue that the class of episodic memories constitutes a natural kind. Endorsing the homeostatic property cluster view of natural kinds, they suggest that episodic memories can be characterized by a cluster of properties unified by an underlying neural mechanism for coding sequences of events. Here, I argue that Cheng and Werning’s proposal faces some significant, and potentially insurmountable, difficulties. Two are described as most prominent. First, the proposal fails to satisfy an important normative constraint on natural kind theorizing, not providing the requisite theoretical resources for arbitration between rival taxonomies of memory. Second, the proposal is in direct tension with a foundational principle of the HPC view: the rejection of essentialism. This has far-reaching consequences, which threaten to undermine the coherence of the proposal.