2

A Case for Procedural Causality in

Episodic Recollection1 Denis PerrinA Case for Procedural Causality

Denis Perrin

1 The Causal Condition Under Scientific Threat: The

Soundness Problem
This chapter aims at making a case for what I propose to call “procedural
causality” that is operative in episodic memory. To do so, I rely on the
widely accepted notion of episodic memory understood as a mental
occurrence of remembering. Indeed, among the many forms memory can
take, one should distinguish declarative memory, i.e., the form of memory
that provides explicit representations of personal or general facts. This
mnemonic form is usually distinguished from procedural memory in the
wide sense, which includes (among other things) motor and cognitive skills
and does not involve any representation. Declarative memory, in turn, can
come in either of two ways. On the one hand, semantic memory is the
memory for facts conceptually represented, and on the other hand, episodic
memory is the quasi-experiential representation of past personal episodes.
Now, such episodes can be the objects of a semantic memory as well as of
an episodic memory. So, a question is what makes a mental occurrence an
episodic memory, rather than a semantic memory, of a personal episode
experienced in the past. One can refine this question in three main sub-
questions (Fernandez, 2013):

• The metaphysical question: for any mental occurrence o in a subject

S’s mind, what does it take for o to be an episodic memory of a past
perceived event e? Which actual relation between o and e is required?
• The intentional question: for any mental occurrence o in S’s mind, what
o should be about, i.e., what should o’s content be, for o to qualify as
an episodic memory of e?
• The phenomenological question: for any mental occurrence o in S’s
mind, what should it be like for S to entertain o for o to qualify as an
episodic memory of e?

Arguably, these three questions are not independent. I suggest considering

the phenomenological question as primary. First, indeed, in episodic memory
34 Denis Perrin
phenomenology plays a substantial role regarding the informational content.
It “is not a mere phenomenological embellishment” (Dokic, 2014) of the
intentional content.2 As S is episodically remembering a past personal event
e, S’s phenomenal representation is of e as of a past personally experienced
event. Thus, the way e is presented in episodic remembering is informative
in and by itself, or: it is part and parcel of the intentional content. Second,
through their informativeness phenomenological features also present why
an o should be considered as an episodic memory from the metaphysical
point of view, or: which metaphysical conditions o claims to satisfy so
that it should be considered as an episodic memory. Let me specify the
phenomenological features and the metaphysical conditions they posit. As S
is episodically remembering an event e, S is conscious of e as:

• Pastness condition: having occurred in the past

• Actuality condition: having actually occurred (in the past)
• Personal experience condition: having been personally experienced by S
(in the past)
• Causality condition: being mentally re-experienced by S because S has
personally experienced it (in the past).

Among these features, the fourth is of prominent importance. Since

Martin and Deutscher’s paper (1966), it has been common stand to posit a
causal necessary condition among the metaphysical requirements of episodic
remembering. To put it in general terms:

Causal connection condition: For an occurrence o that represents an

event e to qualify as an episodic memory of e, o must derive causally (in
an appropriate way) from e.

Note that in line with my previous remarks, this condition falls in agreement
with what the phenomenology of episodic remembering requires from any
(apparent) episodic memory and what it builds into its intentional content.
Indeed, the causal phenomenological feature:

• represents e as mentally re-experienced by S because S has personally

experienced it in the past—phenomenological aspect;
• thereby informs S that s/he is mentally re-experiencing e because s/he
has personally experienced it in the past—intentional aspect;
• thereby requires from o to derive causally (in an appropriate way)
from S’s past experience of e for o to qualify as an episodic memory of
e—metaphysical aspect.

Now, drawing on empirical results provided by the current constructivist

approach to remembering (Schacter & Addis, 2007, 2012), some researchers
have recently cast doubt on the necessity of including a causal condition
 A Case for Procedural Causality 35
among the metaphysical features of episodic memory. Robins (2016)
pinpoints a conflict between the causal theory and the currently widely
endorsed view of mnemonic traces as a distributed and superpositional
storage of memories, to the effect that the latter blurs the singular causal
path from e to o that is claimed by the causal theory to make o a memory of
e specifically. She speculates that the causal theory could not reflect our best
analysis of what remembering requires. Michaelian (2016) bites the bullet
and proposes to go beyond the causal theory. He argues for a simulation
theory that posits no necessary causal connection for remembering. Instead,
the right condition would be a properly functioning constructive episodic
system, that is a system that tends to produce accurate representations of
the past, whatever the causal origin of the bits of experience through which
it constructs episodic simulations.
If these criticisms are right in their rejection of the causal condition—and
I think they are as far as a certain notion of causality is concerned—then the
fourth phenomenological feature is in danger of saying something wrong
about, and requiring something irrelevant from, the mental occurrence to
which it belongs. Indeed, as I have suggested, episodic memory has its causal
origin on its sleeves. As Dokic (2001: 228) puts it: “episodic memory gives
me a reason to believe that it comes directly from my own past experience,
because the fact that it does so is presented in the memory experience itself.”
Again: “The thought is that the causal chain that originates in a certain
event and terminates in a certain memory experience . . . is . . . what that
memory experience is representing” (Fernandez, 2008b, 348). So, the fourth
phenomenological feature together with its contentual and metaphysical
implications appears to stand in contradiction with what scientific results
reveal about episodic memory and causality. At this stage, one faces a
dilemma. Either one takes seriously into account what science data suggest,
but then one is doomed to consider the phenomenological features are
unsound. This looks like an undesirable move, because it raises problematic
questions, as (for instance) why evolution would have built a systematic lie
in the very heart of episodic memory.3 So, it seems preferable to endorse a
soundness constraint for any satisfying theory of episodic memory:

Soundness constraint: the phenomenological features of episodic

memory (the causal one, in particular) are sound to the effect that
the elements they build into the intentional content of such mental
occurrences as metaphysical requirements are correct.4

In other words, while the actual metaphysical features of an apparent

episodic memory are not transparent to the subject, to be sure, the features
it must possess for it to qualify as an actual episodic memory are presented
by its phenomenology. But insisting on the soundness constraint, one is led
to contradict—this is the second horn of the dilemma—what psychology
has repeatedly shown over the past decades, namely: there is no causal
36 Denis Perrin
connection as the one required by causalism. So, what? The way out of
this dilemma favored in this chapter is to acknowledge the aforementioned
criticisms of causalism, while suggesting that the actual causal connection is
not the one criticized by Robins and Michaelian. If the causal condition can
be rebutted, this is due to the commitment to an inadequate conception of
causality. Once the right concept is promoted, the way out of the dilemma is
smooth and the fourth phenomenological feature is sound. While I defend
the causal theory, I thus do not propose to come back to one of its existing
versions, I rather suggest there is a (still widely unexplored) causal dimension
of episodic memory, namely the procedural one. In my view, this dimension
puts to rest the mentioned criticisms and is the one the phenomenological
feature is about.
To make the case for this proceduralist account of causality in episodic
memory, I proceed in two stages. In Section 2, I distinguish componential
and procedural notions of causality and go on to argue that, provided
a revised view of what one should expect from causality in episodic
memory, a procedural causal connection avoids the difficulties faced by the
componential conception. In Section 3, I account for the phenomenology of
episodic memory in terms of a feeling of pastness. I show that this account
neatly falls in line with the proceduralist version of causalism promoted in
Section 2.

2 Promoting Procedural Causality

On Martin and Deutscher’s causal theory of memory (1966), the causal
connection condition must hold between a current mental occurrence o and
a past experience of an event e. In their terms: S’s experience of e has to
have been “operative in producing a state or successive states in him finally
operative in producing his representation” (166). More specifically four
criteria define the causal connection necessary for remembering, namely:

(1) The operative-in criterion: the experience of e must be the cause of the
state stored by the system;
(2) The operative in-the-circumstances-of-remembering criterion: the state
stored must be the cause of the remembering state;5
(3) The analogue-memory-trace criterion: the information retained must be
a representational analogue of the experienced e.6 Note that this view
of memory trace has been criticized. A much more empirically plausible
(connectionist) view is that traces are distributed patterns of activation
on a neural network (Sutton, 1998; Bernecker, 2010; Michaelian, 2011;
De Brigard, 2014);
(4) The singular-causal-signature criterion: there must be a unique causal
chain running from the past experience of e to the current remembering
state. Though not quite explicit, this criterion belongs to the causal
theory, as emphasized by Robins (2016: 16–7).
 A Case for Procedural Causality 37
Are all of these four criteria legitimate? In this section, drawing on the notion
of a procedural causality, I argue that while criteria (1) and (2) should be
endorsed, criteria (3) and (4) are to be rejected. Justifying this move requires
introducing a new notion of causality for remembering.

2.1 The Componential vs. Procedural Causality Distinction

My point is twofold here. First, I hold that different causal relations at play
in episodic remembering involve different types of relata. On the one hand,
the components of the perceptual and memory representations, and on the
other hand, the processes that make up these representations. I will speak
of componential causality about the causal relations that involve the first
type of relata, and of procedural causality about the causal relations that
involve the second type of relata. Second, I claim that the latter type is
irreducible to the former. To make this point, it will be useful to draw on
an analogy with a jigsaw puzzle. Let’s imagine you have two copies of one
and the same puzzle. The pieces are exactly the same in number, forms,
and pictures in each box. Obviously, however alike the pieces are, as one
makes one the two puzzles one does not use the pieces of the other. In
other terms, the two series of construction operations apply respectively to
causally unrelated (though similar) bits of representation. But at the same
time—this is crucial point to my argument—these construction operations
themselves can be causally related. For instance, if you make the two puzzles
one after the other, you will possibly perform the second time better than the
first time. And should you repeat the operations further, the enhancement
will probably get ever clearer. So arguably, an earlier series of construction
operations can get a later series enhanced, while the manipulated sets of
pieces are distinct and causally unrelated. Now, as repeatedly emphasized
by psychological literature about perception (Neisser, 1967; O’Reagan &
Noë, 2001), as one perceptually experiences a certain event, one does not
merely receive sensory information from the latter in a passive way. Instead
one is actively engaged in a perceptual exploration and construction of the
scene, which eventually results in the perceptual experience. In other terms,
some constructive processes underlie any perceptual experience. Moreover,
just as causally unrelated sets of puzzle pieces can be gathered into distinct
copies of the same picture by causally connected operations, causally
connected constructive processes can be applied to causally unrelated bits of
sensory information and bring about highly similar sensory scenes. Now the
prevailing constructive episodic simulation hypothesis (Schacter & Addis,
2007; Schacter et al., 2012) strongly emphasizes the role played in episodic
memory by constructive operations of piecing together the elements of an
episode. Hence my proposal is to say that the constructive processes at play
respectively in the remembered and the perceptual scenes can be causally
connected, even though the bits of experience pieced together in the present
are causally unrelated to the past episode that is being remembered.
38 Denis Perrin
The suggested distinction thus permits to envision causal relations that,
on the one hand, are operative at the procedural level of construction rather
than at the level of the experiential componential blocks, and on the other
hand, whose operativity does not presuppose the identity of the blocks to
which the constructive processes are applied at each stage. My proposal is
precisely to posit in episodic memory a causal relation between the processes
of the construction of the initial experience of an event and the construction
of the remembering state—typically, the former cause a relatively high
procedural fluency of the latter—without positing any necessary causal
relation between the elements manipulated by these operations. A crucial
consequence of this move is that the causalist theory of memory turns out to
possibly come in two different ways depending on the type of causal relata
considered. Correspondingly, one can flesh out the initial Causal connection
condition in two ways:

• Componential Causal Condition: For a mental occurrence o that

represents an event e to qualify as an episodic memory of e, the elements
composing the scene represented by o must derive causally (in an
appropriate way) from the elements composing the initial experience of e.

• Componential Causal Theory of Memory (CCTM)

• Causal criterion (3) is necessary.

• Procedural Causal Condition: For a mental occurrence o that represents

an event e to qualify as an episodic memory of e, the processes whose o
is the outcome must be causally determined (in an appropriate way) by
the processes that constructed the initial experience of e.

• Procedural Causal Theory of Memory (PCTM)

• Causal criterion (3) is not necessary.

In what follows, I will argue that componential causality puts no necessity

constraint on remembering, in line with recent anticausalist analyses
(Robins, 2016; Michaelian, 2016). But against the conclusions promoted
by such criticisms, I will also argue that this does not discard every causal
condition and that procedural causality does put a necessity constraint on
remembering. I will thus endorse PCTM.
The view just sketched out receives strong theoretical and empirical support
from an important trend in psychology, though neglected by philosophers
of memory, namely the attributionalist view of remembering (Kolers &
Roediger, 1984; Jacoby et al., 1989; Kelley & Jacoby, 1990; Whittlesea,
1997; Leboe-McGowan & Whittlesea, 2013). Let me be more specific
about this framework. The attributionalist account of episodic memory
has rarely received much, let alone positive attention from philosophers.
Some squarely reject it as inadequate (Hoerl, 2001), while the ones who
mention it in positive terms consider attributionalism as providing merely
 A Case for Procedural Causality 39
one possible element of explanation among others (Fernandez, 2008a). My
suggestion is that, on the contrary, attributionalism is still a promising view.
Let’s introduce it. Its core contention is that the phenomenology of episodic
recollection is the result of a subpersonal causal attribution of a current
mental occurrence to a past experience. For instance, as I episodically
remember playing football with my son yesterday:7

(i) Because I have already constructed the experience of such an episode,

when I do it again as a mental simulation the way I do it displays specific
procedural features.
(ii) The easiness or the fluency (e.g.) of the simulation operations are
subpersonal cues available to detection. The detection of such cues
is inference-grounding, that is: detecting the cues leads the cognitive
system to carry out an inference about the causal origin of the cues,
thereby about the status of the simulated scene—this is the attribution.
For instance, the system infers that it has already constructed such an
experience, thus that the currently simulated scene of playing football
with my son is a past experience.
(iii) The personal counterpart of this attribution is the episodic phenome­
nology under which the scene presents itself to my mind.

Obviously procedural causality is crucial to attributionalism. The subper­

sonal cues that ground the process of attribution are normally the causal
effects of the past construction processes. Should they actually be so, one
has to do with an actual episodic memory; should they not, one has to
do with a merely apparent episodic memory. So attributionalism strongly
suggests one endorse PCTM about episodic recollection. Then the question
is: how this attributionalist account does comply with the aforementioned
causality criteria? It complies well with the first two criteria. It indeed claims
that adequate procedural information—i.e., the construction of the experi-
ence of the event e—is retained in some way (criterion (1)), and that this
information is operative in the circumstances of remembering (criterion (2)),
provided it must be involved in them to be possibly detected. So far so good,
but attributionalism does not seem to meet so easily criteria (3) and (4). To
show this is no real problem, I have to be more explicit about what one
should expect from the causal connection.

2.2 What One Should (and Should Not) Expect From Causality in

Episodic Memory
Dismissing causality about episodic memory often relies on the claim that it
is unable to meet certain expectations assumed to be legitimate. So, it seems
prudent to be clear about what one should legitimately expect from causal-
ity in the first place. Maybe its apparent inability results from mistaken
expectations rather than from any unreliability. So, let’s question what the
 40 Denis Perrin
legitimate expectations with respect to causality are as for its format, on the
one hand, and its role in episodic recollection, on the other hand.
As for its format, consider what connectionism, invoked by many philoso-
phers of memory nowadays (Sutton, 1998; Bernecker, 2010; Michaelian,
2011; Robins, 2016, see also McClelland, 2000), teaches us about causality
in memory. My suggestion is that connectionism promotes a more radical
picture of causality than usually admitted. Philosophers usually consider that
connectionism substitutes a new conception of representational mnemonic
traces—henceforth distributed, superpositional, and constructed—for the
old one.8 I propose to go further and see connectionism as discarding the
very notion of a representational trace at the neural level. According to con-
nectionism, each connection between two neural nodes has a weight. The
only reality retention has at this neural level consists of this weight. Thus,
the network at a certain stage of its dynamics consists of a set of different
weights of connection. Now the so configured network could yield, for a
certain input stimulus, an output representation. But this in no way implies
that a representation would be deposited in the network, which (to repeat)
only includes weights and potential reactions to stimuli. A first, critical con-
clusion is that because of its strongly representational meaning, the very
notion of a trace, whether local or distributed, is to be rejected. This boils
down to giving up CCTM and causal criterion (3). A second, more positive
conclusion is that on connectionism properly understood, what is retained is
De Brigard
2017
dispositions to react, that is a procedural ability to (re-)construct representa-
tions, which falls in line with the attributionalist account.
As for the role of causality now, on existing causalist views, causality
is expected to account for the metaphysical singularity feature of episodic
recollection. As an illustration, consider two qualitatively identical events
e and e’ both experienced by a subject S in her past. Most causalists say
that the causal connections between S’s present remembering and his past
have to be able to secure the fact that a given episodic recollection is about
event e rather than e’. Now as Robins (2016) points out, if connection-
ism is right, storage is superpositional, which implies that the patterns of
activation deposited by e and e’ are blended. Then one can hardly see how
causal criterion (4) could be secured. Importantly, a procedural conception
of causality faces exactly the same difficulty. The events e and e’ are likely
to bring about the same procedural ability after all. As a reply, I propose to
promote an alternative view of the role causality plays in episodic memory.
On this view, this is an undue expectation to assign to causality the task of
accounting for metaphysical singularity. Let’s consider singularity as a phe-
nomenological feature, instead. I propose to say that this feature consists in
(what I suggest to call) a presuppositional singularity. Thereby I mean that
as an episodic recollection represents an event as a singular event, it takes
for granted that the represented event could be assigned singular spatiotem-
poral coordinates. But for doing so, it has not to be able to actually assign
such coordinates, and thus it has not to draw on any metaphysically unique
 A Case for Procedural Causality 41
causal link to a past event. As many experimental studies make it clear, the
procedural feature of fluency is able to bring about the consciousness of
remembering a singular event even though there is no singularity feature
intrinsic to such procedural features. This nicely falls in line with having the
experience of remembering a singular event without being able to assign a
singular spatiotemporal address to the event (Hoerl and McCormack, 1999,
158). So PCTM can account for the phenomenological feature of singular-
ity without endorsing causal criterion (4) that turns out to be too strong a
constraint to be satisfied by a cognitive system.
On the whole, if I am on the right track, the proceduralist conception
of causality provides an efficient alternative to the classical causal theory.
Indeed, it avoids the difficulties recently pointed out about causal criteria (3)
and (4). More specifically, it shows that even if there is no causal continuity
as far as the representational aspect of remembering is concerned, there is
still a causal connection as far as the procedural aspect is concerned. It also
shows that even if (as documented by neuropsychology) the occurring of
singular causal connections is highly unlikely, this does not prevent from
accounting in causal terms for the phenomenological feature of singularity,
which is all we need.

3 Deeper Into the Phenomenology of Episodic Memory:

Reconsidering the Feeling of Pastness
So far, after formulating the soundness constraint (Section 1), I have fleshed
out and promoted a different notion of causality with a view to arguing
for the necessity of the causal connection in episodic memory (Section 2).
Indeed, this notion permits to preserve the soundness constraint—more
specifically the soundness of its causal component—while accommodating
neuropsychological data. In this section, I will argue that the proceduralist
notion of causality permits not only to preserve the soundness constraint,
but also to account for the very phenomenology that is declared to be sound
by this constraint. I will do so by showing that the feeling of pastness (FP
henceforth) that is often held to constitute the phenomenology of episodic
memory has to be conceived as a metacognitive feeling.

3.1 An Attributionalist Account of the Feeling of Pastness

That a FP is intrinsic to the experience of remembering has long been
­envisioned and discussed by philosophers (Russell, 1921, Lecture 9) and
­psychologists (James, 1890, ch. 16). It is still important in the study of m
­ emory,
some authors being strongly reluctant to endow it with any substantial role
(Teroni, 2015; Debus, 2016), while others are eager to promote it or one of
its cognates in the account of remembering (Matthen, 2010; Dokic, 2014;
Michaelian, 2016). But even among its defenders, there is no agreement
about the way it should be understood. In particular, a strong divide runs
42 Denis Perrin
between those who think that pastness is one of the elements encoded in
the intentional content of an episodic memory (Perner, 2000; Fernandez,
2008b, 2013)—let’s call this line of analysis encoding intentionalism—and
those who think it issues from a subpersonal detection of the way the cogni-
tive system carries out certain tasks (Fernandez, 2008a; Matthen, 2010)—
let’s call this line of analysis retrieval intentionalism.9 I definitely take side
with the latter view in this chapter. But I think that even its proponents are
mistaken in the way they conceive the FP or minimize its importance for
episodic memory. In particular, few people see it as a metacognitive feeling,
and the rare people who do so (Dokic, 2014, for instance) do not place it
in the right specific category. In this regard, my claim is that the FP is not a
metacognitive feeling relative to epistemic capabilities to retrieve or recon-
struct a past event—it is not an episodic feeling of knowing—but a feeling
relative to the causal source, as sustained by attributionalism.
Studies about metacognition have repeatedly shown that some feelings are
the outcomes of heuristic metacognitive mechanisms (Koriat, 2007; Arango-
Munoz, 2014; about episodic memory specifically, Souchay et al., 2007). In
their pioneering study, Schacter and Singer (1962) argued experimentally
for a two-factor theory of emotions, on which emotions are (sometimes,
at least) the affective results (i.e., feelings) of an interpretation process of
physiological sensations. In an experiment, unknown to them some subjects
were given a drug that produced physiological arousal in them—so was the
first factor. When the reaction occurred, half of the subjects were not provided
the explanation that they had been injected a drug whose effects they were
presently sensing—the explanation (the second factor) was missing. As it
turned out, depending on the emotional context in which they were placed,
they subpersonally interpreted the physiological arousal they sensed as a
manifestation of happiness or angriness. So, feelings (e.g., emotional) can be
the outcomes of an interpretation of a certain functioning of the cognitive
system (e.g., a physiological arousal). In Nelson and Narens’ terms (1990),
feelings can be the outcomes of a meta-level evaluation (or monitoring) of
happenings occurring at the information processing level.
Arguably, such meta-level interpretation operations play a crucial role in
remembering. In particular, attributionalists have it that the FP is one of the
possible outcomes of these operations. In Whittlesea’s terms: “the feeling of
pastness that separates remembering from other memory-supported activi-
ties is not a direct product of interacting with memory, but the result of eval-
uating that interaction” (1997, 241—see also Jacoby et al., 1989, 393 and
400). If this is right, then the FP has to be considered as a metacognitive feel-
ing in nature and elucidated accordingly. Committing oneself to this analysis
has an immediate interesting consequence relative to the phenomenology of
episodic memory. It locates the attribution of the pastness feature at a sub-
personal level. Indeed, the occurrence of feelings seems to require that their
cause remain at a subpersonal level. In some experiments (Jacoby & White-
house, 1989; see also Roediger and McDermott, 1995), the perceptual
 A Case for Procedural Causality 43
fluency of items was increased unknown to the subjects. In a recognition
test, this increased fluency resulted in an increased number of “old” (or
recall) responses. But as the source of the “old” feeling was made explicit
to the subjects, the number of “old” responses dramatically decreased. Such
results favor the idea that the interpretive process that causes the FP has
to occur at a subpersonal level. If so, then one can neatly account for the
phenomenological status of pastness. Why an episodically remembered
event does appear as intrinsically past, so that one is prone to describe one’s
recollective experience in terms of a mental re-experiencing of the event?
Because the represented event has been assigned the pastness feature at a
subpersonal level by a heuristics. This means, first, there is no deliberate
control of the subject on this operation, thus the event appears as already
possessing the mentioned feature as an intrinsic feature when the subject
accesses its representation. Second, the attribution is no conceptual process,
thus pastness has the format of a phenomenological felt feature.
On the whole, the attributionalist analysis of the FP has thus strong
supports. I now embark upon a critical discussion of the existing
philosophical accounts of the FP to restore its due place in the theory of
episodic memory along attributionalist lines.

3.2 Disentangling the Locating-in-the-Past/Feeling-as-Past Conflation

It is tempting to assimilate two things in the one single notion of “being
presented to [a subject] S as happening in the past” (Fernandez, 2008b,
p. 336—see also Michaelian, 2016, p. 194 for this assimilation):

• Locating an event e in the past: S’s assigning a temporal address to e

within S’s personal past.
• Feeling an event e as past: S’s feeling of mentally re-experiencing e.

Closely considered, these two cognitive happenings are different in

various respects. To be sure, it would be simplistic to say there is no link
between them. In particular, both achievements rely on the detection and
interpretation of features of the processes through which the memory
operation is carried out, as their fluency for the FP and the strength of the
memory trace for the relative recency of an event. Strong discrepancies
must be pinpointed, however. To begin with, to engage in the operation of
dating an event in one’s own past does not involve but rather presupposes
locating it in one’s past. In other words, assigning a date is not an attempt
to answer the question of whether one is imagining something belonging to
one’s own past, but to answer the question of where the event is situated
within one’s own past, in particular how it relates to other events of the
same subject’s past. Moreover, one can episodically remember an event
while one is unable to provide any location within one’s personal past. In
other words, the feeling that one is mentally re-experiencing a particular
44 Denis Perrin
event does not depend on one’s ability to provide a specific location to
this event in one’s past—in terms suggested previously, the particularity of
episodically remembered events is presuppositional. Instead, initiating the
process of determining the temporal location of an event is often contingent
on having episodically remembered this event. Conversely, one can use the
various mechanisms usually resorted to by cognitive subjects to determine
the temporal address of their memories (Friedman, 1990, 1991) without
being episodically remembering. Consider the following example due to
Friedman: “Which word have you read most recently, beach or theorizing?”
(1990, 27) According to the mechanism pinpointed by so-called strength
model,10 one draws on the respective strengths of the trace of beach and
of the trace of theorizing to determine their temporal order of appearance
in one’s past. But to do so in no way supposes to episodically remember
these words. The traces in question have not to be episodic traces; they can
be semantic. So, one has not to feel a remembered event as past—one can
merely know it is past—in order to assign it a temporal address. This is
certainly why the strength theory proponents talk about the operation of
“time estimation” and “dating events” (see Brown et al., 1985—in the same
way, Hinrichs (1970) speaks of “the ability to judge the recency of events”),
but never of “feeling” them as past.
It thus seems preferable not to consider attributionalism, as far as it
claims to account for the FP, as merely one among various theories that
attempt to work out the mechanisms through which we locate events in our
personal pasts (Fernandez, 2008a). As far as attributionalism is concerned,
its specificity should be preserved to the effect that it accounts for something
(the FP) for which the mentioned theories do not claim to account.

3.3 Rebutting Encoding Intentionalism on the Feeling of Pastness

According to encoding intentionalism, the pastness proper to an episodically
remembered event is either an intentional element included in content at
encoding—call this strict encoding intentionalism (Perner, 2000)—or
something derived from such an intentional element at retrieving—call
this qualified encoding intentionalism (Fernandez, 2008b). Arguing for the
latter, Fernandez says: “the intentional properties of memory can account
for the feeling of pastness,” and: “we do not experience temporal properties
of past events when those events are presented to us in memory. However,
we do experience certain properties of past events that, as it were, track
their property of occurring in the past when those events are presented to us
in memory” (2008b, resp. 337 and 354). According to Fernandez, it is the
causal status of past events that would “track their property of occurring
in the past” and brings about the FP (2013, 442). The event remembered
would be intentionally represented as being the cause of the current episode
of remembering, and since the remembering subject knows that a cause
precedes its effect, the pastness of the event would derive from its causal
 A Case for Procedural Causality 45
status. On the whole, depending on the version one endorses, encoding
intentionalism has it that the FP is an encoded intentional component of
content or an element of content derived from such a component.
At this stage, it is important to recall the categorical status of the feeling of
pastness (see 3.1). According to strict encoding intentionalism, the pastness
feature of episodic remembering would consist in a piece of information
included among the elements of the content acquired at encoding. But if, as
argued by attributionalism, pastness has to be conceived as a metacognitive
feeling, then on the one hand, it is an intrinsically phenomenological feature
rather than something we would first know about the event remembered,
which would trigger a certain appearance added to the remembered event.
On the other hand, it is something generated at remembering rather than
something acquired at encoding and preserved since then. Therefore, it
seems hard to maintain strict encoding intentionalism. What about ­qualified
encoding intentionalism? It also faces serious difficulties. To begin with, if it
were right, then things would go this way: one would first have to retrieve
the causal information about the representation of the remembered event
and then derivatively conclude that the event in question is a past one. But it
seems as likely to say that as one is episodically remembering an event, one
is conscious of the latter as an event one has experienced in the past, and
for this very reason as the causal source of one’s current memory (Hoerl &
McCormack, 2001, p. 209). The alleged anteriority of causality on pastness
is not obvious. Moreover, if qualified intentionalism were right, one would
face a difficulty faced by strict intentionalism too. As argued previously,
feeling something as past in episodic recollection consists in experiencing
it as having an intrinsic temporal property when it is presented to us. If
qualified intentionalism were right, during the process of remembering
there should be a preliminary phase at which one would be conscious of
the event represented with its causal status and would conclude therefrom
to its pastness. This knowing-it-to-be-past state would then have to trigger
the adequate phenomenology. But one can hardly see how such a state of
knowing could endow the remembering state with such phenomenology,
and actually remembered events are very often immediately presented as
past.
These difficulties are serious enough to renounce encoding intentionalism.
Moreover, they promote a much more procedural account of the feeling
of pastness, as desired by attributionalism. To repeat: the intrinsic
phenomenological feature of pastness can hardly be explained in terms of
an encoded knowledge about the remembered event.

3.4 Rebutting the Chronesthesia Account of the Feeling of Pastness

In recent psychological literature, the FP is conceived in terms of the
time consciousness designated by Tulving as autonoetic consciousness
(Tulving, 1985, pp. 5–6; Klein, 2015). Tulving (2002) refines this notion
46 Denis Perrin
and distinguishes “autonoetic consciousness” as the consciousness of
oneself as extended in time and “chronesthesia” as the consciousness of
the experiential time in which one can place oneself through autonoetic
consciousness. The FP would thus be the consciousness of the past time
provided by chronesthesia. Importantly, chronesthesia would be the
consciousness of subjective time extended toward the future as well. On
the mental time travel paradigm in psychology, episodic memory system
permits episodic simulations of the past (episodic recollection, in particular)
as well as of the future. Thus, it seems legitimate to consider there is a
feeling of futurity just in the same way as there is a FP (Michaelian, 2016),
the latter being the mere symmetrical counterpart of the former.
A broad disagreement between this account and proceduralism concerns
the respective view of memory each one promotes. On the chronesthesia
account, the subjective sense of pastness at play in episodic recollection is a
given structure of the mind, while the proceduralist view explains it as the
outcome of an inferential attribution process.11 Here are two arguments
for the latter view. First, the symmetry between the FP and the feeling of
futurity is not as neat as it should be expected if the structural account
were right. As emphasized by (moderate) discontinuism on mental time
travel (Perrin, 2016), the subjective sense of time in episodic recollection is
not symmetrical to the subjective sense of time in episodic future thought.
One striking feature is that the FP as described previously does not occur
at will in episodic recollection, contrary to what happens in the future
episodic thought. Indeed, one can try but fail to episodically remember an
event, even though one is imagining it as located in one’s past. Instead,
episodically thinking of a future event is something one actually does as
soon as one simulates it. Moreover, in the case of episodic future thought,
the event does not have to appear as future in the first place; it is rather
assigned in a stipulative way this temporal feature by the imagining subject.
Instead, in episodic recollection pastness appears as an intrinsic feature
of the appearing event, which it possesses independently of any explicit
assignment operation by the subject. Furthermore, the FP does not merely
consist in sensing something as located in one’s past; it also involves
sensing it as having actually been experienced by the subject in her past.
These discrepancies—this is the second argument—are smoothly explained
by proceduralism. Indeed, the latter grounds the FP on the detection of
some procedural features. Now an obvious difference between backward
and forward mental time travel is that in the former case, but not in the
latter, something has already happened (in the past) that is thus liable to
have caused a modification of the cognitive system that is in turn liable
to be subpersonally detected and to automatically trigger an inferential
attribution. This explains the asymmetry with the episodic future thought
case. Moreover, the proceduralist account of the pastness phenomenology
provides an explanation of the intrinsicness feature of pastness in episodic
 A Case for Procedural Causality 47
recollection, which is not observed in episodic future thought. Provided the
attribution to the past is a subpersonal and automatic cognitive process, this
is no surprise that the simulated event appears as intrinsically past.
These critical discussions all point toward the idea introduced previously
that the FP is of a metacognitive nature. But which specific kind of
metacognitive feeling is it?

3.5 Distinguishing Feeling of Pastness and Episodic Feeling

of Knowing (EFOK)
Some researchers—in the minority—have proposed to consider the FP as a
metacognitive feeling. Dokic (2014: 10), in particular, proposes to define it
as an episodic feeling of knowing, claiming that “EFOKs can be bound to
fully explicit memories.” I think such a characterization is inaccurate about
the metacognitive type of the FP. On a standard definition (Souchay, 2013),
EFOK:

• is an affective state endowed with a content issuing from metacognitive

monitoring—a feature shared with other metacognitive feelings (Koriat,
2007);
• usually occurs before any actual recollection (Paynter et al., 2009;
Arango-Munoz & Michaelian, 2014: 100) and has a predictive content
relative to the capacity of the subject to episodically recollect.

I think that the second, specifying feature makes it impossible to assimilate

FP to EFOK. First, indeed, if EFOK and FP were the same feeling both in the
predictive and the recollective situations, then we should have a FP before
actually recollecting. But in the predictive situation, we very often only have
a feeling concerning our epistemic capabilities relative to episodic recollec-
tion without carrying out the latter, a point strongly confirmed by the dis-
sociation between EFOK and actual episodic performances in Alzheimer
patients (Souchay et al., 2007). Moreover, on an important line of analysis
(Souchay & Moulin, 2009), even as both feelings cooccur, they, however,
do not confuse with each other. On the mentioned analysis, indeed, one
ought rather to say that positive EFOKs are contingent on partial recol-
lective experience, which implies that they are distinct. Second, as far as
the content is concerned, EFOK is about epistemic capabilities, rather than
about the causal status of an actually represented event, the latter being
precisely the content of the FP. The proceduralist view here defended can
account smoothly for this important difference, since it grounds FP on the
detection of an apparent causal effect, which requires the construction pro-
cess to have occurred for it to display the detected procedural feature. If
this is right, then one should prefer to define FP as a causal-source relative
metacognitive feeling, rather than as an epistemic one.
48 Denis Perrin
4 Conclusion
Where does all this leave us? In what precedes, I have argued for a proceduralist
view of the causal connection required by episodic recollection, rebutting the
representational and metaphysical singularity requirements of the existing
versions of causalism, and for a causal-source relative metacognitive view of
the phenomenology of episodic recollection, framed in the attributionalist
terms of a FP. By way of conclusion, I make it clear how these two threads
should be pieced together.

• The feeling of pastness is efficiently grounded by procedural causality in

episodic memory. Indeed, provided it is a metacognitive feeling about the
causal source of a current mental representation, procedural causality
can explain the FP in terms of the interpretation of the detection of a
procedural effect due to a prior encounter with the represented event.
In particular, this line of analysis is well equipped to account for the
intrinsicness of the pastness feature to the recollective representation
and for the presuppositional singularity feature of the FP.
• Conversely, procedural causality is what the feeling of pastness
phenomenologically represents. The latter has a complex content (not
a merely time-relative content) including the parameters of the cause
of the detected procedural effect: the event appears as a causal singular
source actually experienced by the rememberer in her own past. These
features are precisely the conditions to be satisfied for the mentioned
causal effect to occur in normal circumstances.

If this is correct, an interesting consequence is that, at least as far as

the information conveyed by the phenomenology of episodic memory is
concerned, the encoded content should not be conceived in representational
terms. It ought rather to be explained in procedural terms, as maintained
by Whittlesea (1997), that is: in terms of procedural skills detected as one
is remembering.

Notes
1 Thanks for feedback at the University of Otago, the Thumos seminar of the
University of Geneva and Issues in the Philosophy of Memory (Cologne, 2017).
Special thanks for very helpful written comments to Kourken Michaelian, Sarah
Robins, and Santiago Arango-Munoz.
2 The relation between intentional and phenomenal aspects of sensory experiences
has raised debates of its own. I leave them aside in this paper.
3 A thorough exploration of this point would require to discuss the epistemic
innocence stand (Bortolotti, 2015). I leave it aside for today.
4 The soundness constraint should not be confused with the claim that
phenomenology is always rightly informative rather than misinformative.
Phenomenological information concerns the normal use of memory but excludes
in no way the deviant cases; it rather explains, for such cases, why it can merely
 A Case for Procedural Causality 49
seem that one is remembering. In other terms, I am not committed to the
“doctrine of concordance of cognition, behaviour, and experience” discussed
critically by Tulving (1989, 8).
5 These two criteria are meant to accommodate the relearning cases.
6 This criterion is intended to accommodate the suggestibility case.
7 See (Jacoby et al., 1989). Similar claims are made in source monitoring
framework (Johnson et al., 1993)
8 “When an object is experienced a stimulus enters the system and gives rise to a
pattern of activity over a network of neurons. This pattern of activity is taken to
be the representation of the object” (Bernecker, 2010, 132).
9 Both versions of intentionalism consider that the feeling of pastness is endowed
with a specific meaning, i.e., they endorse the view that “feelings are always
directed toward an object or piece of information” (Arango-Munoz, 2014, 196).
10 There are others, see Friedman (1990).
11 Note that at some point (1983, 187–8) Tulving frames his account of subjective
pastness in terms of feelings of pastness rather than in terms of a structural
“autonoetic” mode of consciousness.

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