Memory and the Search for Natural Kinds

The chapter proceeds by focusing on four different but connected topics: The first topic concerns the question of how we should conceive of a natural kind and what the advantages and disadvantages of the various theories of natural kinds are—see section 1. We will opt for the HPC notion of natural kinds. The second topic discusses various kinding strategies for psychological phenomena, in general, and memory, in particular. More concretely: In section 2, we address the minimal notion of memory, which amounts to a general functionalist definition of memory. In section 3, we turn to (folk-)psychological kinds and the idea of the autonomy of psychology. Section 4 proceeds with a related discussion, namely, the “language-first” approach and the classification of memories by types of contents. Section 5 reviews the hierarchical taxonomy of memories most prominent in psychology. Section 6 discusses a route to the classification of memories that starts from the phenomenological characterization of different types of consciousness, where episodic memory is characterized by autonoetic consciousness. It relates to the view that episodic memory is just one form of mental time travel and subserved by a more general episodic simulation mechanisms. This leads over to the third topic, namely, whether episodic memory, specifically, is a natural kind. To substantiate this, in section 7, we take a closer look on memory traces as a mechanism distinctive of episodic memory, and, in section 8, we discuss the proposal that hippocampal replay and scenario construction are the uniform mechanism underlying episodic memory. This ultimately results in the categorization of episodic memories as a natural kind in the HPC sense. Section 9, summarizes the conclusions and provides an outlook.