How Memories Feel Real: The Sense of Reality in Episodic Remembering

Abstract

Abstract Episodic memories, like perceptions, possess a distinctive justificatory force: subjects naturally take their contents to be or to have been the case. This epistemic affinity between memory and perception, and their shared contrast with imagination, has received insufficient attention in the philosophy of memory. Existing accounts emphasize phenomenological components such as pastness, self, familiarity, and singularity, but none of these fully explains the justificatory force characteristic of memory. Drawing on the phenomenological conception of experiential justification, according to which justificatory force is grounded in phenomenal character, I argue in this paper that the missing explanatory component is the sense of reality, understood as the experience of the represented object or event as independent of one’s representation of it. Building on work on perceptual objectivity, I propose that the sense of reality consists in two constitutive experiences, constancy and coming-into-view, and that episodic memory exhibits both. I further argue that the sense of reality involves two distinguishable dimensions: an existence aspect and an identity aspect, covering both whether and, if so, how objects and events are experienced as mind-independent. This distinction also sheds light on imagination. While imagination can involve partial degrees of the sense of reality, it is fundamentally characterized by a contrasting sense of creativity: the subject’s freedom to determine and modify the imagined content. The sense of reality thus explains both the justificatory force shared by memory and perception and their contrast with imagination.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2026 · DOI ↗