Episodic Memory in Animals

Abstract

Do animals have episodic memory—the kind of memory which gives us rich details about particular past events—or is this uniquely human? This might look like an empirical question, but is attracting increasing philosophical attention. We review relevant behavioural evidence, as well as drawing attention to neuroscientific and computational evidence which has been less discussed in philosophy. Next, we distinguish and evaluate reasons for scepticism about episodic memory in animals. In the process, we articulate three pressing philosophical issues underlying these sceptical arguments, which should be the focus of future work. The Problem of Interspecific Variation asks which differences between humans and animal memory mean that an animal has a variant of episodic memory, and which mean that it has a different kind of memory altogether. The Problem of Functional Variation asks how we should conceptualise the functions of episodic memory and other capacities across species and across evolutionary time. Finally, the Problem of Alternatives asks what, besides episodic memory, might explain the evidence—and how we should evaluate competing explanations.