Memory and the intentional stance
Despite Dennett's vast scholarship, he seemed to only have directly addressed the topic of memory in a relatively unknown coauthored article published in a somewhat obscure volume. The current chapter attempts to reconstruct the ideas from this old article, and argues that it offers a viable and coherent view of episodic memory with substantial empirical support. Specifically, the chapter uncovers three empirically supported theses. A functional thesis, according to which our memory system not only processes information about past events but also uses this information to construct useful anticipations of possible future events. A computational thesis, according to which statistical regularities, along with individual limitations and goals, probabilistically constrain the search space examined during memory retrieval. And a metaphysical thesis, according to which memories do not exist as subpersonal-level brain structures encoding particular intentional contents but rather as personal-level psychological phenomena only accessible from the intentional stance.
