Varieties of memory, varieties of reconstruction, varieties of memory trace

The biological world is rich in variation, both in bodies and in minds. A particularly clear case is memory, where traditional taxonomies increasingly face challenges capturing the full extent of variation. Meanwhile, a central debate within philosophy of memory has focused on whether episodic memory requires memory traces, given the role of simulation in episodic remembering. Do other forms of memory involve traces and simulation in the same way as episodic memory, and if they do, does this undermine episodic memory’s claim to be a natural kind? Trace minimalist approaches see the role of simulation in memory retrieval as a means of extracting a rich, reliable yet fallible representation from a trace storing compressed information. This insight can be generalised to a broader class of theories, Minimal Trace Minimalism. Within this broader class, ‘Trace Pluralist’ theories suggest, surprisingly, that the basic computation of compressed storage and potentially fallible reconstruction shows up not just in episodic memory, but equally in paradigmatic cases of semantic memory. This motivates replacing the episodic/semantic distinction with a richer, more systematic array of categories, and reevaluating our understanding of semantic memory and related notions such as belief.