Abstract
Wittgenstein is drawing psychologists attention to the heterogeneity of the category of memory, and the corresponding unlikelihood that the variegated phenomena they refer to with the term “memory” will be amenable to any unified explanatory model. Procedural memory has nothing essentially to do with conscious recall of prior events: one can, in principle, know how to do something while having completely forgotten learning to do it. The ambiguity embodied in the concept of episodic memory, then, is that between the episode experienced and the experience of the episode. The idea of an episodic memory as a trace of the episode of which it is a memory conforms to this general schema quite closely. The representational account of episodic memory is a realist account in two senses. First, it is realist about the past: it assumed that at some point in the past, episodes of certain sorts occurred. Second, it is realist about the possibility of representation of the past.