Constructing Memories, Episodic and Semantic

What is the nature of semantic memory? Philosophers and cognitive scientists have long held that semantic memory stores invariant knowledge structures to be retrieved as such. In this paper, I argue that this conception of semantic memory is likely false. In particular, I argue that if episodic and semantic memory share causal mechanisms, and episodic memory is (re)constructive, then semantic memory is likely constructive too. I review evidence that suggests that episodic and semantic memory are subserved by a domain-general system that supports representing and navigating relations among various kinds of stimuli, including space, time, events, and semantic relations. I then review the supposed hallmark properties of constructivism in episodic memory and show that they appear in semantic memory as well. To increase the inductive support for my proposal, I show how the view predicts some of the evidence others have marshaled in favor of a constructivist semantic memory system. Finally, I close by providing a proof of concept for the view on offer, the semantic pointer architecture.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Cognitive Sciences

• Publication date

  2025-09-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Philosophy, Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1111/cogs.70113PMID 40952833
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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