ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I consider the unique way memory and imagination cooperate in the use of mnemonic techniques. Mnemonics are a loose collection of strategies and methods for improving one’s ability to remember. I focus specifically on the method of loci (MoL), which involves use of a “memory palace” where items to be remembered are assigned particular imagistic associations and placed in particular locations within the mental palace one has constructed. Understanding this technique – how widely effective and available it is, and how integral it can be to the activity of remembering when it is used – is useful and will, I hope, encourage further theoretical and empirical exploration into it and other mnemonic techniques. Consideration of the technique also provides an understanding of a distinctive and significant way that memory and imagination can interact. I argue that the MoL is a way of remembering via constructive imagination. The way in which the technique makes use of our imaginative capacities is interesting – inherently so, but also in relation to recent work in philosophy of memory where episodic memory is understood as a form of constructive imagination. Both may be uses of constructive imagination, but the MoL and episodic remembering engage this imaginative capacity differently. Episodic remembering and mnemonic techniques share a representational format, but they are otherwise quite distinct. Remembering past experiences is not much like building a memory palace. In this way, remembering via mnemonics offers us an important case from which more standard forms of remembering can be contrasted and, hopefully, better understood.
