ABSTRACT
The demarcation between episodic memory and semantic memory remains a contested area in both psychology and philosophy. In this chapter, I outline a new characterization of the difference between episodic memory and semantic memory, which connects that difference to what is sometimes called the ‘epistemic asymmetry’ between the past and the future. My proposal will be that episodic memory and semantic memory exemplify the epistemic asymmetry in two different ways, and for somewhat different reasons, and that the way in which episodic memory exemplifies the epistemic asymmetry is manifest to the remembering subject in a way in which this is not the case for semantic memory. The reasons for this have to do with the specific kind of knowledge that is retained in episodic memory—the knowledge as to what it was like to experience the event in question—and with the fact that the only epistemic means of acquiring this knowledge is through having the relevant experience itself.
