While writing a paper on the phenomenology of memory and after receiving some feedback, I found myself questioning the role and importance of phenomenology in memory research. Why is it important to investigate the phenomenology of an experience? Why does it matter to distinguish memory from imagination from a subjective point of view? What relevance can phenomenology have compared to metaphysical and naturalistic questions about the conditions for successful remembering?
I would like to start with a somewhat surprising example that occurred to me at the end of my reflections on this topic, as a consequence of my account.
Consider cases of idealization. Think of someone who idealizes a romantic partner, seeing them as perfect and flawless, interpreting every gesture as proof of their exceptional character. Or think of someone who idealizes a period of their life, reinterpreting it through an imaginative lens that filters out its negative aspects.
In psychology and everyday discourse, we often talk about “projecting” our fantasies onto someone or something. In idealization, we interpret a person’s character or a period of our life through an imaginative lens, rather than perceiving things as they actually are or remembering them as they actually were.
What is most striking about idealization—and part of what makes it problematic—is that the subject often does not realize that they are idealizing. They genuinely believe that they are objectively interpreting a person’s character. They take their interpretation to reveal reality.
How shocking is it, then, when one realizes that what seemed to be the objective character of a person was nothing more than one’s own fantasy projected onto them? The discovery can be devastating precisely because it felt so real.
To understand why idealization can be so compelling and disturbing, I propose thinking about it through the notion of the sense of reality, which I analyze in my work. From a phenomenological perspective, experiences that appear to give us access to (part of) objective reality are characterized by a sense of reality—a kind of phenomenological marker that indicates to the subject that their experience represents something “out there,” something that it is not produced by their own mind. This is what philosophers call mind-independence (Siegel 2006; Ratcliffe 2008; Ferretti 2024): the content of an experience appears as existing independently of the experience of it—as independent of the mind that represents it.
Perception is the paradigmatic case here (Matthen 2005; Dokic and Martin 2017). When I see the coffee mug on my desk, the mug appears as existing independently of my seeing it. In my paper, I argue that episodic memory is characterized by the same phenomenological feature. When I remember my birthday party, the remembered event likewise appears as something that existed independently of my remembering it.
This sense of reality marks an important contrast with standard cases of imagination. In imagining, I typically experience myself as creating or constructing the content. The imagined scenario feels dependent on my imaginative activity: I am free to modify it as I like.
Things are more complex, however. There are cases of imagination that also involve a sense of reality. One might argue, for instance, that when we imagine an actual object or (part of) the actual world, the imaginative content has a certain independence and is not fully under our control. A particularly striking example is our engagement with fictional characters.
When I imagine Anna Karenina, this imaginative content possesses a sense of reality: Anna’s representation does not depend on my imagination, but on Leo Tolstoy’s novel. Yet even here, there remains a sense in which I am free to use this “abstract entity” as I please. I can imagine her in scenarios that Tolstoy never described, or imagine her differently from how he portrayed her. For instance, I can imagine Anna Karenina as a Black woman, and this is perfectly legitimate within the context of, a creative reimagining of Tolstoy’s novel or a thought experiment exploring alternative narratives.
Contrast this with memory. If, during a literature exam, I remember that Anna Karenina is a Black woman, this is simply false—and I will fail my exam. Memory commits me to a claim about what is fictionally or was actually the case, and that claim can be correct or incorrect. Imagination, by contrast, does not bind me in the same way: it does not commit the subject to claims about the original text or historical facts, but rather explores possibilities.
Importantly, the sense of reality is a phenomenological marker—it does not guarantee veridicality or success. The same feature characterizes not only veridical perception and successful remembering, but also hallucinations, confabulations, and false memories.
The sense of reality is therefore not a condition for veridically perceiving or successfully remembering. Rather, it indicates how strongly an experience impacts the subject’s epistemic life. When an experience presents its content as real, we tend to trust it: we form beliefs on its basis, act on it, and rely on it in planning. In this way, the sense of reality gives mental states their justificatory force from the subject’s perspective.
This is precisely why cases like hallucination, confabulation, and idealization are so shocking and unsettling. In idealization, the subject’s interpretation of the other person comes with a sense of reality: it is experienced as revealing how the person really is.
When the idealization shatters—when reality breaks through—the subject does not simply discover that they were wrong. They discover that what felt like a realistic interpretation of someone’s character was, all along, something they themselves had “made up,” something intrinsically imaginative in this sense. The same happens when one realizes one has been hallucinating or confabulating. What felt like perceiving or remembering reality turns out to have been produced by the subject—it was like imagining.
The phenomenological marker they trusted, that guided their beliefs and actions, has misled them. This explains the distinctive shock that accompanies such realizations.
The devastating feeling comes not just from being wrong, but from realizing that one’s own phenomenology—the very thing that felt most trustworthy—was unreliable.
This, I think, is where the phenomenological approach proves its importance. The sense of reality does not neatly track the metaphysical distinction between memory and imagination. But it helps explain why we treat some mental states as authoritative, why we believe them, and why we act on them. It explains why we take mnemic content to have been the case, unlike imaginative content. And it sheds light on why cases like hallucination, confabulation, and idealization are so compelling and disturbing: the subject starts mistrusting a phenomenological marker that was there for them to be trusted.
More broadly, phenomenology is essential for understanding social and psychological phenomena, making sense of people’s experiences, and explaining why we take certain things in the way we do. The sense of reality clarifies not only what people believe, but why they trust certain mental states over others. It illuminates how experiences feel from the inside, and how this felt quality shapes our epistemic lives.
The phenomenological approach does not replace naturalistic or metaphysical investigations of memory. Rather, it addresses a different—and equally important—set of questions. It helps us understand the lived experience of remembering, the felt difference between remembering and imagining, and the subjective grounds on which we base our trust in memory.
And that, I think, is worth investigating.
A special thanks to Lucia Recchia for the many conversations on idealization, for suggesting the example of idealizing a period of one’s past, and for her constant support in navigating the sense of our realities. Special thanks as well to Peter Langland-Hassan, Jonathan Najenson, and Juan F. Álvarez for their thoughtful feedback, which pushed me to reflect more deeply on my project, to question what I am doing, and ultimately helped me improve it in invaluable ways.
the calibration discourse is wild! where can we read more? thank you so much