Against Perrin’s Embodied Causalism: Still no Evidence for the Necessity of Appropriate Causation

Perrin (2021) has two main goals. First, to attack the simulation theory of memory on its empirical home turf. Second, to defend a novel embodied causal theory of memory designed to avoid the empirical difficulties that beset both the classical causal theory of memory and—if Perrin is right—the simulation theory of memory. In pursuit of his first goal, Perrin argues that the empirical evidence to which simulationists appeal does not in fact support simulationism. In pursuit of his second goal, he argues that that very evidence supports causalism in general and, moreover, that additional empirical evidence supports an embodied form of causalism in particular. This paper likewise has two goals. First, to critique Perrin’s attempt to show that the evidence to which simulationists appeal supports causalism rather than simulationism. Second, to show that, regardless of whether Perrin is successful with respect to his first purpose, he is unsuccessful with respect to his second—to show, that is, that the additional evidence that he adduces fails to provide any support for the necessity of the sort of embodied appropriate causation that figures in the embodied causal theory. If the paper achieves its two goals, embodied causalism is in the same empirically-leaky boat as more traditional forms of causalism, and the empirical evidence continues to favour simulationism over causalism.