The Structure of Time in Autobiographical Memory

Much of ordinary memory is autobiographical; memory of what one saw and did, where and when. It may derive from your own past experiences, or from what other people told you about your past life. It may be phenomenologically rich, redolent of that autumn afternoon so long ago, or a few austere reports of what happened. But all autobiographical memory is first-person memory, stateable using ‘I’. It is a memory you would express by saying, ‘I remember I...’. My question is whether this autobiographical memory requires the conception of time as linear. To think of time as linear is to suppose that times are ordered by ‘earlier than ’ in a way that is irreflexive, anti-symmetric, transitive and connected. If we identify times using the ordinary Western clock and calendar we do seem to be supposing that time is linear, and we are using a method of identifying times that could be said to be ‘canonical ’ in the sense that the temporal relations between any two times can simply be read off from the ways in which they are identified: it is immediately apparent that, for example, Thursday 25th December 1963 is before Friday 26th December 1963. But autobiographical memory could