Alberto Guerrero Velázquez – Filósofo de la Memoria

Alberto Guerrero-Velázquez

Philosopher, Cognitive Scientist

I am a philosopher of mind and memory. I hold a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy, a specialisation in Social Sciences, and a master’s degree in Cognitive Sciences. I have been working as a teacher since 2007 and as a teacher trainer since 2014.

Currently, I am a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Western Australia (UWA), under the supervision of Rob Wilson. My research focuses on episodic thinking, with a specific emphasis on episodic memory and its interaction with imagination, identity, language, and collective memory…

Creating the self: The construction of identity through self-narration in autobiographical interviews

Philosophical Psychology, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2025.2608901íso

Autobiographical interviews are a key tool in various social science disciplines. Autobiographical narratives, the product of these interviews, suggest that individuals use self-narration to construct their identity. In addition to remembering, interviewees often engage in parallel additional mental tasks (AMTs), such as action evaluation, counterfactual imagination, and value expression. Although research on autobiographical interviews has highlighted the occurrence of these AMTs, the cognitive processes behind them remain underexplored. In this article, I draw on the theoretical framework of Simulation Theory, which is influential in the psychology and philosophy of memory, to examine the nature of AMTs and their role in identity construction. According to simulationist accounts, remembering personal past events relies on mental simulation as a general mechanism for episodic construction. I argue that this mechanism not only enables recalling information about the past but also supports AMTs that help achieve the agent’s current goals. In autobiographical interviews, the coordinated use of recalling information about the past and engaging in AMTs serves to construct identity through self-narration. AMTs play a key role in reinforcing or altering beliefs about the self by tapping into the malleability of memory and the need for coherence between memories and self-conceptions.

Read Online

Constructive Memory in Truth-Telling for Reconciliation

Guerrero-Velázquez, A. and Enciso, S.W. (2025). Journal of Applied Philosophy. https://doi.org/10.1002/japp.70066ín July/Dec. 2021 Epub Sep 22, 2021

Truth-telling has, in diverse contexts, been conceptualised as a vehicle for achieving reconciliation following injustice. As a social and political phenomenon, it involves the communication of narratives grounded in episodic memory. Such narratives may fail to reproduce the details of past events and may even include details that were not present in the original experience. To explore this issue, we examine the conservative backlash against the testimonies of the Stolen Generations in Australia, where perceived inaccuracies in remembering were used to discredit victim-survivor testimony. We argue that this backlash was based on epistemic and conceptual errors, relying as it did on a mischaracterisation of False Memory Syndrome (FMS) and a narrow view of memory that does not align with the current scientific understanding. We propose that a constructive view of memory is better suited to the task of truth-telling and reconciliation, and we consider how the epistemic risks associated with this view might be addressed.

Read the article

See all the Publications

Moments

Like a tragic litany, dull memory repeats itself. Living memory, on the other hand, is born anew each day, for it exists from what was and against what was.

Eduardo Galeano

El libro de los abrazos

The identity of a person is not their name, the place where they were born, or the date they came into the world. A person’s identity consists, quite simply, in being, and being cannot be denied.