 Philosophers have often treated remembering as a basically preservative process, but this should not be taken to suggest that content invariantism is the standard view in philosophy. While there have been attempts to identify purely preservative forms of memory (Dokic 2001), most philosophical theories of remembering allow for two kinds of variance between the content of retrieved representations and the content of perceptual representations. First, all theories allow for the subtraction of content through forgetting. Second, many theories allow for the addition of self-reflexive, second-order content of the sort described in section 3. Thus content variantism is in fact the standard view. Note, however, that the standard form of content variantism permits the addition of second-order content concerning the subject’s relationship to the remembered event but forbids the addition of first-order content concerning the event itself. Most theories of remembering thus remain preservationist in spirit. Another possible form of content variantism permits the addition of both second-order content and first-order content. Generationist theories of remembering entail this more radical form of content variantism.