Skip to main content

PERFECT 2018 Confabulation Workshop

On Wednesday 23rd May, PERFECT will host its third annual workshop, at St Anne’s College, Oxford. This year, our topic is confabulation, and we’re excited to welcome leading researchers in the field for a stimulating programme of presentations.

The talks explore a number of philosophical issues arising from confabulation, and will be of interest to philosophers of mind, philosophers of psychology and epistemologists. Papers to be presented also examine confabulation in relation to wider research programmes in cognitive science and psychiatry, and so we also welcome researchers from all disciplines of the mind who are interested in how we give accounts of our experiences, choices and actions.




The speakers will address a range of issues, with some exploring an aspect of confabulation that is underdeveloped or has been overlooked in previous work, whilst others propose a new model of the phenomenon that helps to explain and bring clarity to existing observations.





In her talk, Sarah Robins will focus on the possibility of veridical confabulation and how this possibility pushes us to clarify successful remembering and explaining, as well as what it tells us about the nature and extent of the phenomenon of confabulation itself.

William Hirstein will consider how recent empirical research counts against the standard model of Capgras syndrome, a condition in which patients confabulate about their loved ones. He will offer an alternative to the standard interpretation of the condition, arguing that this is a better fit with the evidence.

Derek Strijbos and Leon de Bruin extend previous work undertaken on the “mindshaping” interpretation of confabulation as an alternative to the mainstream “mindreading” view in their talk, offering an exploration of the relevant folk psychological norm that underwrites this interpretation.

I’ll look at confabulation in the context of a more general faculty for organising experience into a coherent narrative, and how interventions to reduce confabulation must account for the epistemic benefits of this faculty as revealed by other research programmes in cognitive science.

In her talk, Louise Moody argues that the notion of confabulation is central to understanding key characteristics of the phenomenology of dreaming, and demonstrates that this revisionary theory of dreams reveals new insights into confabulation.

I hope you’ll join us in May! For the full programme, further information, and to register, please follow this link.

Popular posts from this blog

Delusions in the DSM 5

This post is by Lisa Bortolotti. How has the definition of delusions changed in the DSM 5? Here are some first impressions. In the DSM-IV (Glossary) delusions were defined as follows: Delusion. A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith). When a false belief involves a value judgment, it is regarded as a delusion only when the judgment is so extreme as to defy credibility.

Motivated Reasoning in Science

Today's post is by Josh May (University of Alabama, Birmingham). In this post, he talks about one of his papers published in Synthese and entitled " Bias in Science ". Josh May Much discussion of the replication crisis in science has focused on the social sciences, particularly psychology. A common narrative is that the social sciences are particularly susceptible to powerful biases, such as moral and political ideology. I argue instead for a parity thesis: all areas of science are subject to bias, through the general psychological mechanism of motivated reasoning . This provides a unified framework for understanding how values influence the entire scientific enterprise. The scientific process involves numerous decisions that can be influenced by one's values--including moral, political, and prudential values--which manifest as goals or motivations. A researcher wants badly, say, to publish in a prestigious journal in order to either advance her career or maintain ...

Rationalization: Why your intelligence, vigilance and expertise probably don't protect you

Today's post is by Jonathan Ellis , Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Public Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Eric Schwitzgebel , Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. This is the first in a two-part contribution on their paper "Rationalization in Moral and Philosophical thought" in Moral Inferences , eds. J. F. Bonnefon and B. Trémolière (Psychology Press, 2017). We’ve all been there. You’re arguing with someone – about politics, or a policy at work, or about whose turn it is to do the dishes – and they keep finding all kinds of self-serving justifications for their view. When one of their arguments is defeated, rather than rethinking their position they just leap to another argument, then maybe another. They’re rationalizing –coming up with convenient defenses for what they want to believe, rather than responding even-handedly to the points you're making. Yo...