Imperfect Cognitions

We’re continuing our series of post s on “Philosophical Perspectives on Confabulation” - our special issue in the journal Topoi this week. In today’s post,  Sarah Robins , Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas, introduces her paper “ Mnemonic Confabulation ”. The motivation for this paper was the following question: How are discussions of confabulation in the philosophy of memory related to discussions of confabulation in empirical and clinical work? At first pass, it’s easy to suppose that they’re closely related. After all, both focus on confabulatory remembering. For philosophers of memory, confabulation is one of many memory errors (alongside misremembering, forgetting, relearning, etc.) that needs to be distinguished from successful remembering.  In clinical work, interest in confabulation began with Korsakoff (1885) and Wernicke’s (1906) observations of bizarre false memory reports in patients with amnesia and dementia. Despite the s...

Today's post is by Jordi Fernández . He is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Adelaide . Jordi's research interests are mainly in philosophy of mind, epistemology and metaphysics. He is particularly interested in self-knowledge and memory.  He is the author of Transparent Minds (2013), a monograph on self-knowledge, and he is currently working on a monograph on memory. He is also interested in cognitive science and continental philosophy. Jordi's post is the second of a series on chapters from the New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory collection. (See here for the first in the series.) He discusses his chapter " The functional character of memory ". Consider the question of what is to remember something, as opposed to imagining it. This is a question that I have tackled in a recent article. I try not to appeal to the phenomenology of memories, or the content of memories, or the kind of knowledge that memories provide. The rea...

This post is by Alessandra Tanesini . Alessandra is a Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University working on epistemology and philosophy of language. In this post she summarises some of her recent work on collective amnesia and epistemic injustice. Thanks to Ema for inviting me to contribute this snapshot of my current research for the readers of the blog. Epistemologists, unlike psychologists, have in the past focused on notions such as knowledge, truth, justification, belief or virtue that have positive epistemic status. Instead, I want to develop accounts of those things whose epistemic status is negative. These include: vices, bias and ignorance. I have written a paper on intellectual arrogance which I shall deliver at the Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and Mind Association in July. A pre-proofs draft is already available here . I have also given talks on the epistemology of implicit bias. A podcast can be heard here . More recently I have written and given talks...

Martin Davies This is the third part of an interview with Professor Martin Davies on delusions. (Although this part can be read independently of the previous two, you may want to read also the first and second part of the interview if you haven't done so already!) LB: In the first stage of our project PERFECT we are going to ask whether delusions can have pragmatic and epistemic benefits. You and your collaborators have noticed how anosognosia (denial of illness), despite initially interfering with rehabilitation, can then lead to lower anxiety and protect from negative emotions ( Aimola Davies et al., 2009 ). Can you think of other examples of delusions having a positive psychological impact?  MKD: Let me begin by reviewing the findings that you mentioned in your question. Some researchers distinguish denial of illness from anosognosia and use the ‘denial’ terminology for cases with a ‘psychological’ rather than neurological aetiology. In our paper, we referred to a th...