Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Alessandro Fiorello, an adjunct philosophy professor at the University of Ottawa, where he also received his PhD in 2025. His main research interests are in free will, narrative views of personal identity, ethics, and related topics in the metaphysics of death and philosophy of religion. Alessandro Fiorello                                         All human beings have at least one thing in common: we are all going to die. Achievements in nutrition, public health, and medical science have increased human longevity. Many people believe that increasing our longevity indefinitely would be desirable. But what if being given indefinite extended longevity creates a kind of boredom with one’s life that cannot be solved by finding new things to do? In my recent essay, “Terminal Boredom, Longevity, and Narrative” I analyse a famous argument against the desirability of immortalit...

This week's blogpost comes from Regina Fabry , a philosopher of mind and cognition and works as a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Discipline of Philosophy, School of Humanities at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her research currently focusses on self-narration, grief, human-technology interactions, and their intersections. In working on these topics, she brings together philosophical theorising on situated cognition and affectivity with feminist scholarship and research in literary and cultural studies, the empirical cognitive sciences, and AI. Regina Fabry Self-narration is an important part of our mental lives. The configuration and re-configuration of our personal past experiences – and our anticipated futures – in narrative form, many philosophers argue, can be conducive to self-knowledge and self-understanding . Furthermore, self-narratives are an important part of human sociality by facilitating collaborative modes of meaning-making . While self-narratives can take vari...

In this post, Kathleen reports from the 'Experiences of Loss' Conference which took place on the 26th and 27th October 2023, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The conference was organised and ran by Sabrina Coninx (VU Amsterdam). The selection of talks over two days all spoke to the theme of loss in different contexts, addressing self, illness, and memory.  Day 1 Regina Fabry Regina Fabry (Macquarie University): Sharing experiences of loss through self-narration: possibilities and limitations. (online) Regina first clarified the concept of a self-narrative. Individuals might also draw on master narratives, which are widely shared in a socio-cultural community or society. These are value-laden, usually reflecting systems of power and oppression in play. Individuals might push back against these master narratives with alternative narratives, as a form of resistance. In cases of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), there is a sense of loss or absence which is very much felt by the...

Today's post is by Grace Hibshman at University of Notre Dame on her recent paper “ Narrative, Second-Person Experience, and Self-Perception: A Reason it is Good to Conceive of One’s Life Narratively ” ( The Philosophical Quarterly 2022). Grace Hibshman In the  Lord of the Rings  trilogy, when Frodo and Sam are struggling to persevere on their quest, they turn to remembering the tales of old and wondering whether their journey will one day be put into songs and tales and told by the firesides of their people. Conceiving of their life narratively in this way as part of a great web of stories helps the hobbits find meaning and courage, and it seems that it can be similarly helpful for people in general as well. But why might this be? Why might conceiving of one’s life narratively be conducive to one’s flourishing? In my paper, I argue that conceiving of one’s life narratively as a part of the songs and tales of old can prompt one to imagine how an audience might experience hear...

In this post, part of a series on the new journal Memory, Mind & Media , Katie Laker interviews Robyn Fivush, whose article, co-authored with Ariel Grysman, is entitled: ' Narrative and gender as mutually constituted meaning-making systems ’ and is available open access. Robyn Fivush KL: Firstly, thank you for being part of the Memory, Mind & Media inaugural collection. Why was MMM a good fit for your paper? RF: The two core constructs that we explore in our paper, narrative and gender, are inherently interdisciplinary and culturally mediated. No single discipline can fully define or even describe either of these constructs; they require a broad synthesis across multiple ways of knowing. And both are fully culturally mediated; both narrative and gender derive from socially and culturally saturated lenses that find expression in multiple media formats, from books to memes.  MMM is committed to fostering conversations at the intersection of cognitive, social and cultural app...

This post is by Meghan Griffith  (Davidson College). Meghan Griffith In “ Narrative Capacity and Moral Responsibility ”, I argue that our ability to understand and tell stories plays a role in moral responsibility. One standard approach to moral responsibility involves “reasons-responsiveness.” If we can recognize and react to reasons for acting, then it seems that we are in control of our behavior, and therefore responsible (see Fischer and Ravizza 1998 for an influential account). I think “narrative capacity” enhances our sensitivity to reasons. Narrative capacity is a way of making sense of the world (Velleman 2003, 1) and involves understanding the “meaning-affecting” relation between events (Rosati 2013, 34). In other words, we come to understand and interpret the events in our lives within the context of a story. Each event is not interpreted on its own. Instead, its meaning is “conditioned by” its relation to other events (Schechtman 2007, 162). For example, an event might b...

A month from the end of project PERFECT, Michael Larkin (Co-Investigator) and Valeria Motta (Doctoral Research Fellow) reflect on what the project meant for them. One helpful way to think about being involved in a project as expansive as PERFECT is to reflect on where it is sending you next. In this post, we discuss some of the things they have learned from our interdisciplinary work together. Michael Larkin Michael : One of the most interesting aspects of PERFECT for me has arisen from the opportunity to work with you on your PhD. It’s going to be a really innovative combination of philosophical argument and phenomenological-psychological investigation. I’m aware that – coming into it – you were already very well-read on the phenomenological philosophy. I’m curious to know what has struck you most about getting to grips with qualitative methods in psychology? Valeria Motta Valeria : Thank you Michael. It was very interesting for me working with you too. I was s...

In which I confabulate (in a sense I’ll leave up to the reader to determine) about my recent paper “ Confabulation, Explanation, and the Pursuit of Resonant Meaning ”. This is the final post in our series dedicated to our special issue “Philosophical Perspectives on Confabulation” in Topoi, so let me take the opportunity to thank all of the authors for contributing to what I think has turned out to be a fantastic resource on current philosophical and psychological thinking on the topic. You can revisit the other posts in the the series  (and find links to the full papers)  here . I don’t really understand ball sports. I mean that in the sense that, if I’m ever a spectator to a bunch of people throwing/kicking/hitting an inflated spherical object around a pitch, I’m usually not familiar with the rules, and I just don’t get a lot of what’s going on, and end up losing interest. But I also mean it in the sense that I am just not stirred up by a lot of the grandiose spor...

Today’s post is by Joshua Bergamin , philosopher and performance artist based in Edinburgh, Scotland, who continues our series on our Topoi special issue on confabulation with a summary of his paper “ An Excess of Meaning: Conceptual Over-Interpretation in Confabulation and Schizophrenia ”. Most of my academic work centres on the effects of language and conceptual capacities on human consciousness, particularly on what I suspect is the role of language in creating and maintaining a sense of (egoistic) self. This was the subject of my doctoral thesis, in which I touched upon confabulation, since it presents an interesting tension between our feeling of being a unitary agent, and the underlying motivations of our actions, however they might be described. Thus, although much of the literature on confabulation is concerned with the fascinating -- and often bizarre -- pathological cases that arise through brain injury, my interest has leaned more towards the kinds of everyd...

Luca Malatesti (left in the picture below) and Filip Čeč (right) collaborated on the project Classification and explanations of antisocial personality disorder and moral and legal responsibility in the context of the Croatian mental health and care law (CEASCRO), funded by the Croatian Science Foundation (HRZZ-IP-2013-11-8071).  Both are  based in the  Department of Philosophy  of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka (Croatia).  Luca  is associate professor of philosophy and works mainly in philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychiatry.  Filip  is assistant professor of philosophy and his interests include the metaphysical problem of free will and moral responsibility, and the history of psychiatry. In this post Luca and Filip summarize their chapter ‘Identification and self-knowledge’, that is contained in the collection edited by Patrizia Pedrini and Julie Kirsch,  Third-Person Self-Knowledge, Self-Interpre...

This post has been written by Dariusz Galasiński, who is  Professor  at the University of Wolverhampton and Visiting Professor  at the Uniwersytet SPWS in Warsaw.  He is a linguist interested in psychiatry and psychology and their discourses. He blogs  here .  In this post, he presents his new  book on discursive constructions of the suicide process. My book is founded on a contradiction. Suicide and masculinity do not and cannot sit together easily. Suicide is stigmatised, and people who killed themselves are often thought to be weak and cowardly. Masculinity is anything but this. Its dominant model constructs men as strong ‘masters of the universe’. My book explores a number of resulting paradoxes. 1. The first paradox has to do with constructions of suicide. Even though suicide is constructed as a rational gift, it is not spoken of directly. The positive gift is outside discourse. For as the notes construct men as 'defenders' of the ...

Jens Brockmeier is a Professor in the Psychology department at the American University of Paris. With a background in philosophy, psychology, and language studies, he is concerned with the cultural fabric of mind and language - language understood as a form of life and central dimension of human development. He is the author of Culture and Narrative (Mimesis, 2014) and a co-editor (with L.-C Hyden and H. Lindemann Nelson) of Beyond Loss: Dementia, Memory, and Identity (OUP, 2014). In this blog post he talks about his latest book Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process In recent work, Brockmeier has been investigating narrative as psychological, linguistic, and cultural practice. His main interest is in the function of narrative for autobiographical memory, personal identity, and the understanding of time, issues he has explored both empirically and philosophically – empirically, in various languages and sociocultural contexts, and under conditi...

In this post, I report on our third annual workshop, this year with a focus on confabulation, which took place last month at St Anne’s College, Oxford. We had an international programme of talks from both philosophers and psychologists, and talks addressed a range of topics, including exploration of both the varieties and boundaries of the phenomenon of confabulation; application of the notion to new areas of study; and how developments in conceptual models of confabulation influence new therapeutic interventions. Sarah Robins addressed the phenomenon of mnemonic confabulation, or confabulation in memory. In her talk, she demonstrated that although discussions of confabulation began with aspects of memory, mnemonic confabulation is importantly dissimilar from other confabulatory phenomena. In mnemonic confabulation, there is no relationship between the remembered event and an occurrence in the rememberer’s past. However, claiming to remember an event is generally considered ...

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. I...