Imperfect Cognitions

We continue to hear from contributors to our special issue on confabulation in Topoi. In today’s post, Leon de Bruin , Senior Research Fellow in philosophy at VU University Amsterdam and Radboud University Nijmegen , and Derek Strijbos , psychiatrist and research fellow at Dimence Group in Zwolle, and a post-doctoral philosopher at Radboud University Nijmegen, introduce their paper “ Does Confabulation Pose a Threat to First-Person Authority? Mindshaping, Self-Regulation and the Importance of Self-Know-How ”. In social practice, self-ascriptions of mental states are often treated as having a special kind of first-person authority. When people self-ascribe mental states, we by default treat them as being in a privileged position to know their own mind. That is: relative to what others know and claim about their mental states. In our paper we focus on the issue how confabulation, both of the everyday and clinical kind, affects this first-person authority of mental state self-...

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 ...