Skip to main content

Call for Papers: Confabulation and Epistemic Innocence

Elisabetta Lalumera is organising a Confabulation and Epistemic Innocence workshop at the University of Milano-Bicocca (image below), to be held in Milan (Italy) on May 28, 2018.



Below you find a call for papers for the event.


Summary of topic

When people are unaware of information that accounts for some phenomenon, this does not necessarily prevent them from offering a sincere, but often inaccurate, explanation. Indeed, whilst confabulation has been shown to occur alongside psychiatric diagnoses featuring serious memory impairments, and in people undergoing symptoms of mental distress, it also occurs regularly in people with no such diagnoses or symptoms.

Some cognitions which fail to accurately represent reality may nonetheless have redeeming features that promote good functioning in a variety of domains. Inaccurate cognitions may misrepresent the world, but can also bring psychological and practical benefits. More recently, philosophers have pointed out that epistemically costly cognitions can also sometimes have positive epistemic features.

When these epistemic benefits are significant, and could not be attained in other ways, then the cognition can be considered “epistemically innocent”. The notion of epistemic innocence has already been discussed in the case of some inaccurate cognitions, such as delusions, but whether or not confabulation counts as epistemically innocent is a relatively underexplored issue.

Sample questions

  • What are the epistemic costs of confabulation and are there any epistemic benefits? 
  • How should epistemic costs and potential benefits of confabulation be adjudicated? 
  • Are the potential epistemic benefits of confabulation related to, or independent of, any psychological benefits? 
  • Is providing an inaccurate answer or an inaccurate explanation better (and in what sense) than providing no answer or no explanation at all? 
  • Are the costs and benefits of clinical confabulation comparable to those of non-clinical confabulation?


Instructions, review process, and timeline

Please submit a 500-word paper by 28th February 2018. The short paper is supposed to sketch the main argument and include some reference to its conclusions and implications. Contributors will be informed by 30th March 2018 whether their short papers have been selected for presentation at the workshop.

For the authors whose short papers are selected for presentation, there may also be an opportunity to submit a full paper (max. 8000 words) by 30th June 2018 for inclusion in a special issue of a journal on the philosophy of confabulation.

Please submit your 500-word papers to Valeria Motta as an email attachment. The title should be CONFABULATION 2018 [SURNAME OF AUTHOR]. Identifying information such as the full name of the authors, their email addresses, and their affiliations should not appear in the attachment, but only in the body of the email. The attachment should contain a blind version of the short paper. Authors’ names, affiliation if applicable, and contact details will be accessed only by Valeria Motta who will assign reviewers, but will not be involved in reviewing submissions. Each paper will be independently reviewed by two experts. Contributions from members of groups underrepresented in philosophy are especially welcome.

Please note that reasonable travel and subsistence expenses of the selected workshop contributors will be covered thanks to the support of the University of Milano-Bicocca and the sponsorship of project PERFECT. Also note that presentation of the selected papers at the workshop does not guarantee that the full papers will be accepted for publication in a special issue dedicated to the issue of confabulation, as the full papers will be subject to further, independent review and may be rejected at that stage.

You may contact Elisabetta Lalumera for general inquiries about the workshop or the CFP.

Labels:

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.
Read more

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 ...
Read more

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...
Read more