Imperfect Cognitions

Our series of posts on confabulation continues, featuring papers that appear in a special issue of Topoi on the topic, guest edited by Sophie Stammers and Lisa Bortolotti. Today's post, on gaslighting, confabulation, and epistemic innocence, is by Andrew Spear , Philosophy Faculty at Grand Valley State University near Grand Rapids, Michigan. In Gaslighting, Confabulation, and Epistemic Innocence , I suggest that confabulation plays a central role in many paradigm examples of gaslighting, and that appreciating this sheds some light on what it takes for a defective cognition (such as confabulation) to be epistemically innocent. The central feature of gaslighting is the attempt by one agent to undermine another’s epistemic self-trust, her conception of herself as an independent locus of experience, thought, and judgment. I model gaslighting on the phenomenon of epistemic peer-disagreement (the gaslighter and his victim disagree specifically about whether or not the victim’s c...

This post is written by Tom Cochrane, who is a British philosopher working at Flinders University in Adelaide , Australia. One of his main aims is to draw on facts about psychology to develop insights about the good life.  Tom has worked a lot on emotions and aesthetics. He also has specific interests in mental disorders- including a co-authored article on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder at Mind &Language that readers of this blog may find interesting. My new book The Emotional Mind (2018) is mostly focused on how the various phenomena we associate with the emotions—feelings, behaviours, moods, pain and pleasure, rational cognition, character traits and so on—all fit together. The overall picture I propose is of fundamental concern-regulating routines that get steadily elaborated as new ways to represent information come along. Thus the book starts by outlining the fundamental routines, and then builds on this layer and layer until we reach a pretty complete descrip...

Our series on new research on confabulation continues, featuring summaries of the papers contributing to the special issue of Topoi guest-edited by Sophie Stammers and Lisa Bortolotti. Today's post, the third in the series, is by Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini . Since September 2017, she is an assistant professor of Philosophy at Union College (NY), specialized in philosophy of mind and epistemology. She received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2017. My paper “ Confabulating Reasons ” focuses on the confabulatory episodes connected to those mental attitudes (e.g. belief, emotion, intention) whose causes we cannot introspectively access. In the literature, the predominant view is that these confabulations track – or at least attempt to do so – the psychological causes of mental attitudes.  A related hypothesis is that these confabulations are either the result of a general cognitive mechanism that pushes us to understand the world in terms of causal relatio...

The author of the post is Walter Glannon , who is a professor of philosophy at the University of Calgary in Canada. He has held other academic appointments at McGill University and the University of British Columbia.  Walter grew up and received all of his education in the US. Following a fellowship in clinical medical ethics at the University of Chicago, for 5 years (2000-2005) he was clinical ethicist at 3 hospitals in Montreal and Vancouver. This is largely how he developed his interest in research and clinical aspects of psychiatry. Advances in psychiatric research and clinical psychiatry in the last 30 years have given rise to a host of new questions that lie at the intersection of psychiatry, neuroscience, philosophy and law. Such questions include: Are psychiatric disorders diseases of the brain, caused by dysfunctional neural circuits and neurotransmitters? What role do genes, neuro-endocrine, neuro-immune interactions and the environment play in the ...

This is the second in a series of posts featuring new research on confabulation. Today's contribution is by Kirk Michaelian ( Centre for Philosophy of Memory ) who summarises his paper , "Confabulation as Unreliable Imagining", for the special issue of Topoi on confabulation guest edited by Sophie Stammers and Lisa Bortolotti. The context for my contribution to the special issue is a debate over the nature of confabulation that has been unfolding for several years now within the philosophy of memory community. In my 2016 book, Mental Time Travel: Episodic Memory and Our Knowledge of the Personal Past , I developed and defended a simulation theory of memory. In opposition to the causal theory, the simulation theory denies that remembering an event presupposes the existence of an "appropriate" causal connection between the subject's present representation of the event and his past experience of it, maintaining, instead, that the difference between ge...

The Australasian Society for Philosophy and Psychology formed in 2017, with the aim to “promote interaction in Australasia among philosophers and psychologists, broadly construed to include anyone interested in scientific study of the mind”. The ASPP held their inaugural conference at Macquarie University in December 2018, and I was lucky enough to go along. Here’s a little of what I learned there... If you’ve ever been perplexed by the prevalence of a viewpoint or political stance that you don’t share, then you might be wondering: how do we step outside of the epistemic echo chambers in which we find ourselves in our increasingly online world? Kate Devitt and her team at Queensland University of Technology are on the case.  Inspired by the finding that increasing the number and diversity of hypotheses considered can improve decision making, particularly in an organisational and strategic setting, Kate and her team have built an interactive platform which encourag...

Our series of blog posts on new research on confabulation continues. In this blog post Anneli Jefferson summarises her contribution to the special issue of Topoi on Confabulation guest edited by Sophie Stammers and Lisa Bortolotti. In her paper  (available open access), she shows the costs and benefits of everyday confabulation and rationalisation for moral conduct and judgment. Anneli focuses on everyday-confabulations and rationalisations that give explanations and justifications in terms of moral motivations. I understand everyday confabulations as a response to ignorance of our motives for actions, when we confabulate, we aim to explain to ourselves and to others why we did what we did. Rationalisations, on the other hand, aim to give justifications for our actions, showing that what we did was morally permissible or even morally required. We can justify actions without explaining them, for example by saying that what we did was morally desirable, without claimin...

Today's post is written by Charlie Kurth , who is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at Western Michigan University. His research interests focus on issues in ethics, moral and philosophical psychology and emotion theory.  A unifying theme of his work is that research in ethical theory, moral psychology and the philosophy of emotion can be productively informed by empirical inquiry in the cognitive and social sciences. In this post, he discusses his book The Anxious Mind: An Investigation into the Varieties and Virtues of Anxiety published by MIT Press.  My book aims to enrich our understanding of anxiety by exploring two questions—What is anxiety? And is anxiety valuable? While I take these questions to be independently interesting, I also see them as intimately intertwined: understanding what anxiety is helps us understand the ways in which it can be valuable. Consider the first project—investigating what anxiety is. We talk of ‘anxiety’ as if...

Have you ever explained something that you believe or that you've done in a way that felt appropriate and meaningful at the time, but which, on reflection, you might have realized was a little…well… made up ? You’re not alone! 'Confabulation', first studied in the context of psychiatric disorders featuring severe memory impairments (known as narrow confabulation) can also be seen as a more general tendency people have to provide explanations for their choices and attitudes ( broad confabulation). Common to the two notions of confabulation is that whilst the teller does not intend to deceive their audience, the explanation given is not grounded in reality, and is usually false. This week marks the first in a series of Tuesday research posts covering our forthcoming special issue “Philosophical Perspectives on Confabulation” in the journal Topoi . Last year, we had the pleasure of hosting and co-organising a series of workshops dedicated to the topic, its relation to t...