Imperfect Cognitions

In this post,  Anna Ichino ,  Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Milan, working primarily in the philosophy of mind and philosophical psychology , continues our series of research posts on the special issue in Topoi, introducing her paper " Superstitious confabulations ".  Confabulation is a heterogenous phenomenon, which varies across a number of dimensions – including content, mode of elicitation, aetiology, and more. While acknowledging this heterogeneity, recent philosophical discussions have focussed mostly on some particular kinds of confabulation: notably, confabulations that are about the self, and externally elicited – classic examples being cases of memory distortions and of ‘ choice blindness ’. With a few exceptions, such discussions highlight the epistemic faults of these confabulations, especially in relation to self-knowledge. In my paper, I draw the attention to a different sort of confabulations, which are typically about the worl...

On 28th May, Elisabetta Lalumera organised a workshop on Confabulation and Epistemic Innocence  at the Department of Psychology, University of Milan Bicocca. First speakers of the day were Lisa Bortolotti and Sophie Stammers from project PERFECT  who presented a picture of confabulation where clinical and non-clinical cases are continuous and have a similar structure. Bortolotti talked about epistemic costs and benefits of confabulation. She argued that we should distinguish between innocent and guilty instances of confabulation depending on whether the person confabulating has access to the information that ground an epistemically less problematic explanation and on whether the ill-groundedness of the explanation spreads to the person's further beliefs. Stammers focused on the question why we confabulate . Do we aim to provide a causal theory about what is going on—as recently was argued by Max Coltheart ? Or are we imposing meaning and attempt to develop a...

Today I report from a workshop organised by Anna Ichino and Bence Nanay at the University of Antwerp (pictured below) on 31st May, 2017. The themes included subdoxastic attitudes, imagination, and belief. I ( Lisa Bortolotti , Birmingham) was the first speaker and discussed costs and benefits of confabulated explanations of one’s attitudes and choices. I started defining confabulation and providing several examples from the clinical and non-clinical literature. Then, I considered the standard philosophical reaction to confabulation, that it is evidence for a failure of self-knowledge, and rejected it. Next, I argued that confabulated explanations of attitudes and choices involve ignorance and ill-grounded causal explanations. Finally, I looked at potential psychological and epistemic benefits of confabulated explanations, and applied to them the framework of epistemic innocence developed at part of project PERFECT .  I concluded by saying that some confabulated exp...