A series of blog posts featuring scholars in the philosophy and science of mind.
[Update: given really helpful discussion below, I’ve put a summary of some of the extended comments below] I want to begin with a distinction that I think is fundamental to our thinking about the mind and yet is not adequately characterized by philosophers or psychologists (the latter will beg to …
Thanks to John for the invitation to post in the Brains blog and for his detailed introduction and overview of my work. I also want to commend him for the many exciting developments since he took over from Gualtiero’s admirable tenure as founder. Here are the topics I hope to …
I’m pleased to be able to introduce Wayne Wu, currently Associate Professor of Philosophy and Associate Director of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at Carnegie Mellon University, as this month’s featured scholar at Brains.
In my last post I want to go back to delusions. Isn’t it just hopeless to suggest that they can achieve epistemic innocence? It probably is, as delusions violate all norms of rationality for beliefs we can think of. But it is important to ask whether delusions have any redeeming …
Do confabulatory explanations and memory distortions occurring in the clinical population have any epistemic benefits? Let’s start by considering evidence for the view that autobiographical memory is instrumental to self-knowledge and identity formation processes. Autobiographical memory encompasses memories of specific events (e.g. how I felt when I passed my driving …
In the last post I offered examples of confabulatory explanations as attempts to give reasons for attitudes whose source might escape introspection or be otherwise difficult or impossible to access. The interesting philosophical question for me is whether confabulation carries any epistemic benefit.
Here are some examples of confabulatory explanations in the clinical population. In anosognosia people deny some serious impairment. When a person with a paralysed leg is asked why she cannot climb stairs, she may say she suffers from arthritis and she is less mobile as a result. In the Capgras delusion, people believe …
