I’d like to invite everyone to check out this new blog I’ve started: Underappreciated Philosophy?. It’s something of an experiment. I have no idea if it will actually fly. But, or so it seems to me, it’s worth a try. Existing power-structures in the discipline — gender imbalances, biases, journal rankings, …
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 …
Philosophy has lost one of its greats, Fred Dretske. Among other things, he authored the classic Knowledge and the Flow of Information which is a key source for information-based semantic theories. At a personal level, he was always kind and patient with me, a neuroscientist, peppering him with questions via email, …
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 …
Recently there has been a lot of discussion in our profession (e.g., on philosophy blogs) about the underrepresentation of women in philosophy. Most of the proposed solutions to this problem have focused on problems about, and solutions for, the underrepresentation of female graduate students and professors. Hiring practices are being …
In my previous post I suggested that the epistemic faults listed in most definitions of delusions are not distinctive of delusions. Although delusions may diverge from norms of rationality to a greater extent than non-delusional beliefs, they are irrational in no special way. Excessively positive beliefs about ourselves, and widespread …
