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 …
Ergo is a general, open access philosophy journal accepting submissions on all philosophical topics and from all philosophical traditions. This includes, among other things: history of philosophy, work in both the analytic and continental traditions, as well as formal and empirically informed philosophy. Ergo uses a triple-anonymous peer review process …
First of all, my thanks to John for a very generous introduction. I’m glad to be blogging on Brains when I’m about to start a brand new project. Come September, I’ll be on an AHRC Fellowship exploring the possibility that, in some contexts, cognitions with obvious epistemic pitfalls (such as …
I am getting ready to head out to San Diego for the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness 17th Annual meeting. I have organized a symposium on the Role of the Prefrontal Cortex in Conscious Experience which will feature talks by Rafi Malach, Joe Levine, Doby Rahnev, and me! …
