testingflink

Today's post is by Adam Andreotta . He earned his PhD from the University of Western Australia in 2018. His research and teaching interests include: epistemology, self-knowledge, the philosophy of David Hume and the philosophy of artificial intelligence.  Here, he introduces his article, " Confabulation does not undermine introspection for propositional attitudes ", that has recently appeared in the journal Synthese. For more of his work, see his PhilPapers profile . Most of us think there exists an asymmetry between the way we know our own minds, and the way we know the minds of others. For example, it seems that I can know that I intend to watch Back to the Future , or that I believe that Australia will win the Ashes, by introspection: a private and secure way of knowing my own mental states. If I want to know whether my friend intends to see Back to the Future or believes that Australia will win the Ashes, I need to ask them or observe their behaviour. This common-sens...

Here is the second post in our series reflecting on the end of project PERFECT , this week from postdoc Sophie Stammers . Whilst we’ve all focused on something slightly different, PERFECT researchers were united in using philosophical and psychological tools to dismantle the assumptions that give rise to mental health stigma, and to change the narrative on what counts as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ cognition. A big focus of my work on the project has been the issue of confabulation. We confabulate when we give an account of an event or an action that is not grounded in evidence, but which is given sincerely. Originally, researchers were interested in confabulation as it arose in cases of mental distress or cognitive disfunction, but it turns out that confabulation arises commonly and frequently in all of us, from explanations of mundane consumer choices, to accounting for our moral and political beliefs. Maybe you’ll have been engaged in an explanation of an event, or an experience you’ve had, or...

Hello! This is a post in a series where we are reflecting on the end of project PERFECT , offer an overview of our activities, and look at the future! So it's me first. Research Yesterday the project officially ended, after five intense and wonderful years. We did achieve the goals that we set for ourselves, investigating what we call the epistemic innocence of beliefs that are irrational and often false. Epistemic innocence is the capacity some beliefs have to support epistemic agency despite their obvious epistemic costs. In other words, it is good for us to have those beliefs in some respects, even if the beliefs themselves are not well-supported by, or responsive to, evidence. Our main focus was on those belief-like states that can be at the same time common in the non-clinical population and symptomatic of mental health issues: delusional beliefs, distorted memory beliefs, and confabulatory explanations. Indeed, we investigated these three cases in some depth, Ema Sullivan-Bi...

In this post, I summarise a paper I recently wrote with Kathy Puddifoot (University of Durham), which appears open access in an excellent new book, entitled 'Why Philosophy?' and edited by Diego Bubbio and Jeff Malpas. Kathy Puddifoot Philosophical research impacts on our understanding of the world. We argue that empirically informed philosophy can help us both reduce and control the effects of implicit bias on our behaviour, and challenge the stigma associated with the diagnosis of psychiatric disorders. In both cases, knowledge of philosophy and practice of philosophy make a significant contribution to the development of a fairer society. Implicit bias Implicit biases are responses to members of social groups (e.g., races, religions, gender, ability groups), associating members with traits in virtue of their social group membership. Biases may occur unintentionally, seemingly without the believer being aware of their occurrence, and are difficult to control. They can lead to...

It was a pleasure be invited to the “Conscious Will and the Unconscious Mind” workshop, held at the Department of Philosophy, University of Duisburg-Essen , on the 28th of June this year. Organised by Astrid Schomäcker and Neil Roughley , the workshop intended to explore whether influences like implicit biases present a threat to free, responsible agency and a series of related questions. The following is a summary of the talks by the three speakers. Sven Walter Osnabrück, Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück, began by outlining two opposing ideas about the role of science in the free will debate. Firstly: free will incompatible with a naturalistic view of world (a view that often crops up in popular science magazines and journals). Secondly: the question of what free will amounts to is a philosophical one, and so empirical science is not the appropriate disciplinary home for an investigation into free will. For Sven, neither of these...

In which I confabulate (in a sense I’ll leave up to the reader to determine) about my recent paper “ Confabulation, Explanation, and the Pursuit of Resonant Meaning ”. This is the final post in our series dedicated to our special issue “Philosophical Perspectives on Confabulation” in Topoi, so let me take the opportunity to thank all of the authors for contributing to what I think has turned out to be a fantastic resource on current philosophical and psychological thinking on the topic. You can revisit the other posts in the the series  (and find links to the full papers)  here . I don’t really understand ball sports. I mean that in the sense that, if I’m ever a spectator to a bunch of people throwing/kicking/hitting an inflated spherical object around a pitch, I’m usually not familiar with the rules, and I just don’t get a lot of what’s going on, and end up losing interest. But I also mean it in the sense that I am just not stirred up by a lot of the grandiose sports discou...

We continue to hear from contributors to our special issue on confabulation in Topoi. In today’s post, Leon de Bruin , Senior Research Fellow in philosophy at VU University Amsterdam and Radboud University Nijmegen , and Derek Strijbos , psychiatrist and research fellow at Dimence Group in Zwolle, and a post-doctoral philosopher at Radboud University Nijmegen, introduce their paper “ Does Confabulation Pose a Threat to First-Person Authority? Mindshaping, Self-Regulation and the Importance of Self-Know-How ”. In social practice, self-ascriptions of mental states are often treated as having a special kind of first-person authority. When people self-ascribe mental states, we by default treat them as being in a privileged position to know their own mind. That is: relative to what others know and claim about their mental states. In our paper we focus on the issue how confabulation, both of the everyday and clinical kind, affects this first-person authority of mental state self-ascription...

This cross-disciplinary symposium on the nature and implications of human and artificial autonomy was organised by  Anastasia Christakou  and held at the Henley Business School at the University of Reading on 8th May 2019. You can find a report on the first part of the workshop here . First talk in the second half of the workshop was by Daniel Dennett  (Tufts) and Keith Frankish  (Sheffield), exploring how we can build up to consciousness and autonomy. They endorsed an "engineering approach" to solving hard philosophical problems, such as the problem of consciousness, and asked: How can we get a drone to do interesting things? For instance, recognise things? We can start by supposing that it has sensors for recognising and responding to stimuli. There will also be a hierarchy of feature detectors and a suite of controllers who will take multiple inputs and vary outputs depending on their combination and strength. When it comes to action selection and conflict resolut...

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 world (as op...

We’re continuing our series of post s on “Philosophical Perspectives on Confabulation” - our special issue in the journal Topoi this week. In today’s post,  Sarah Robins , Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas, introduces her paper “ Mnemonic Confabulation ”. The motivation for this paper was the following question: How are discussions of confabulation in the philosophy of memory related to discussions of confabulation in empirical and clinical work? At first pass, it’s easy to suppose that they’re closely related. After all, both focus on confabulatory remembering. For philosophers of memory, confabulation is one of many memory errors (alongside misremembering, forgetting, relearning, etc.) that needs to be distinguished from successful remembering.  In clinical work, interest in confabulation began with Korsakoff (1885) and Wernicke’s (1906) observations of bizarre false memory reports in patients with amnesia and dementia. Despite the shared focus ...

Today’s post is by Joshua Bergamin , philosopher and performance artist based in Edinburgh, Scotland, who continues our series on our Topoi special issue on confabulation with a summary of his paper “ An Excess of Meaning: Conceptual Over-Interpretation in Confabulation and Schizophrenia ”. Most of my academic work centres on the effects of language and conceptual capacities on human consciousness, particularly on what I suspect is the role of language in creating and maintaining a sense of (egoistic) self. This was the subject of my doctoral thesis, in which I touched upon confabulation, since it presents an interesting tension between our feeling of being a unitary agent, and the underlying motivations of our actions, however they might be described. Thus, although much of the literature on confabulation is concerned with the fascinating -- and often bizarre -- pathological cases that arise through brain injury, my interest has leaned more towards the kinds of everyday confabulation ...