testingflink

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...

As Project PERFECT enters its fifth year, here’s a little bit about what I’ve been up to recently, and what I plan to do over the year to come. This year just gone has been our Year of Confabulation: we held our confabulation workshop in Oxford in May, where we were lucky enough to have a programme of researchers from around the world, all at the forefront of philosophical and interdisciplinary inquiry into confabulation; we also co-organised a Confabulation and Epistemic Innocence workshop with Elisabetta Lalumera at Milano-Bicocca. Our special issue on confabulation with Topoi is well underway, and we hope it will be ready for you to read in the next few months. In my own work, I’ve been investigating some under-explored benefits of confabulation, and have developed two papers on the topic this year. In one paper I argue that confabulation can have epistemic benefits because it preserves collective cognitive partnerships; whilst in another I explore the psychological and social ...