Confabulation and Rationality of Self-knowledge
Sophie Keeling is currently a philosophy PhD student at the University of Southampton. She primarily works on self-knowledge which has allowed her to research a range of topics in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of psychology. Sophie’s thesis argues that we have a distinctive way of knowing why we have our attitudes and perform actions that observers lack. She gives a brief overview here . This post summarises my paper ‘ Confabulation and Rational Requirements for Self-Knowledge ’ (forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology ). The paper argues for a novel explanation of confabulation: Confabulation is motivated by the desire to have fulfilled a rational obligation to knowledgeably explain our attitudes by reference to motivating reasons. (Following others in the epistemological literature, I term the reason for which we hold an attitude our ‘motivating reason’ for it). I shan’t seek to define confabulation here (a task in its own right) but instead note the subtype I’ll...