Thursday 1 February 2018

PERFECT 2018 Confabulation Workshop

On Wednesday 23rd May, PERFECT will host its third annual workshop, at St Anne’s College, Oxford. This year, our topic is confabulation, and we’re excited to welcome leading researchers in the field for a stimulating programme of presentations.

The talks explore a number of philosophical issues arising from confabulation, and will be of interest to philosophers of mind, philosophers of psychology and epistemologists. Papers to be presented also examine confabulation in relation to wider research programmes in cognitive science and psychiatry, and so we also welcome researchers from all disciplines of the mind who are interested in how we give accounts of our experiences, choices and actions.




The speakers will address a range of issues, with some exploring an aspect of confabulation that is underdeveloped or has been overlooked in previous work, whilst others propose a new model of the phenomenon that helps to explain and bring clarity to existing observations.





In her talk, Sarah Robins will focus on the possibility of veridical confabulation and how this possibility pushes us to clarify successful remembering and explaining, as well as what it tells us about the nature and extent of the phenomenon of confabulation itself.

William Hirstein will consider how recent empirical research counts against the standard model of Capgras syndrome, a condition in which patients confabulate about their loved ones. He will offer an alternative to the standard interpretation of the condition, arguing that this is a better fit with the evidence.

Derek Strijbos and Leon de Bruin extend previous work undertaken on the “mindshaping” interpretation of confabulation as an alternative to the mainstream “mindreading” view in their talk, offering an exploration of the relevant folk psychological norm that underwrites this interpretation.

I’ll look at confabulation in the context of a more general faculty for organising experience into a coherent narrative, and how interventions to reduce confabulation must account for the epistemic benefits of this faculty as revealed by other research programmes in cognitive science.

In her talk, Louise Moody argues that the notion of confabulation is central to understanding key characteristics of the phenomenology of dreaming, and demonstrates that this revisionary theory of dreams reveals new insights into confabulation.

I hope you’ll join us in May! For the full programme, further information, and to register, please follow this link.

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