These confabulations are guaranteed to improve your marriage! Toward a teleological theory of confabulation

Synthese 198 (11):10313-10339 (2020)
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Abstract

Confabulation is typically understood to be dysfunctional. But this understanding neglects the phenomenon’s potential benefits. In fact, we think that the benefits of non-clinical confabulation provide a better foundation for a general account of confabulation. In this paper, we start from these benefits to develop a social teleological account of confabulation. Central to our account is the idea that confabulation manifests a kind of willful ignorance. By understanding confabulation in this way, we can provide principled explanations for the difference between clinical and non-clinical cases of confabulation and the extent to which confabulation is rational.

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Author Profiles

Samuel Murray
Providence College
Peter Finocchiaro
Wuhan University

Citations of this work

Maladjustment.Michaela McSweeney - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 180 (3):843-869.

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References found in this work

What we owe to each other.Thomas Scanlon - 1998 - Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Intention, plans, and practical reason.Michael Bratman - 1987 - Cambridge: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
What We Owe to Each Other.Thomas Scanlon - 2002 - Mind 111 (442):323-354.
A Natural History of Human Morality.Michael Tomasello (ed.) - 2015 - Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

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