A Problem for Self-Knowledge: The Implications of Taking Confabulation Seriously

Abstract

There is a widespread assumption that we have direct access to our own decision-making processes. Empirical demonstrations of confabulation, a phenomenon where individuals construct and themselves believe plausible but inaccurate accounts of why they acted, have been used to question this assumption. Those defending the assumption argue cases of confabulation are relatively rare and that in most cases, we still have direct insight into our own decision-making. This paper reviews this debate and introduces two novel points. Firstly, I will point out that a rich source of evidence of confabulation is often overlooked. Secondly, I will argue that our inability to distinguish confabulations from cases in which we gain accurate information about the reasons for our actions gives rise to an empirically motivated scepticism which gives us grounds to doubt the accuracy of all our introspective insights into our own decision-making processes.

Confabulation and rational obligations for self-knowledge

“…8. Indeed, the confabulation of motivating reasons even constitutes Scaife's (2014) definition. I should note that a reasonable amount of the literature on confabulated explanations concerns actions rather than our attitudes, see, for example, Hirstein's (2009) section on confabulated introspection.…”

Confabulating Reasons

“…For many, that shows both a failure of introspection and a distorted self-knowledge more generally. It is not merely that we are ignorant of the causes of our attitudes, and that we are also unaware of being ignorant about that: in confabulating we actually come up with a fictitious narrative of how we came to have those attitudes and believe this narrative to be right (Lawlor 2003;Scaife 2014).…”

Introduction: Philosophical Perspectives on Confabulation

“…Confabulation is tightly linked to some core notions in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of psychology, such as those of self-knowledge and rationality, and raises interesting epistemological questions about the coherence, accuracy, and justification of our reports. However, until recently and with some exceptions (Hirstein 2005;Bortolotti and Cox 2009;Strijbos and de Bruin 2015;Scaife 2014;Sandis 2015;Sullivan-Bissett 2015;Bernecker 2017;Bortolotti 2017), the notion of confabulation has been largely underexplored in philosophy.…”

“…Two papers challenge traditional views on this issue, with De Bruin and Strijbos focusing on understanding the threat to first-person authority; and Bergamin viewing confabulation as tied up with an interpretive faculty essential to understanding ourselves and our world. Leon de Bruin and Derek Strijbos address the view that findings on the prevalence of confabulation show that people lack self-knowledge (e.g., Scaife 2014), and that this undermines first-person authority-the special authoritative status we have when attributing mental states to ourselves, compared to attributing them to others. De Bruin and Strijbos argue that even on folk-psychological understandings of the mind, expectations of perfect alignment between how we act and what we say about our actions are unrealistic.…”