Confabulation is a beautiful word for—if you will—a tragic concept. It is arguably a ubiquitous phenomenon. Assuming its ubiquity should mean that it’s likely not the case that most instances of confabulation are symptomatic of brain damage or dementia, even if some or many instances are in fact indicative or suggestive of real neuropsychological problems or disorders. In brief, it involves inaccurate or false personal or autobiographical narratives, but more formally: “confabulation is a memory error defined as the production of fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world. People who confabulate present incorrect memories ranging from ‘subtle alterations to bizarre fabrications,’ and are generally very confident about their recollections, despite contradictory evidence.” As with delusions, confabulations are generally identified by what we term their “surface” or behavioral features and these features of necessity make reference to normative or evaluative epistemic terms: truth, rationality, justification or warrant, and belief.
As Lisa Bortolotti explains, “many of the epistemic features attributed to people with delusions and confabulations constitute infringements of norms of rationality for beliefs, such as resistance to counter-evidence, inconsistency, lack of evidential support, failure of action guidance, or as failures of self-knowledge, such as a distorted sense of one’s personal boundaries, double bookkeeping [in psychology: ‘the tendency, among those who experience delusions, to perceive reality and the delusions as both being real, while remaining unbothered by the discrepancy or inconsistencies between the two’], inaccurate autobiographical narratives and fabricated memories.” And here is where—if not why—confabulation in particular makes it hard to draw hard and fast conceptual, diagnostic and therapeutic boundaries between the fields of psychiatry (or psychology), psychoanalysis and neuropsychology: “principles of classification and diagnosis informing clinical practice and even neuropsychological research into psychiatric disorders are still parasitic on the behavioral manifestations of such disorders” (Bortolotti). The boundaries between everyday stress and distress, existential anxiety or unease, and “disorders” of the psyche, soul or mind (some of which may be etiologically ‘organic’) are likewise in question or at least fuzzy, although conceptual, medical, and mental or psychological distinctions and line drawing is no less necessary even if and when such boundaries are permeable.
I was moved to briefly introduce the concept confabulation because I came across its invocation unexpectedly in a book I am reading, Graeme Hunter’s Pascal the Philosopher: An Introduction (University of Toronto Press, 2013). Hunter relies on this technical and diagnostic concept in philosophy and psychology of mind to explain what he terms “philosophical failure.” Hunter experienced quite a few occasions in which he presented a lucid valid or sound argument on a substantive and contested or controversial topic to a “learned audience” (including his peers in the profession), its members afterwards unimpressed or unpersuaded by the argument’s conclusion, without, as befits their expertise, explaining to him (or discussing amongst themselves) what was wrong with the argument or why an apparent reaction of radical scepticism or failure to persuade was the (unwarranted) result. The characterization of this as “philosophical failure” has some precedent, Hunter informs us, not only in the writings of Pascal, but in our own time in the works of Robert Nozick and Peter van Inwagen. But Hunter, unlike Nozick and van Inwagen, wants to proffer a plausible or even persuasive explanation for this failure, and thus he summons the notion of confabulation to do so. The particular rendering of the concept, however, is a tad different than what we presented above, as it does not necessarily rely on a failure of memory as such, and thus can be considered a bit wider in scope:
“[C]onfabulation is a mental disorder some people exhibit in which, without intending to deceive, they make up explanations that sound rational [or reasonable or plausible] but are based on insufficient [or irrelevant, or improperly conceived or recalled] knowledge. It has been loosely or broadly characterized [by William Hirstein] as ‘a sort of pathological certainty about ill-grounded thoughts and utterances.’ Confabulations resemble lies, except they are believed by the teller and told without intending to deceive. And they are not like ordinary mistakes either, because the confabulator is in a position to see without difficulty [?] that what he is saying is false [while I agree that confabulations are not like ordinary epistemic or mental mistakes, I am not sure it is correct to claim that ‘the confabulator is in a position to see without difficulty’ his or her utterances are false, given what we’ve learned from over a century of psychoanalysis].”
Hunter also contends that “[c]ompelling examples of confabulation can only [emphasis added] be gathered under clinical conditions,” which I don’t think need be the case, although it is true that compelling neuropsychological, psychosomatic, or psychoanalytic explanations of the causes of same in any one individual require the constraints of the clinic for thorough symptomatic diagnosis, etiology, and (if possible) prescription or therapeutic regimen. And he proceeds to argue for a philosophical conception of confabulation to account for philosophical failure (having to do with how valid or sound arguments are received by others) based on reasons associated with professional philosophy and philosophers, which we will not address here. Yet, with him, I am extending the concept beyond what is circumscribed by “brain science” and “naturalized epistemology,” assuming (and here I may be departing from Hunter) there are credible forms of psychology and psychoanalysis (and thus philosophy and psychology of mind) that are neither conceptually nor even scientifically (when psychoanalysis is understood to be a science of subjectivity) beholden to or dependent upon neuropsychology and/or naturalized epistemology.
Given what has occurred in politics with the ascendancy of Trump and the cult that slavishly and blindly supports him, we can make armchair symptomatic diagnoses based on the behavioral manifestations of confabulation we witness routinely in the news (be it cable television or newspaper; this is also to some extent now documented in social scientific research), to which we can of course add our own personal experiences or encounters as anecdotal evidence and/or “testimony” (construed in the manner of social epistemology). It is rather hard to resist the conclusion that “confabulation” (among other deleterious psychological phenomena: denial, self-deception, delusion, illusion, uninhibited wishful thinking, indulgence of dangerous passions or vices, etc., any or all of which in most cases is in conjunction with more commonplace cognitive biases that afflict most of us one time or another) rules the minds of millions of people in this country, the vast majority of whom proudly if not perversely avow Republican Party* identification or affiliation.
* As I earlier wrote, the GOP is a party of imaginary and delusionary grievance, of crass and cartoonish schtick, of denial and desperation, of repugnance and regression, of illusion and irrationality, of empty gestures and vain cynicism, of authoritarianism and aspirational fascism, of obscene wealth and amoral power, of sycophants and cults, of self-deception and phantasy, of white supremacy (and racism generally) and narcissistic privilege, of putatively Christian nationalism, a faux populism of bread and circuses that has failed to conceal, let alone contain, a degraded and debased political practice drowning in a toxic dump of greed, corruption, and sleaze.
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