Richard Farry

1 Cases of the confabulation of propositional attitudes have been used by Carruthers (2013) as evidence that we lack introspective access to our propositional attitudes, and that instead our route to self-knowledge is via self-interpretation. In this paper I defend this position from objections raised by Andreotta (2021) that Carruthers’ claimed cases of self-misattributions do not show people misattributing their propositional attitudes. In response to Andreotta’s objection for a particular case involving a split-brain patient, that the apparent misattribution involved a fabricated explanation, not a fabricated intention, I argue that this objection does not hold for cases where self-attributions are made retrospectively. Secondly, I explore the unwelcome consequences of accepting a separate objection from Andreotta that some claimed cases of misattributions are instances of propositional attitudes being influenced by perceptual cues. Accepting this objection would entail that we are mercurial beings, which plainly we are not, or that additional attitude-like mental features would be required to avoid this entailment. In defending self-interpretation accounts of self-knowledge, I seek to show that compared to direct access views they can more plausibly account for why our self-reports are swayed by perceptual cues. I go on to make the case that confabulations are a normal and everyday occurrence, and as such, our confabulations mainly go unnoticed, get glossed over, or become self-fulfilling. Consequently, the level of behavioural incongruence with self-attributions required by critics to show that confabulations have occurred is too demanding. Abstract 2 We experience things like redness and painfulness—the qualitative aspects of experience—which seem difficult to account for in terms of the brain and information processing. This difficulty arises, because the qualitative aspects of experience seem to have features which (when taken at face value) seemingly do not fit comfortably with a physicalist and mechanistic view of the brain. There are several different approaches to resolving this difficulty, including Keith Frankish’s (2017; 2023) Illusionism. According to Illusionism we only seem to experience things like redness and painfulness. They do not really exist, rather they are the result of a misrepresentation or illusory perspective, somewhat analogous to the apparent existence of rainbows as arcs in the sky. In this paper I present a novel argument in support of Illusionism, that as evolved entities we should expect our various mental capacities to track usefulness rather than accuracy. As such the way things seem to us seem the way that they do because they have developed to be useful, rather than truth-tracking, and so we should not expect our qualitive experiences to provide us with a view of how things really are. The various perceptual illusions and cognitive biases that we experience show that in a range of cases such expectations are correct. As a result, we should be wary of using our qualitative experiences as a basis for determining what things really are, and in particular the metaphysical status of those experiences. Abstract 3 In this paper I argue in favour of radical cognitive extension, sometimes referred to as cognitive bloat. According to the Extended Mind Thesis (Clark and Chalmers 1998), under the right conditions cognition and the mind can extend over external artefacts like notebooks. Various critics—along with Clark and Chalmers 1998—seek to limit the scope of the thesis, often appealing to a reductio ad absurdum. However, rather than the implications of the Extended Mind Thesis being absurd, I claim they are counter-intuitive but revealing insights into the nature of cognition, and processes in general. In this paper I argue against Clark and Chalmers’ (1998) ‘Availability and Portability’ Criteria and consider a parallel case of Extended Digestion and the extent to which we consider entities apt for a particular functional role is based on human-centric concerns, to make the case for a wide view of cognitive extension, in favour of cognitive bloat.