Abstract

In some neuropsychological disorders, distorted reports seem to fill gaps in people's memory of their past, where people's self‐image, history, and prospects are often enhanced. False beliefs about the past compromise both people's capacity to construct a reliable autobiography and their trustworthiness as communicators. However, such beliefs contribute to people's sense of competence and self‐confidence, increasing psychological well‐being. Here, we consider both the psychological benefits and epistemic costs and argue that distorting the past is likely to also have epistemic benefits that cannot be obtained otherwise, such as enabling people to exchange information, receive feedback, and retain key beliefs about themselves.

Highlights

  • Some neuropsychological disorders cause people to experience serious memory impairments

  • We offered some reasons in favour of what we will refer to as the Psychological Benefits claim: some CMDs are psychologically beneficial as they are reliably correlated with increased well-being in people with neuropsychological disorders featuring memory impairment

  • One might object that our overall argument requires the claim that the person cannot attain the epistemic benefits we identify by other means, including therapeutic interventions aimed at aiding autobiographical memory recall

Read more

Summary

The epistemic innocence of clinical memory distortions

Document Version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Citation for published version (Harvard): Bortolotti, L & Sullivan-Bissett, E 2018, 'The epistemic innocence of clinical memory distortions', Mind & Language, vol 33, no. 3, pp. 263-279. https://doi.org/10.1111/mila.12175

ORIGINAL ARTICLE
| INTRODUCTION
| CONCLUSIONS
Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call