As sort of an aside, in some way I think the confabulation is the default mode of human language. We make stuff up all the time. But we have to coordinate with others too, so that places constraints on what we say. Those constraints can be so binding that we’ve come to think of this socially constrained discourse as ‘ground truth’ and free of the confabulation impulse. But that’s not quite so.
As sort of an aside, in some way I think the confabulation is the default mode of human language. We make stuff up all the time. But we have to coordinate with others too, so that places constraints on what we say. Those constraints can be so binding that we’ve come to think of this socially constrained discourse as ‘ground truth’ and free of the confabulation impulse. But that’s not quite so.