AIM Framework glossary
Confabulation Priority Principle
Canonical definition
The principle that, in any epistemic system operating under Type I Exclusion, the sincere-but-wrong account of a phenomenon is temporally prior to the accurate account, because projection of the phenomenon onto the representable subspace occurs at the moment the phenomenon demands explanation, whereas the subspace expansion that would admit the accurate account requires a generative act that the already-occupied explanatory slot renders unnecessary. The Confabulation Priority Principle is domain-general: it governs the explanation of external events and the explanation of a person's own conduct alike, and the source-attribution case in which the excluded dimension is Mimetic Desire is one instance of it rather than its basis. Its signature in the historical record is the attribution of unexplained natural events to agents, and ultimately to gods, together with the consistent lateness of the structural account that eventually displaces them.
Explanation
When something happens that a person, or a whole society, cannot explain, they do not wait in silence for the correct theory to arrive. They cannot wait, because the event demands an account now, and the mind fills the gap with the best explanation the ideas it already has can produce. If the true explanation is one nobody has thought of yet, it is not even in the running, so the slot gets filled with something else, and that something else is usually an agent, because the mind reaches for who did this before it reaches for what process caused this. A flood too big for any person to have caused gets blamed on an agent big enough to have caused it, which is how you get a god, and a punishing god if the flood needs a reason. The trouble is that once the slot feels filled, nobody feels a gap, so nobody goes looking for the real cause. That is why the accurate explanation nearly always arrives last, and has to shove aside a story that got there first and still feels good enough. You cannot have the science before the story, because the story is already sitting in the science's chair.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Principle. Source: Chapter 14, Section 14.4.11.