Lisa Bortolotti

Lisa Bortolotti
University of Birmingham · Department of Philosophy

Laurea (Bologna), MA (London), BPhil (Oxon), PhD (ANU)

About

163
Publications
40,472
Reads
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2,185
Citations
Introduction
I write about the limitations of human cognition, such as faulty reasoning, delusions, confabulations, irrational beliefs, distorted memories, unreliable self narratives, and attitude/behaviour inconsistencies. I am also interested in the ethical issues emerging from the contributions of science to society and concerning biomedical research, psychiatry, reproduction, happiness, and death.
Additional affiliations
July 2008 - January 2009
Macquarie University
Position
  • Endeavour Research Fellow
Description
  • Endeavour Research Fellowship
September 2005 - present
University of Birmingham
Position
  • Coordinator of UG and PG modules and MA and PhD supervisor
Description
  • Lecturer 2005-2008; Senior Lecturer 2008-2011; Reader 2011-2013; Professor 2013-ongoing
September 2005 - present
University of Birmingham
Position
  • Faculty Member

Publications

Publications (163)
Book
Full-text available
This open access book explores epistemic justice in mental healthcare, bringing together perspectives from psychologists, psychiatrists, philosophers, activists, and lived experience researchers. Through eight chapters, authors identify threats to the agency of people who hear voices, experience depression, have psychotic symptoms, live with dement...
Article
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This paper starts from an observation of our practices: when people are ascribed delusional beliefs or conspiracy beliefs, they tend to be excluded from shared epistemic projects relevant to the content of their beliefs. What might motivate this exclusion? One possibility is that delusional beliefs and conspiracy beliefs are considered as evidence...
Chapter
Full-text available
Across many domains, it is important for us to feel that we are understood by others. This is crucial when we are disclosing a vulnerability or seeking help for a problem. When these disclosures or help-seeking requests relate to mental health difficulties , our interactions with others can carry many threats, including stigmatisation; inappropriat...
Chapter
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Recent work on clinical communication has highlighted the possibility that vulnerable young people may experience epistemic injustice and have their sense of agency undermined in encounters with mental healthcare providers. In particular, five dimensions of agency have been studied: validation of the person’s perspective; legitimisation of the pers...
Article
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Why Delusions Matter is a reflection on the importance of the study of delusions for better understanding and reshaping our mutual interactions. The study of delusions has transformed the philosophy of mind and psychology in the last thirty years, helping redefine the relationship between rationality and intentionality. It has still a lot to offer...
Article
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In this paper, I re-elaborate some of the ideas presented in Why Delusions Matter (Bloomsbury 2023) in response to four commentaries on the book. My proposed conception of delusionality cuts across clinical and non-clinical contexts: an interpreter calls a speaker’s belief delusionalwhen the belief seems to be central to the speaker’s identity, but...
Article
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Background Patients seeking emergency care for self-harm and suicidality report varying experiences from being believed and taken seriously to not being believed and taken seriously. Epistemic injustice provides a conceptual framework to explore how peoples’ experiences of self-harm and suicidality are believed or not. We use an empirical method –c...
Article
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Is curiosity a virtue or a vice? Curiosity, as a disposition to attain new, worthwhile information, can manifest as an epistemic virtue. When the disposition to attain new information is not manifested virtuously, this is either because the agent lacks the appropriate motivation to attain the information or because the agent has poor judgement, see...
Article
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According to a naturalist conception of what counts as a disorder, conspiracy beliefs are pathological beliefs if they are the outcome of a cognitive dysfunction. In this article, I take issue with the view that it is pathological to believe a conspiracy theory. After reviewing several approaches to the aetiology of conspiracy beliefs, I find that...
Book
Delusions can be many things. They can be symptoms of mental health problems, such as schizophrenia, clinical delusions, or simply the beliefs that people cling to which are unsupported by evidence. We call the latter everyday delusions and they can include anything from the benefits of homeopathy to the dangers of alien abduction. Yet, why do peop...
Article
In this paper, we offer a brief overview of the debate between realism and anti-realism in the philosophy of science. On the background of that debate, we consider two recently developed approaches aimed at vindicating realist intuitions while acknowledging the limitations of scientific knowledge. Perspectivalists explain disagreement in science wi...
Article
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In this paper, I borrow Neil Levy’s account of bad beliefs as a starting point to discuss how the social turn in epistemology affects our understanding of the formation, persistence, and spreading of conspiracy beliefs. Despite the recent convergence of philosophers and psychologists on the importance of studying the social dimensions of cognition,...
Chapter
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Irrational beliefs are often seen as beliefs that are either costly or even pathological and it is assumed that we should eliminate them when possible. In this paper we argue that not only irrational beliefs are a widespread feature of human cognition and agency but also that, depending on context, they can be beneficial to the person holding them,...
Article
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Delusions are often portrayed as paradigmatic instances of incomprehensibility and meaninglessness. Here we investigate the relationship between delusions and meaning from a philosophical perspective, integrating arguments and evidence from cognitive psychology and phenomenological psychopathology. We review some of the empirical and philosophical...
Article
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In chapter 3 of Delusions and Beliefs , Kengo Miyazono argues that, when delusions are pathological beliefs, they are so due to their being both harmful and malfunctional. In this brief commentary, I put pressure on Miyazono’s account of delusions as harmful malfunctioning beliefs. No delusions might satisfy the malfunction criterion and some delus...
Article
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When young people seek support from mental health care practitioners, the encounters may affect the young people’s sense of self, and in particular undermine their sense of agency. For this study, an interdisciplinary team of academics and young people collaboratively analysed video-recorded encounters between young people and mental healthcare pra...
Article
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Purpose of Review Over the last 30 years, medical assistance in dying (MAiD) including euthanasia (EU) and physician-assisted death (or suicide, PAS) has become the center of a large debate, particularly when these practices have involved people with psychiatric illness, including resistant depression, schizophrenia, personality, or other severe ps...
Article
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Letheby’s book is an engaging and crystal-clear exploration of the philosophical issues raised by the use of psychedelic drugs. In this paper, we focus on the epistemological issues Letheby examines in chapter 8 and argue that his analysis requires an agency-first approach to epistemic evaluation. On an agency-first approach, epistemic evaluation i...
Article
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Exceptionalism is the view that one group is better than other groups and, by virtue of its alleged superiority, is not subject to the same constraints. Here we identify national exceptionalism in the responses made by political leaders in the United States and the United Kingdom to the covid -19 pandemic in early 2020. First, we observe that respo...
Article
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People often use personal stories to support and defend their views. But can a personal story be evidence? A story tells us that a certain event can happen and has already happened to someone, but it may not always help us understand what caused the event or predict how likely that event is to happen again in the future. Moreover, people confabulat...
Chapter
In this chapter we explore the value of politeness in conversation. In Sect. 1, we introduce the apparent tension between the pragmatic and epistemic value of politeness. It would seem that politeness has epistemic drawbacks by compromising informative and sincere communication, but also has benefits by enhancing the quality of interpersonal relati...
Article
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When subject to the choice-blindness effect, an agent gives reasons for making choice B, moments after making the alternative choice A. Choice blindness has been studied in a variety of contexts, from consumer choice and aesthetic judgement to moral and political attitudes. The pervasiveness and robustness of the effect is regarded as powerful evid...
Book
Full-text available
Are we rational creatures? Do we have free will? Can we ever know ourselves? These and other fundamental questions have been discussed by philosophers over millennia. But recent empirical findings in psychology and neuroscience suggest we should reconsider them. This textbook provides an engrossing overview of contemporary debates in the philosophy...
Article
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A good therapeutic relationship in mental health services is a predictor of positive clinical outcomes for people who seek help for distressing experiences, such as voice hearing and paranoia. One factor that may affect the quality of the therapeutic relationship and raises further ethical issues is the impact of the clinical encounter on users’ se...
Article
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In this paper we ask whether the two-factor theory of delusions is compatible with two claims, that delusions are pathological and that delusions are adaptive. We concentrate on two recent and influential models of the two-factor theory: the one proposed by Max Coltheart, Peter Menzies and John Sutton (2010) and the one developed by Ryan McKay (201...
Article
On one influential view, the problems that should attract medical attention involve a disorder, because the goals of medical practice are to prevent and treat disorders. Based on this view, if there are no mental disorders then the status of psychiatry as a medical field is challenged. In this paper, I observe that it is often difficult to establis...
Chapter
In this chapter, the author argues that the ill-grounded explanations agents sincerely offer for their choices have the potential for epistemic innocence. Such explanations are not based on evidence about the causes of the agents’ behaviour and typically turn out to be inaccurate. That is because agents tend to underestimate the role of priming eff...
Chapter
Human agents do not simply survive but navigate their world quite successfully despite being inclined to adopt and hang onto irrational beliefs. In this introductory chapter, the author justifies the new framework of epistemic innocence as an attempt to make sense of the idea that our undesirable and at times cringeworthy irrationality may be instr...
Chapter
In the concluding chapter, the author revisits the significance of the epistemic innocence framework in the light of the applications of epistemic innocence to distorted memory beliefs, confabulated explanations, elaborated delusional beliefs, motivated delusional beliefs, and optimistically biased beliefs in the preceding chapters. The somewhat co...
Chapter
In this chapter, the author argues that beliefs about the past that are based on distorted autobiographical memories have the potential for epistemic innocence. The focus is on beliefs about the past that people report in the context of dementia and other conditions in which autobiographical memory is severely compromised. Such beliefs may embellis...
Chapter
In this chapter, the author argues that monothematic delusions that have been construed as responses to trauma or adversity have the potential for epistemic innocence. So-called ‘motivated’ delusions are irrational because they are the output of a mechanism enabling an agent’s desires to influence the agent’s beliefs, independent of the evidence av...
Chapter
In this chapter, the author argues that optimistically biased beliefs that agents tend to have about themselves and their future have the potential for epistemic innocence. Such beliefs—inflated beliefs about the agent’s self-worth and rosy predictions about the agent’s health prospects or romantic relationships—are not sufficiently sensitive to th...
Book
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Ideally, we would have beliefs that satisfy norms of truth and rationality, as well as fostering the acquisition, retention and use of other relevant information. In reality, we have limited cognitive capacities and are subject to motivational biases on an everyday basis, and may also experience impairments in perception, memory, learning, and reas...
Chapter
In this chapter, the author argues that delusional beliefs that are elaborated—often emerging in people who attract a diagnosis of schizophrenia—have the potential for epistemic innocence. Delusional beliefs are strenuously resistant to counterevidence. However, when they are adopted to explain a puzzling experience that might compromise the agents...
Article
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It is estimated that up to 7500 people develop schizophrenia each year in the UK. Schizophrenia has significant consequences, with 28% of the excess mortality in schizophrenia being attributed to suicide. Previous research suggests that suicide in schizophrenia may be more related to affective factors such as depression and hopelessness, rather tha...
Article
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Autobiographical stories do not merely offer insights into someone’s experience but can constitute evidence or even serve as self-standing arguments for a given viewpoint in the context of public debates. Such stories are likely to exercise considerable influence on debate participants’ views and behaviour due to their being more vivid, engaging, a...
Chapter
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In this chapter we discuss the impact of philosophical research on our understanding of the world. Considering two examples from our areas of research, we argue that empirically informed philosophy can help us both reduce and control the effects of implicit bias on our behavior, and challenge the stigma associated with the diagnosis of psychiatric...
Article
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Delusions are symptoms of psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and dementia. By and large, delusions are characterized by their behavioral manifestations and defined as irrational beliefs that compromise good functioning. In this overview paper, we ask whether delusions can be adaptive notwithstanding their negative features. Can they be a r...
Chapter
Optimistically biased beliefs are beliefs about oneself that are more positive than is warranted by the evidence. Optimistically biased beliefs are the result of the influence of cognitive and motivational factors on people’s capacity to acquire, retrieve, and use information about themselves, and they resist counterevidence due to biases in belief...
Article
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Findings from the cognitive sciences suggest that the cognitive mechanisms responsible for some memory errors are adaptive, bringing benefits to the organism. In this paper we argue that the same cognitive mechanisms also bring a suite of significant epistemic benefits, increasing the chance of an agent obtaining epistemic goods like true belief an...
Chapter
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This chapter addresses the contribution that the delusion literature has made to the philosophy of belief. Three conclusions will be drawn: (1) a belief does not need to be epistemically rational to be used in the interpretation of behaviour; (2) a belief does not need to be epistemically rational to have significant psychological or epistemic bene...
Chapter
In the chapter I suggest that epistemic rationality should not be seen as a condition for intentional agency, but rather as an aspiration. Common failures of epistemic rationality in agents, such as conservatism, superstition, and prejudice, do not prevent us from interpreting and predicting those agents’ behaviour on the basis of their intentional...
Article
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After briefly reviewing some of the empirical and philosophical literature suggesting that there may be an adaptive role for delusion formation, we discuss the results of a recent study consisting of in-depth interviews with people experiencing delusions. We analyse three such cases in terms of (1) the circumstances preceding the development of the...
Article
Read the full article at doi: 10.1111/camh.12229 Read the Response to this Commentary at doi: 10.1111/camh.12292
Article
Full-text available
We ask whether reasoning strategies leading to doxastic irrationality that have benefits for individual agents are also beneficial to groups of agents. We consider the overconfidence bias, the intergroup bias, and the optimism bias. In these three cases, the biases are said to contribute to the agents subjective wellbeing or good functioning, to th...
Article
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In this paper I discuss the costs and benefits of confabulation, focusing on the type of confabulation people engage in when they offer explanations for their attitudes and choices. What makes confabulation costly? In the philosophical literature confabulation is thought to undermine claims to self-knowledge. I argue that when people confabulate th...
Article
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Does optimism lead to success? Friends of optimism argue that positive beliefs about ourselves and our future contribute to our fitness and mental health, and are correlated with good functioning, productivity, resilience, and pro-social behaviour. Sceptics, instead, claim that when we are optimistic we fail to react constructively to negative feed...
Article
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Background The lifetime risk of suicide and suicide attempt in patients with schizophrenia are 5% and 25%–50%, respectively. Understanding the suicide risk factors is of great significance in research and clinical practice. The current systematic review is the first attempt to examine and demonstrate the associations between the core negative sympt...
Article
Full-text available
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 contr...
Book
Full-text available
‘This is an excellent and engaging resource on delusions. The idea that delusions should not be seen as radically different from other beliefs… is an important challenge to much contemporary thinking and practice. It should be of interest to anyone studying delusional beliefs, and to all those who aim to help people who are troubled by them.’ Phili...
Chapter
This chapter argues that some beliefs from fiction present a problem for the truth-aim teleological account of belief. It outlines Nishi Shah's teleologist's dilemma, which challenges the teleologist to explain the focus on truth in deliberation over what to believe, but to do this in a way which does not exclude attitudes which are less regulated...
Article
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Here we consider the nature of unrealistic optimism and other related positive illusions. We are interested in whether cognitive states that are unrealistically optimistic are belief states, whether they are false, and whether they are epistemically irrational. We also ask to what extent unrealistically optimistic cognitive states are fixed. Based...
Article
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In this paper we have two main aims. First, we present an account of mood-congruent delusions in depression (hereafter, depressive delusions). We propose that depressive delusions constitute acknowledgements of self-related beliefs acquired as a result of a negatively biased learning process. Second, we argue that depressive delusions have the pote...
Article
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In this brief response to Etzioni’s paper we argue that satisfying one’s preferences and seeking to live up to one’s moral standards are not incompatible ways of living one’s life, and that choosing to act morally need not involve self-sacrifice.
Article
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In this paper we review two debates in the current literature on clinical delusions. One debate is about what delusions are. If delusions are beliefs, why are they described as failing to play the causal roles that characterise beliefs, such as being responsive to evidence and guiding action? The other debate is about how delusions develop. What pr...
Article
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In this article I ask whether elaborated and systematized delusions emerging in the context of schizophrenia have the potential for epistemic innocence. Cognitions are epistemically innocent if they have significant epistemic benefits that could not be attained otherwise. In particular, I propose that a cognition is epistemically innocent if it del...
Article
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In this paper we address the ethics of adopting delusional beliefs and we apply consequentialist and deontological considerations to the epistemic evaluation of delusions. Delusions are characterised by their epistemic shortcomings and they are often defined as false and irrational beliefs. Despite this, when agents are overwhelmed by negative emot...
Article
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What is the relationship between rationality and mental health? By considering the psychological literature on depressive realism and unrealistic optimism, it was hypothesized that, in the context of judgments about the self, accurate cognitions are psychologically maladaptive and inaccurate cognitions are psychologically adaptive. Recent studies r...
Article
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In this paper we consider an argument that is very influential in the philosophical literature, the argument from causal role against the view that delusions are beliefs. The argument has two premises, that many delusions fail to play belief-roles and that playing belief-roles is necessary for a mental state to be a belief. We assess both premises...
Article
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In this brief commentary, we examine the account of thought insertion provided by Jordi Fernandez in his book, Transparent Minds. We highlight some of the strengths of the account, and raise one main objection to it. In mainstream philosophical accounts of thought insertion, people who report the delusion are thought to have ownership of the alien...
Article
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What factors should be taken into account when attributing criminal responsibility to perpetrators of severe crimes? We discuss the Breivik case, and the considerations which led to holding Breivik accountable for his criminal acts. We put some pressure on the view that experiencing certain psychiatric symptoms or receiving a certain psychiatric di...
Article
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Delusions are defined as irrational beliefs that compromise good functioning. However, in the empirical literature, delusions have been found to have some psychological benefits. One proposal is that some delusions defuse negative emotions and protect one from low self-esteem by allowing motivational influences on belief formation. In this paper I...
Book
In this clear and engaging introduction to current debates on irrationality, Lisa Bortolotti presents the many facets of the concept and offers an original account of the importance of judgements of irrationality as value judgements. The book examines the standards against which we measure human behaviour, and reviews the often serious implications...
Article
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Understood in their historical context, current debates about psychiatric classification, prompted by the publication of the DSM-5, open up new opportunities for improved translational research in psychiatry. In this paper, we draw lessons for translational research from three time slices of 20th century psychiatry. From the first time slice, 1913...
Book
The leading theme is contemporary, interdisciplinary research on delusions.
Article
Sentience is a capacity that only some organisms have. It is often assumed that this capacity has moral significance and should have a prominent role in moral thinking. The commonsense notion of sentience (as indicated by the etymology, from the Latin sentiens which means “capable of feeling”) suggests that sentience is a capacity to be in certain...
Chapter
In this paper we focus on the reasons why great apes should be considered as part of our moral community and thus be protected from harm
Article
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The right not to know is often defended on the basis of the principle of respect for personal autonomy. If I choose not to acquire personal information that impacts on my future prospects, such a choice should be respected, because I should be able to decide whether to access information about myself and how to use it. But, according to the incoher...
Article
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It has been argued that schizophrenic delusions are "behaviourally inert." This is evidence for the phenomenon of "double bookkeeping," according to which people are not consistent in their commitment to the content of their delusions. The traditional explanation for the phenomenon is that people do not genuinely believe the content of their delusi...
Article
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Here I reply to the main points raised by the commentators on the arguments put forward in my Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs (OUP, 2009). My response is aimed at defending a modest doxastic account of clinical delusions, and is articulated in three sections. First, I consider the view that delusions are in-between perceptual and doxastic st...
Article
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To what extent do self-deception and delusion overlap? In this paper we argue that both self-deception and delusions can be understood in folk-psychological terms. "Motivated" delusions, just like self-deception, can be described as beliefs driven by personal interests. If self-deception can be understood folk-psychologically because of its motivat...

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