Lisa Bortolotti

Taking advantage of a concentrated period of research, I have planned a series of talks on my research on delusions, conspiracy beliefs, and epistemic injustice and a series of talks in or for schools. Academic talks Medical reasons to promote epistemically just communication in mental health clinical encounters. OZSW Conference , Eindhoven, 30-31 August 2024. Epistemically just medicine is good medicine. Bioethics and Social Justice , Prague, 12-13 September 2024. Conspiracy Beliefs and Delusions as Implausible and Unshakeable Identity Beliefs. Conspiracy Beliefs Between Secret Evidence and Delusion . Berlin, 26-27 September 2024. Are conspiracy theories epistemically innocent? Pre-talk with Egenis graduate students. Exeter, 30 September 2024. Medical reasons to promote epistemically just interactions in healthcare. Egenis seminar . Exeter, 30 September 2024. Epistemically just interactions are good medicine. PhenoLab . Online, 1 October 2024. Speaker and panel member at the Annual Me...

The resources available at The Philosophy Garden have significantly expanded in recent months, thanks to the generous support of the University of Birmingham AHRC Impact Acceleration Account. In particular, new videos address issues surrounding disagreement and the difficulty and importance of trusting reliable sources and being socially connected in order to gain the information we need and achieve our most basic goals. These videos can be conversation starters, prompting reflection and discussion, and introducing some interesting concepts in concrete and engaging ways. We have been using them with primary school children, from age 7, and with secondary school students and sixth-formers as well. We use them in class with our undergraduate and Masters students to test intuitions and contextualise problems.  On the site, there are recommendations for readings, games young people can play online to challenge themselves, a video library, and handouts, worksheets, and slides for teach...

It is so exciting that the very first Philosophy Museum in the world, in Milan, is hosting a new exhibition on fake news, conspiracy theories, and misinformation . I am grateful to Anna Ichino, Paolo Spinicci and Clotilde Calabi for curating this timely exhibition and inviting me to be part of it. Poster of the exhibition The exhibition will run from 5th to 22nd February 2024, and the space will be reserved to schools in the mornings and open to the public in the afternoon, free for all. It will explore the philosophy of misinformation, inviting visitors to play interactive games, watch animated videos, and reflect on what goes on in the mind of a conspiracy theorist. There will be several events accompanying the exhibition, including a debate on whether conspiracy theories are pathological with psychiatrist Lingiardi and myself on 12th February. Poster of the debate I feel privileged to have collaborated with Anna Ichino (University of Milan) and Kathleen Murphy-Hollis (Universit...

This year, World Philosophy Day was for me an opportunity to bring to young people some philosophical reflections on how we make decisions, arrive at explanations, and interact with each other in challenging contexts. In the morning I visited a primary school and talked to year 5 and 6 students about how we seek an explanation when something unexpected happens. We started by considering some definitions of philosophy and accounts of the value of philosophy ("What is philosophy for?") and then we watch two brief videos together.  The Ant and the Grasshopper  is about how we tend to blame others (especially people and institutions we don't like) when we find ourselves in a crisis; and The Fox and the Owl  is about how we often prefer to arrive at the solution of a problem by ourselves, without consulting with other people, even when they may have relevant knowledge to share. In the discussion after watching the videos, children recognised in the various animal characters di...

On 10th August Why Delusions Matter is out in paperback! One of the key ideas of the book is that we should avoid thinking of beliefs that we find irrational as a sign of a pathology. In the last few days, two open-access papers have been published where I capture some aspects of this idea. In one paper,  Is it pathological to believe conspiracy theories? , I ask how we decide that some ways of thinking about the world are pathological. Either those ways are considered to be harmful or the output of a malfunctioning mechanism. But in the case of conspiracy beliefs, harmfulness is hard to ascertain, and beliefs that are harmful in some ways can also bring benefits.  For instance, the belief that a vaccine is unsafe and is promoted by health authorities to benefit the pharmaceutical company who produced it may lead someone not to take advantage of the vaccine. As a result, the person is left unprotected against a serious disease. But conspiracy theories also aim to respond to e...

  One month to the publication of Why Delusions Matter (Bloomsbury, 2023)!  This week I will present the main ideas in the book at an in-person event in Oxford, a lecture for the MSt in Practical Ethics, and at an online seminar in Poland , at the Institute of Applied Psychology, Faculty of Management and Social Communication, Jagiellonian University. Reflecting on what happens when we call another person's belief delusional helps us realise that we tend to disapprove of that belief because we regard it as implausible, unshakeable, and costly. But there is another dimension to delusional beliefs: for the person who reports the belief and defends it from challenges, the delusion may be a way to explain distressing or unexpected events and to find meaning.