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...

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...

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...

On 18th November 2022, from 4pm to 5:30pm, I will deliver the New Enlightenment Lecture at the University of Edinburgh. New Enlightenment Lectures are held annually, and feature a prominent woman philosopher leading a roundtable discussion with postgraduate students and faculty members on gender issues in Philosophy, and delivering a keynote lecture on a topic of her choice. I am honoured I was invited to give a talk! Here are the poster of the event and the abstract of my talk. Epistemic Criteria of Delusionality Both in the popular press and in cognitive science research, there is a tendency not only to compare beliefs in conspiracy theories with clinical delusions, but to call ‘delusions’ various nonclinical beliefs that are found epistemically problematic, including conspiracy beliefs. One recent proposal by Sam Wilkinson is that when an interpreter calls a speaker’s belief delusional, the interpreter expresses their folk-epistemic disapproval towards the belief. Being an expressio...