Lisa Bortolotti

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 Monday 20th February 2023 I will join Julian Baggini for a Salon event at St George's Bristol, entitled "How to to think like a philosopher" and hosted by Bristol Ideas.  Is it problematic to question everything? Are modesty and self-scrutiny important for thinking well?  Here is the podcast if you want to learn more:

On 5th and 6th January 2023, a workshop hosted by Birkbeck University and organised by Alex Grzankowski will explore the nature of happiness ( book here ).  My talk will focus on whether we can be delusional and happy at the same time. Here is the full (provisional) programme: January 5th  Lisa Bortolotti (Birmingham) — Can we be delusional and happy? Jonathan Mitchell (Cardiff) — Affective experiences of higher values Mark Textor (KCL) and Alex Grzankowski (Birkbeck) — Happiness is a mood January 6th MM McCabe (KCL) — Choosing lives Dan Haybron (Saint Louis University) — Happiness and human agency Luca Barlassina and Max Hayward (Sheffield) — Affect and satisfaction: from the folk concept of happiness to happiness (and back) Christine Vitrano (CUNY Brooklyn) — A life well lived: happiness and goodness

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...