The DOI matches its Crossref record; 14 of the 14 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The Epistemic Innocence of Irrational Beliefs
Abstract
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 reasoning in the course of our lives. Such limitations and impairments give rise to distorted memory beliefs, confabulated explanations, elaborated delusional beliefs, motivated delusional beliefs, and optimistically biased beliefs. In the book, Bortolotti argues that some irrational beliefs qualify as epistemically innocent, where the notion of epistemic innocence captures the fact that in some contexts the adoption, maintenance or reporting of the beliefs delivers significant epistemic benefits that could not be easily attained otherwise. Epistemic innocence is a weaker notion than epistemic justification, as it does not imply that the epistemic benefits of the irrational belief outweigh its epistemic costs. However, it clarifies the relationship between the epistemic and psychological effects of irrational beliefs on agency. It is misleading to assume that epistemic rationality and psychological adaptiveness always go hand-in-hand, but also that there is a straight-forward trade off between them. Rather, epistemic irrationality can lead to psychological adaptiveness and psychological adaptiveness in turn can support the attainment of epistemic goals. Recognising the circumstances in which irrational beliefs enhance or restore epistemic performance informs our mutual interactions and enables us to take measures to reduce their irrationality without undermining the conditions for epistemic success.
Overview
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
In the citing paper
“I argue that some consciousness attributions to AI chatbots are epistemically benign for the attributor, as they don't involve evidence-recalcitrant states, and even some epistemically irrational ones are epistemically innocent in that they can have significant epistemic benefits unattainable otherwise.”
From Are Attributions of Consciousness to AI Chatbots Epistemically Innocent? (2026) · cites this paper as Bortolotti, 2020
In the citing paper
“She argues, for instance, that delusional beliefs can be epistemically beneficial when they (1) are adopted to explain a puzzling experience that might compromise the agent's capacity to interact with their environment, (2) help restore aspects of cognitive performance by decreasing anxiety, (3) support an attitude of curiosity and self-efficacy that is more conducive to acquiring new information”
From Are Attributions of Consciousness to AI Chatbots Epistemically Innocent? (2026) · cites this paper as Bortolotti, 2020
In the citing paper
“an epistemically irrational belief b is”
From Are Attributions of Consciousness to AI Chatbots Epistemically Innocent? (2026) · cites this paper as Bortolotti, 2020
In the citing paper
“She distinguishes between three kinds of”
From Are Attributions of Consciousness to AI Chatbots Epistemically Innocent? (2026) · cites this paper as Bortolotti, 2020
In the citing paper
“If an epistemically irrational belief co-occurs with any of these kinds of unavailability of an alternative, less irrational state then it counts as epistemically innocent on Bortolotti's account”
From Are Attributions of Consciousness to AI Chatbots Epistemically Innocent? (2026) · cites this paper as Bortolotti, 2020
In the citing paper
“Delusions, in general, have serious epistemic and psychological costs, and these costs may vastly outweigh their epistemic benefits (Bortolotti, 2020, chapters 4-5).”
From Are Attributions of Consciousness to AI Chatbots Epistemically Innocent? (2026) · cites this paper as Bortolotti, 2020
Citations
Cites
The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment.
Haidt, J. (2001) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/0033-295x.108.4.814 · Cited by 8,048
Subjective well-being. The science of happiness and a proposal for a national index
Diener, E. (2000) · American Psychologist · doi:10.1037/0003-066x.55.1.34 · Cited by 7,121
Kapur, S. (2003) · American Journal of Psychiatry · doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.160.1.13 · Cited by 2,813
Aging and motivated cognition: the positivity effect in attention and memory
Mather, M., & Carstensen, L. L. (2005) · Trends in Cognitive Sciences · doi:10.1016/j.tics.2005.08.005 · Cited by 1,910
Jones, E. E., & Harris, V. A. (1967) · Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · doi:10.1016/0022-1031(67)90034-0 · Cited by 1,783
Judgment of contingency in depressed and nondepressed students: Sadder but wiser?
Alloy, L. B., & Abramson, L. Y. (1979) · Journal of Experimental Psychology: General · doi:10.1037/0096-3445.108.4.441 · Cited by 1,692
Positive health: connecting well–being with biology
Ryff, C. D., Singer, B. H., & Dienberg Love, G. (2004) · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences · doi:10.1098/rstb.2004.1521 · Cited by 916
Narcissism, Self-Esteem, and the Positivity of Self-Views: Two Portraits of Self-Love
Campbell, W. K., Rudich, E. A., & Sedikides, C. (2002) · Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin · doi:10.1177/0146167202286007 · Cited by 866
Dunning, D., Meyerowitz, J. A., & Holzberg, A. D. (1989) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/0022-3514.57.6.1082 · Cited by 758
Depressive realism: a meta-analytic review
Moore, M. T., & Fresco, D. M. (2012) · Clinical Psychology Review · doi:10.1016/j.cpr.2012.05.004 · Cited by 291
Illness representations and lived experience in early-stage dementia
Harman, G., & Clare, L. (2006) · Qualitative Health Research · doi:10.1177/1049732306286851 · Cited by 196
Abductive inference and delusional belief.
Coltheart, M., Menzies, P., & Sutton, J. (2010) · Cognitive Neuropsychiatry · doi:10.1080/13546800903439120 · Cited by 177
The epistemic innocence of motivated delusions
Bortolotti, L. (2015) · Consciousness and Cognition · doi:10.1016/j.concog.2014.10.005 · Cited by 136
Self-citationModels of misbelief: integrating motivational and deficit theories of delusions
McKay, R., Langdon, R., & Coltheart, M. (2007) · Consciousness and Cognition · doi:10.1016/j.concog.2007.01.003 · Cited by 66
Research works printed but not linked: 249
- 1981, Depression and the generation of complex hypotheses in the judgement of contingency., Behaviour Research and Therapy
- 1991, Is depressive realism real?, Clinical Psychology Review
- 2004, Memory
- Addis, D.R. and Tippett, L.J. (2008). The contributions of autobiographical memory to the content and continuity of self: A social-cognitive neuroscience approach. In F. Sani (ed.) Self-Continuity: Individual and Collective Perspectives. New York: Psychology Press, pp. 71–84.
- 2014, Why does height matter in hiring?, Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics
- 2011, The role of automatic obesity stereotypes in real hiring discrimination., Journal of Applied Psychology
- Aimola Davies, A.M. and Davies, M. (2009). Explaining Pathologies of Belief. In M.R. Broome and L. Bortolotti (eds.) Psychiatry as Cognitive Neuroscience: Philosophical Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 285–26. · DOI
- Aimola Davies, A.M., Davies, M., Ogden, J.A., Smithson, M. and White, R.C. (2009). Cognitive and motivational factors in anosognosia. In T. Bayne and J. Fernàndez (eds.) Delusions and Self-deception: Affective Influences on Belief-Formation. Hove: Psychology Press, pp. 187–25.
- 1985, Global self-evaluation as determined by the desirability and controllability of trait adjectives., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
- 2009, Self-enhancement and self-protection: What they are and what they do., European Review of Social Psychology
- Alloy, L.B. and Abramson, L.Y. (1988). Depressive Realism: Four theoretical perspectives. In L.B. Allot (ed.) Cognitive Processes in Depression. New York: Guildford Press, pp. 223–65.
- 2012, Specialised Early Care for Alzheimer’s (SPECAL).
- 2000, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
- 2013, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
- 1987, Unraveling the Mystery of Health: How People Manage Stress and Stay Well
- 2016, Depressive delusions., Filosofia Unisinos
- Armor, D.A. and Taylor, S.E. (1998). Situated optimism: Specific outcome expectancies and self-regulation. In M.P. Zanna (ed.) Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 30). New York: Academic Press, pp. 309–79. · DOI
- 2003, The effects of mindset on behavior: Self-regulation in deliberative and implemental frames of mind., Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
- 1993, When every relationship is above average: Perceptions and expectations of divorce at the time of marriage., Law and Human Behavior
- Baker, A.G., Mset, R.M., Hanley, N., and Murphy, R.A. (2012). Depressive realism? Sadly not wiser. In M. Haselgrove and L. Hogarth (eds.) Clinical Applications of Learning Theory. Hove: Psychology Press, pp. 153–78.
- 1989, Human agency in social cognitive theory., American Psychologist
- 2006, Toward a psychology of human agency., Perspectives on Psychological Science
- 1973, The development of meaning in life., Psychiatry
- 2005, In defence of the doxastic conception of delusions., Mind and Language
- 1967, Depression: Causes and Treatment
- Bentall, R. (1994). Cognitive biases and abnormal beliefs: Towards a model of persecutory delusions. In A.S. David and J. Cutting (eds.) The Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia. London: Erlbaum, pp. 337–36. · DOI
- 2009, The cognitive and affective structure of paranoid delusions. A transdiagnostic investigation of patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders and depression., Archives of General Psychiatry
- 2020, Confabulating reasons., Topoi
- 2008, Sense of coherence among delusional patients: Prediction of remission and risk of relapse., Comprehensive Psychiatry
- Berrios, G.E. (2000). Confabulations. In G.E. Berrios and J.R. Hodges (eds.) Memory Disorders in Psychiatric Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 348–68. · DOI
- Berti, A., Spinazzola, L., Pia, L., and Rabuffetti, M. (1993). Motor awareness and motor intention in anosognosia for hemiplegia. In P. Haggard, Y. Rossetti, M. Kawato (eds.) Sensorimotor Foundations of Higher Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 163–81. · DOI
- 150Bloom, S. (2003). Caring for the caregiver: Avoiding and treating vicarious victimization. In A.P. Giardino, E.M. Datner and J.B. Asher (eds.) Sexual Assault: Victimization across the Life Span. St Louis, MO: G.W. Medical Publishing, pp. 459–70.
- 1985, First person account: ‘Freedom’ means knowing you have a choice., Schizophrenia Bulletin
- 2012, All things considered duties to believe., Synthese
- 2014, Irrationality
- 2009, Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs
- 2009, The epistemic benefits of reason giving., Theory and Psychology
- Bortolotti, L. (2013). Rationality and sanity: The role of rationality judgements in understanding psychiatric disorders. In B. Fulford, M. Davies, R. Gipps, G. Graham, J. Sadler, G. Stanghellini, et al. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 480–96. · DOI
- 2016, Epistemic benefits of elaborated and systematized delusions in schizophrenia., British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
- 2018, Stranger than fiction: Costs and benefits of everyday confabulation., Review of Philosophy and Psychology
- 2018, Optimism, agency, and success., Ethical Theory and Moral Practice
- 2015, Costs and benefits of realism and optimism., Current Opinion in Psychiatry
- 2009, ‘Faultless’ ignorance: Strengths and limitations of epistemic definitions of confabulation., Consciousness and Cognition
- 2016, The ethics of delusional belief., Erkenntnis
- 2018, Epistemic innocence of clinical memory distortions., Mind and Language
- 2019, Is choice blindness a case of self-ignorance?
- 2012, Can we recreate delusions in the laboratory?, Philosophical Psychology
- Bortolotti, L., Sullivan-Bissett, E., and Antrobus, M. (2019). The epistemic innocence of optimistically biased beliefs. In M. Balcerak Jackson and B. Balcerak Jackson (eds.) Reasoning: Essays on Theoretical and Practical Thinking. Oxford: Oxford University Press, chapter 12. · DOI
- 2009, A primer on the distinction between justification and excuse., Philosophy Compass
- 2009, The Dementia narrative: Writing to reclaim social identity., Journal of Aging Studies
- 2004, Serenity: Much more than just feeling calm., Advance Psychological Research
- 2007, Delusion formation and reasoning biases in those at clinical high risk for psychosis., British Journal of Psychiatry
- 2005, What causes the onset of psychosis?, Schizophrenia Research
- 1986, Evaluations of self and others: Self-enhancement biases in social judgments., Social Cognition
- 1998, The search for self knowledge
- 2012, Understanding the better than average effect: motives (still) matter., Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
- 2016, Implicit Bias and Philosophy
- 2000, Reverse Othello syndrome subsequent to traumatic brain injury., Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Processes
- 1997, Perceived prevalence, perceived superiority, and relationship satisfaction: Most relationships are good, but ours is the best., Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
- 2012, Identity, mood, and quality of life in people with early-stage dementia., International Psychogeriatrics
- 2005, Consciousness: Essays from a Higher-Order Perspective: Essays from a Higher-Order Perspective
- 2011, The Opacity of Mind: An Integrative Theory of Self-Knowledge
- 2010, Depressive realism and clinical depression., Behaviour Research and Therapy
- 1986, Minimal Rationality
- 2019, I just lost it! Fear and anger reduce the sense of agency: a study using intentional binding.
- Clifford, W.K. (1999) [1877]. The ethics of belief. In T. Madigan (ed.) The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays. Amherst, MA: Prometheus, pp. 70–96.
- 2000, Self-identity in older persons suffering from dementia: Preliminary results., Social Science and Medicine
- 2006, Utilization of self-identity roles for designing interventions for persons with dementia., Journal of Gerontology
- 2017, Confabulation and conversation., Cortex
- Coltheart, M. and Turner, M. (2009). Confabulation and delusion. In W. Hirstein (ed.) Confabulation: Views from Neuroscience, Psychiatry, Psychology, and Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 173–88. · DOI
- 2010, Optimism and its impact on mental and physical well-being., Clinical Practice and Epidemiology in Mental Health
- 2005, Memory and the self., Journal of Memory and Language
- 2015, Remembering, imagining, false memories and personal meanings., Consciousness and Cognition
- 1996, Motivated confabulation., Neurocase: The Neural Basis of Cognition
- 2007, Disrupted prediction-error signal in psychosis: Evidence for an associative account of delusions., Brain
- 2001, Delusion, rationality, empathy: Commentary on Martin Davies et al., Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology
- 1973, “From Jerusalem to Jericho”: A study of situational and dispositional variables in helping behavior., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
- Davies, M. (2009). Delusion and motivationally-biased belief: Self-deception in the two factor framework. In T. Bayne and J. Fernández (eds.) Delusion and Self-deception: Affective and Motivational Influences on Belief Formation. Hove: Psychology Press, pp. 71–86.
- 2001, Monothematic delusions: Towards a two-factor account., Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology
- 1985, Intrinsic Motivation and Self-determination in Human Behavior
- Della Sala, S., Freschi, R., Lucchelli, F., Muggia, S., and Spinnler, H. (1996). Retrograde Amnesia: No Past, New Life. In P.W. Halligan and J.C. Marshall (eds.) Method in Madness: Case Studies in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry. Hove: Psychology Press, pp. 209–34.
- 1995, A test of the depressive realism hypothesis in clinically depressed subjects., Cognitive Therapy and Research
- 2013, Epistemic agency., Theory and Research in Education
- 2013, Is epistemic agency possible?, Philosophical Issues
- 1984, Heuristic and analytic processes in reasoning., British Journal of Psychology
- 153Feldman, R. (2002). Epistemological duties. In P.K. Moser (ed.) Oxford Handbook of Epistemology (chapter 12). Oxford: Oxford University Press. · DOI
- 2015, What are the benefits of memory distortion?, Consciousness and Cognition
- 2016, The doxastic shear-pin: Delusions as errors of learning and memory., Cognitive Neuropsychiatry
- 2008, False selves in neuropsychological rehabilitation: The challenge of confabulation., Neuropsychological Rehabilitation
- 2010, Implicit awareness in anosognosia for hemiplegia: Unconscious interference without conscious re-representation., Brain
- 2001, Positive illusions about marriage among married and single individuals., Journal of Family Psychology
- 2013, Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain
- 2004, Why do people with delusions fail to choose more realistic explanations for their experiences? An empirical investigation., Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology
- 2005, Depression, confidence, and decision: Evidence against depressive realism., Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment
- 2010, False memories and fantastic beliefs: 15 Years of the DRM Illusion., Memory and Cognition
- Gigerenzer, G., Czerlinsky, J., and Martignon, L. (2002). How good are fast and frugal heuristics? In R. Elio (ed.) Common Sense, Reasoning and Rationality. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 148–73. · DOI
- 1999, Fast and Frugal Heuristics: The Adaptive Toolbox
- 1998, Immune neglect: A source of durability bias in affective forecasting., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
- 2005, The cognitive neuropsychiatry of delusions: From psychopathology to neuropsychology and back again., Psychological Medicine
- 2016, On the epistemic significance of evidence you should have had., Episteme
- 2012, The narrative sense of self., Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice
- 1986, Epistemology and Cognition
- 1993, Philosophical Applications of Cognitive Science
- 154Gopnik, A. (2000). Explanation as orgasm and the drive for causal knowledge: The function, evolution, and phenomenology of the theory formation system. In J.C. Keil and R.A. Wilson (eds.) Explanation and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. · DOI
- 2002, Symptomatology of the initial prodromal phase in schizophrenia., Schizophrenia Bulletin
- 2012, A (different) virtue epistemology., Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
- 1986, Distinguishing justifications from excuses., Law and Contemporary Problems
- 2012, Sense of agency., Current Biology
- 1998, The epistemic duty to seek more evidence., American Philosophical Quarterly
- 2014, Self-affirmation among the poor: Cognitive and behavioral implications., Psychological Science
- 2014, On the psychology of poverty., Science
- 2013, A Luxury of the Understanding : On the Value of True Belief.
- 1993, Social Comparisons and Adjustment Among Cardiac Patients., Journal of Applied Social Psychology
- Hepper, E.G. and Sedikides, C. (2012). Self-enhancing feedback. In R. Sutton, M. Hornsey, and K. Douglas (eds.) Feedback: The Communication of Praise, Criticism, and Advice. London: Peter Lang, pp. 43–56.
- 2005, Brain Fiction: Self-deception and the Riddle of Confabulation.
- Hirstein, W. (2009). Introduction: What is confabulation? In W. Hirstein (ed.) Confabulation: Views from Neuroscience, Psychiatry, Psychology and Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–12. · DOI
- Hirstein, W. (2009). The name and nature of confabulation. In J. Symon and P. Calvo (eds.) The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Psychology. New York: Routledge, pp. 647–58.
- 2012, Delusions as forensically disturbing perceptual inferences., Neuroethics
- 1975, Erotomania or de Clérambault syndrome., Archive of General Psychiatry
- 1992, Beneficial delusions?, Psychiatric Bulletin
- 2009, Narrative and identity in Alzheimer’s disease: A case study., Journal of Aging Studies
- 1997, Spiritual experience and psychopathology., Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology
- 1963, General Psychopathology
- 2019, Confabulation, Rationalisation and Morality.
- 2020, Confabulation, rationalisation and morality., Topoi
- 2017, What is unrealistic optimism?, Consciousness and Cognition
- 2010, Declining autobiographical memory and the loss of identity: Effects on well-being., Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology
- 1980, De Clérambault syndrome (erotomania): A review and case presentation., Journal of the National Medical Association
- 1980, Healthy Personality: An Approach from the viewpoint of Humanistic Psychology
- 1982, Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases
- 1999, Varieties of false memory., Cognitive Neuropsychology
- 2010, Varieties of confabulation and delusion., Cognitive Neuropsychiatry
- 1994, How believing in ourselves increases risk taking: perceived self-efficacy and opportunity recognition., Decision Science
- 1999, Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
- Kruse, A. (2013). What are epistemic duties? In M. Hoeltje, T. Spitzley, and W. Spohn (eds.) What May We Believe? What Ought We to Do? Proceedings of GAP.8, the Eighth International Conference of the Society for Analytic Philosophy, pp. 340–51.
- 2019, Are clinical delusions adaptive, WIREs Cognitive Science
- 1975, Heads I win, tails it’s chance: The illusion of control as a function of the sequence of outcomes in a purely chance task., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
- 1977, Schizophrenic delusional phenomena., Comprehensive Psychiatry
- 2003, Delusions of success: How optimism undermines executives’ decisions.
- 2003, Elusive reasons: A problem for first-person authority., Philosophical Psychology
- 2015, Emphasizing malleability in the biology of depression: Durable effects on perceived agency and prognostic pessimism., Behaviour Research and Therapy
- 1999, What is a Delusion? Epistemological dimensions., Journal of Abnormal Psychology
- 2012, Automatic optimism: Why people assume their futures will be bright: Automatic optimism., Social and Personality Psychology Compass
- 1990, Judgement of contingency: A replication with hospitalized depressed, schizophrenic and normal samples., Journal of Social Behavior and Personality
- Levy, N. (2008). Self-deception without thought experiments. In T. Bayne and J. Fernàndez (eds.) Delusion and Self-deception: Affective and motivational influences on belief formation. Hove: Psychology Press, pp. 227–42.
- 2016, Unrealistic optimism in the pursuit of academic success., International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
- 1980, Social competence and depression: The role of illusory self-perceptions., Journal of Abnormal Psychology
- 2009, The hidden dangers of implicit bias in the workplace., Employment Relations Today
- 1978, The pathology of love: Some clinical variants of De Clérambault’s syndrome., Social Science and Medicine
- 2012, Memory distortion in Alzheimer’s Disease: Deficient monitoring of short and long-term memory., Neuropsychology
- 2013, Hardiness: Turning Stressful Circumstances into Resilient Growth
- 1997, Rehabilitation of patients with anosognosia for hemiplegia due to intracerebral haemorrhage., Brain Injury
- 2006, The relationship between delusions and hallucinations., Current Psychiatry Reports
- 2005, First-episode psychosis: Psychopathology, quality of life, and functional outcome., Schizophrenia Bulletin
- 2012, Delusional inference., Mind and Language
- 2010, Confabulation, delusion, and anosognosia: Motivational factors and false claims., Cognitive Neuropsychiatry
- 2005, ‘Sleights of mind’: Delusions, defences and self-deception., Cognitive Neuropsychiatry
- 2009, The evolution of misbelief., Behavioral and Brain Sciences
- 2000, Depressive realism: Effects of depression severity and interpretation time., Journal of Clinical Psychology
- 2011, The false memory syndrome: Experimental studies and comparison to confabulations., Medical Hypotheses
- 2011, What good is moral reasoning?, Mind and Society
- 2016, Is deontology a moral confabulation?, Neuroethics
- 2010, Klaus Conrad (1905–1961). Delusional mood, psychosis, and beginning Schizophrenia., Schizophrenia Bulletin
- 2009, Are delusions biologically adaptive? Salvaging the Doxastic Shear Pin., Behavioral and Brain Sciences
- 2015, Delusions as harmful malfunctioning beliefs., Consciousness and Cognition
- 2018, Delusions and Beliefs: A Philosophical Inquiry
- Miyazono, K., Bortolotti, L., and Broome, M.R. (2014). Prediction-error and two-factor theories of delusion formation: competitors or allies? In N. Galbraith (ed.) Aberrant Beliefs and Reasoning. Hove: Psychology Press, pp. 34–54.
- 2016, What is the sense of agency and why does it matter?, Frontiers in Psychology
- Moscovitch, M. (1995). Confabulation. In D. Schacter (ed.) Memory Distortion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 226–51.
- 2005, Depressive realism and outcome density bias in contingency judgments: The effect of the context and intertrial interval., Journal of Experimental Psychology General
- 1996, The benefits of positive illusions: Idealization and the construction of satisfaction in close relationships., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
- 1996, The self-fulfilling nature of positive illusions in romantic relationships: love is not blind, but prescient., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
- 1994, The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-Narrative
- 1977, Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes., Psychological Review
- 2013, New Essays on Belief: Constitution, Content and Structure
- 1990, Temporality and identity loss due to Alzheimer’s disease., Social Science and Medicine
- 158Palermos, S.O. and Pritchard, D.H. (2016). The Distribution of Epistemic Agency. In P. Reider (ed.) Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency: De-centralizing Epistemic Agency. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 109–26.
- 2019, Delusional Predictions and Explanations.
- 1994, Bias against overweight job applicants in a simulated employment interview., Journal of Applied Psychology
- 2003, Are depressive symptoms positively or negatively associated with the illusion of control?, Social Behavior and Personality: An international journal
- 2019, Epistemic innocence and the production of false memory beliefs., Phil Studies
- 1995, Anosognosia in parietal lobe syndrome., Consciousness and Cognition
- 1996, The evolutionary biology of self-deception, laughter, dreaming and depression: Some clues from anosognosia., Medical Hypotheses
- 2005, Self awareness and personality change in dementia., Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry
- 1974, Erotomania., American Journal of Psychiatry
- 1991, Delusional belief systems and meaning in life: A preferred reality?, The British Journal of Psychiatry
- 1992, The origins of delusion., The British Journal of Psychiatry
- Roberts, G. (2006). Understanding Madness. In G. Roberts, S. Davenport, F. Holloway, and T. Tattan (eds.) Enabling Recovery: The Principles and Practice of Rehabilitation Psychiatry. London: Gaskell, pp. 93–111.
- 2020, Mnemonic Confabulation., Topoi
- 2001, Positive illusions about the self: Short-term benefits and long-term costs., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
- 2015, Jumping to conclusions about the beads task? A meta-analysis of delusional ideation and data-gathering., Schizophrenia Bulletin
- 2000, Perceived superiority in close relationships: Why it exists and persists., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
- 2004, Positive health: Connecting wellbeing with biology., Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
- 1996, A study of agentic self‐efficacy and agentic competence across Britain and the USA., Journal of Management Development
- 159Samuels, S., Stich, S., and Bishop M. (2002) Ending the rationality wars: How to make disputes about human rationality disappear. In R. Elio (ed.) Common Sense, Reasoning and Rationality. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 236–68. · DOI
- 2015, Verbal reports and ‘real’ reasons: Confabulation and conflation., Ethical Theory and Moral Practice
- 2014, A problem for self-knowledge: The implications of taking confabulation seriously., Acta Analytica
- 1997, Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past
- 1999, The seven sins of memory., American Psychologist
- 2007, The optimistic brain., Nature Neuroscience
200 of 249 shown
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Are Attributions of Consciousness to AI Chatbots Epistemically Innocent?
Peters, U. (2026) · Minds and Machines · doi:10.1007/s11023-026-09795-8
Metadata
- Authors
- Bortolotti, L.
- Affiliations
- University of Birmingham (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Bortolotti, Lisa
- ORCID
- Bortolotti, Lisa
- Publisher
- Oxford University PressOxford
- Published
- 2020-06-30
- OpenAlex
- W3080704708
- Cited by
- 127
- References
- 14
- Citations by year
- 2026: 25 · 2025: 18 · 2024: 16 · 2023: 39 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 21 · 2020: 1
- FWCI
- 27.94
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- University of Birmingham Research Portal (University of Birmingham) (submittedVersion)
- Institutional Research Information System University of Ferrara (University of Ferrara) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Feminist Epistemology and Gender Studies
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Psychological Treatments and Assessments
- Keywords
- irrational beliefs, epistemic justification, epistemic rationality, memory distortion, confabulation, optimism bias, cognitive limitations, epistemic performance, agency
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review