The Limits of Epistemic Mercy: On Lisa Bortolotti’s Representation Error

Lisa Bortolotti’s concept of epistemic innocence, developed across Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs (2009) and The Epistemic Innocence of Irrational Beliefs (2020), holds that some irrational beliefs deliver significant epistemic benefits that partially offset their epistemic costs, warranting a positive epistemic standing that straightforward condemnation of irrationality misses. This paper argues that the programme commits three foundational logical errors. The first is a category confusion: the benefits Bortolotti identifies as epistemic, coherence, narrative identity, and motivational engagement, are psychological benefits, and classifying them as epistemic presupposes a theory of epistemic value that the programme neither constructs nor defends. The second is a normative presupposition: the concept of epistemic innocence imports a strongly deontological metaepistemology in which epistemic evaluation is primarily about blameworthiness, a position that reliabilist, externalist, and virtue-epistemological traditions reject and that Bortolotti does not argue for. The third is a self-defeating structure: the two conditions for epistemic innocence are jointly falsified by the modal account of persons developed in Fatić (2025), which achieves through rational therapeutic engagement the same outcomes the programme attributes to irrationality, demonstrating that irrationality is not their source. All three errors share a common methodological source, identified as the representation error: applying evaluative vocabulary to psychological phenomena without the philosophical theory that grounds the application.