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David Coady's Pragmatic Rejection Rejection
25 Plays4 years ago
Josh and M finish off reviewing the chapters in David Coady's edited collection "Conspiracy Theories: The Philosophical Debate" by looking at Coady's chapter "The Pragmatic Rejection of Conspiracy Theories."
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
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Transcript
Exploration of the Tunnels Beneath the Church of Orphans
00:00:16
Speaker
I half expected the entrance to whatever lay beneath the ruins of the Church of Orphans to close after us, as this were adventuring in some penny dreadful. However, the moon ably illuminated our cautious descent into the depths. Intriguing, Puddles. Intriguing. From the nature of these arches, I suspect the Church of Orphans was built over these tunnels. A cover-up, Morrissey? Of a kind, Puddles. Of a kind.
00:00:39
Speaker
As we drew deeper into the subterranean structure, we began to lose light. I petted down my pockets to locate my folding candle lantern, which Morrissey lit with one of his new fancy safety matches. If I'm not mistaken, this is a Roman necropolis, likely reused by the local Christians and incorporated into the church when it was built. I shone my lantern at the walls and saw that Morrissey was right. We were walking past elkove after elkove of skeletal remains. Why hide a crypt, Morrissey?
00:01:06
Speaker
Oh, I doubt it was originally hidden, my friend. I suspect, however, that at some point in the last hundred years or so, it was made to disappear with the local records of existence expunged. But why am I receiving? What purpose does it serve? An excellent question, Puddles. Perhaps once we get to the bottom of this, quite literally, we shall have an answer.
00:01:28
Speaker
We walked, by my reckoning, another half mile past piled corpse after piled corpse before we came to what seemed obviously a new addition to the necropolis. Hmm, this red brickwork seems relatively new in construction. At Wardian, do you think?
00:01:43
Speaker
I peered closely, and, knowing nothing about bricks whatsoever, agreed. Aha! Morrissey had located a torch on the wall and promptly proceeded to light it. We found ourselves in a large room big enough to be a ballroom in the higher end of Manchester. Well, I think whatever Archibald and Miracat were seeking, we have found at A-Pluddles. I say, Morrissey, none of these graves are any older than fifty years or so.
00:02:05
Speaker
Yes, pluddles. We seem to be in a crypt containing the remains of some of the vilest miscreants known to Christendom. Lord Early Barony, the Sussex Strangler, Beryl Goodpants, the Yorkshire Drowner, Parley Mudbottom, the Bog Locker. I inspected one of the plaques.
00:02:21
Speaker
Morrissey, I'll check. When did good pants die? I wouldn't need to consult my notes for an exact time and date, but at ninety-seven, I believe. Curious. It says here that she died some ten years later. Pluddles, you are right. Every single person here seems to have died well after their recorded demise. Morrissey lifted a coffin lid before slowly closing it. Though certainly are the remains of the Newport and Bizler.
00:02:47
Speaker
Hmm. Yes, Morrissey? I think, Pluddles, we have come across evidence of something somewhat more sinister than two men chasing up the deeds of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer. If I am right, then what we have here is evidence that some of the most terrible villains this country has ever seen faked their deaths.
00:03:08
Speaker
Although, for what purpose? Morrissey, you should come see this. Yes, Puddles? It appears to be a coffin belonging to your old associate, Stickle.
Introduction to the Podcast and New Topics
00:03:33
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:03:42
Speaker
Hello, you're listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison in Auckland, New Zealand. They are Dr. M. Denteth in Hamilton, Kui Kui Rua, New Zealand. We have a new patron, I'm told. We do. Now, they haven't pledged at a level by which we use their name. We do have a new patron in the fold. So welcome, new patron, to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy.
00:04:07
Speaker
We'll be spending your money wisely on not downloading copies of loose change. And that's a guarantee that we will keep.
00:04:18
Speaker
Now, it is another week, another episode of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre. And the last one before the election. Our election, not the North American election, our election. Yes, no, we'll be doing something next week, I don't doubt. Well, I kind of feel that maybe we should take a look at the conspiracy theories over our local election, given that we are a local podcast and we do cover local issues.
00:04:47
Speaker
I just worry that our election is a little humdrum compared to what's been going on overseas. Did you see The Guardian published a piece by New Zealand comedian James Nokise where he was basically talking about the latest leaders debates and how boring they were. And isn't that nice in this day and age to have a boring leaders debate? That being said, the fact that a fly was the most important part of the vice presidential debate in the US has not been lost on us.
00:05:16
Speaker
No, no. Anyway, that's time for next week. This week, we're looking at a paper by David Cody. Unless you have anything else to say, why don't we get straight into it? Yes, let's close the book literally on conspiracy theories, the philosophical debate.
Philosophical Debates on Conspiracy Theories
00:05:37
Speaker
So this week we're looking at the final chapter of Conspiracy Theories of Philosophical Debate, as published by Esgate in 2006, and edited by David Cote, and is actually kind of the routine in edited collections. The final chapter belongs to the editor, and this is Cote's chapter entitled The Pragmatic Rejection of Conspiracy Theories, and it's quite a short piece, isn't it, Josh?
00:06:06
Speaker
Not particularly long, only half a dozen pages or so. And yet some of the shorter papers that we've looked at in the past have been some of the most interesting, I think.
00:06:18
Speaker
Now, last time we looked at a paper by David Cody, it was his conspiracy theories and official stories where he was arguing against the works of Brian L. Keeley and Steve Clark. He mentioned Lee Basham briefly at the end of that paper, but didn't really go into what he thought of Basham's works particularly much. And so in this essay, he redresses the balance.
00:06:44
Speaker
Now, also, if you recall from when we looked at conspiracy theories and official stories, it seemed like the issue there was that Cody was using quite a different definition of what a conspiracy theory is from what Keeley and Clark used, which meant at times it felt like they were sort of talking at cross purposes a little bit. Cody would say, you know, that this is a feature of conspiracy theories, intending it is a problem where
00:07:13
Speaker
Keighley and Clark would probably say, yeah, no, that's fine. We're totally on board with that. So we shall see if something similar happens in this paper. How does it start? Well, like many of the chapters in this book, there is no abstract per se, but the opening paragraph basically gives us the pre-say of the argument we're about to discuss, and it goes thusly.
00:07:37
Speaker
In conspiracy theories and official stories, I discussed in some detail the arguments of two contemporary critics of conspiracy theory, Brian L. Keeley and Steve Clark. My discussion of Lee Basham was, by contrast, extremely brief. This was partly because Basham presents himself as a defender of conspiracy theories against unfair criticism, and in that respect he's an ally of mine.
00:08:02
Speaker
But Basham does criticise conspiracy theory, and his criticism needs to be diffused, because, like the criticisms of Keeley and Clark, and for that matter Popper, it tends to encourage the fallacy that we are entitled to be dismissive of certain theories just because they are conspiracy theories.
00:08:24
Speaker
It's interesting to see, and this is something that's come up a little bit in the earlier papers we've looked at. At this point in the literature, it seems some people at least are seeing things in sort of, there's two sides. There's the people who are pro-conspiracy theories, and there's the people who are aginum. Again, again, I never remember. Again, again.
00:08:51
Speaker
I mean, I don't know that that was ever entirely accurate, but did things used to feel quite sort of dichotomized? It certainly seems there's a lot more nuance these days.
00:09:03
Speaker
Yes, well I mean, so this particular volume, conspiracy theories, the philosophical debate, was quite instrumental in the development of my PhD thesis, given it was the first book in philosophy on conspiracy theories, and at the time basically contained almost all of the extant literature on conspiracy theory that was available.
00:09:25
Speaker
So it did, to my mind, emblemise the fact that there was a for and against, where you had Cody and Pigton, who were quite clearly for conspiracy theories, Keeley and Clark, who were construed as being quite again conspiracy theories,
00:09:44
Speaker
And Basham, who I take to be four conspiracy theories, but Cody in this chapter seems to go, no, actually he's a kingdom. And what is interesting, and we'll talk about this towards the end of this podcast when we talk about the construal of Basham's point, I did at the time think that Cody had a point.
00:10:10
Speaker
As we will discuss, I think your more charitable reading of Basham and how Cody deals with Basham is actually the right way to go about this.
00:10:22
Speaker
Now, there's a footnote in that opening paragraph where Cody says, of course neither Basham nor I defend all conspiracy theories, nor does anyone else, which is fair at a good point. I thought maybe
00:10:40
Speaker
He should also have pointed out that Keeley and Clark don't criticise all conspiracy theories. They also, you know, certainly in the papers to this point acknowledge that some of them turned out to be true, the likes of your Iran Contras and your Watergates and what have you. And Keeley, we recall, explicitly said that conspiracy theories aren't unwarranted by definition, but
00:11:05
Speaker
It is, yeah, it is good to point that out, I suppose. And I'm assuming since I think it didn't appear until this book that Cody wouldn't have given a full reading to Lee Basham's Afterthoughts on Conspiracy Theory Resilience and Ubiquity, which is the last one as we looked at,
00:11:26
Speaker
where Lee put forward a position that, although it wasn't called that at the time, was basically particularism. He very much was saying, you know, the crucial question is how do you tell a good conspiracy theory from a bad one, not how do you try and classify them as some that are inherently ones that you can throw away.
00:11:45
Speaker
Now, it is important to point out that a lot of this rests on the timetabling of when chapters came in, because as the editor of the volume, and I know this from when I edited taking conspiracy theories seriously, if chapters come in in a timely fashion, then when you get around to writing the conclusion or the final chapter,
00:12:09
Speaker
you can take into account the chapters you've seen. So a lot depends on exactly when Cody wrote this chapter, which, if he wrote it well before the book was meant to be finished, then of course he can't take into account Basham's work unless Lee submits really early. At the same time, if Lee submits, say, on the very last date of submission for the volume, Cody's only able to write the chapter in haste and thus may not be able to incorporate things.
00:12:39
Speaker
So it's hard to know whether Cody has read afterthoughts on conspiracy theory, resilience and ubiquity, because an awful lot rests upon timetables.
00:12:53
Speaker
And he does, though, point out that one of the reasons why he didn't say much about Lee Basham in conspiracy theories and official stories was that he wasn't aware of at least, I assume, I mean, he knew he did mention Lee Basham, so he must have known about it, but he presumably hadn't read his second paper, which was about malevolent global conspiracy. But as we go through this one, we'll see he very definitely has read that paper by this stage.
00:13:21
Speaker
He kind of skipped straight to the end, really. He basically starts by looking at and quoting Lee Basham's conclusion to living with the conspiracy, which is essentially the same as his conclusion to malevolent global conspiracy.
00:13:38
Speaker
where he says that a more solid ground for the rejection of conspiracy theories is simply pragmatic. There's nothing you can do. And it's this line of argumentation that Cody pretty much spends the entire paper looking at, I think.
00:13:51
Speaker
And that's because he agrees with Basham up until the end of Living With The Conspiracy, because Basham and Living With The Conspiracy sets out rationales as to why we should reject Keeley and Clark. Now, as we've discussed in previous episodes, it
00:14:10
Speaker
Very likely there's some unfair interpretation of both Keeley and Clark going on in these early papers, but the kind of rationales that Bashan puts forward for critiquing Keeley and Clark are the kind of rationales that Cody has also put forward. So they're in agreement all the way up to the point where Lee starts talking about the pragmatic rejection of conspiracy theory.
00:14:37
Speaker
And this is where things get interesting, because Cody goes on to state, but Basham surely cannot mean that we should dismiss all conspiracy theories on these grounds. What do you think of that claim, Josh? Well, yes. No, I don't. I don't think
00:14:59
Speaker
I certainly don't think Lee means that, and I don't think that Cody thinks that Lee means that. I'm mixing up surnames and first names here, aren't I? It doesn't matter. It's all right. I know all these people. So no, he sort of goes and he spends a decent-sized paragraph talking about why it would be silly to dismiss absolutely all conspiracy theories on those grounds, but he prefers it by saying, surely Lee doesn't mean this, and no, I don't think he does.
00:15:28
Speaker
and Cody doesn't carry on as though he does. Yes, because he then says, to be fair, Basham may mean to restrict his pragmatic rejection to the most extreme imaginable conspiracy theories, those which postulate a malevolent global conspiracy. Now, I would take issue with that sentence because Cody's got Cody by saying may mean to restrict
00:15:53
Speaker
He's kind of claiming that Lee hasn't been clear about what his pragmatic rejection applies to. And yet on a reread of Lee's paper, it's fairly clear his pragmatic rejection is meant to be about malevolent global conspiracies and not about all conspiracy theories. So Cody is either mistaken or he's being a bit underhanded in his treatment of Basham here.
00:16:22
Speaker
or possibly just being overly equivocal. As tends to be a problem with philosophers from time to time, we do try to avoid making absolute statements.
00:16:32
Speaker
where possible. We should make a joke there about absolute statements. Generally, I agree with you. That's as good as it's going to get. Yep. But Cody says, okay, so maybe he's he's only applying this pragmatic rejection of or rejection of conspiracies on pragmatic grounds, specifically to his malevolent global conspiracies. You'll recall the paper called Malevolent Global Conspiracy was
00:16:59
Speaker
kind of Lee Basham doubling down a little bit on his position and saying, yes, no, my views apply even to the most extreme cases of conspiracy theories, these theories that span the entire globe about secret societies who control everything and so on and so forth. But Cody goes on to say,
00:17:23
Speaker
Whatever else may be said about the epistemic implications of malevolent global conspiracy theories, they are not conspiracy theories as we know them. The conspirators of actual conspiracy theories, warranted and unwarranted, tend to be far from omnipotent. Their conspiracies can be seen through. This is what the conspiracy theorist believes himself to have done, and thwarted. That's usually what the conspiracy theorist hopes to do. Hence our impotence in the face of malevolent global conspiracy theories cannot be the reason many people reject conspiracy theory, because few people have ever heard of any malevolent global conspiracy theories.
00:17:52
Speaker
which I don't know. It seems it's sort of, these points seem to be a very sort of theoretical one. It was sort of, you know, it seemed like he was suggesting a pure example. Like at the time we talked about the analogy to the perfect crime, the one that you get away with, because no one would even know it was, no one would even know it had been committed. And here David Cody is kind of
00:18:20
Speaker
is ignoring that and talking specifically about the practical cases of ones that we know about. Yes, he's talking here about your Watergate's, your Gulf of Tonkins, and your Moscow show trials. Which I don't know if that misses the point a little bit or not, and certainly when I sort of read back to Lee Basham's conclusions in his papers,
00:18:45
Speaker
It didn't seem to me that he was saying, in any case, we should reject conspiracy theories on these pragmatic grounds, because what are you going to do? It seemed to be more like he was saying that people do reject them on pragmatic grounds, and that at least is stronger grounds for rejecting a conspiracy theory than, say, the epistemic grounds that Brian Alkely was putting forwards.
00:19:12
Speaker
So yeah, my reading of this was that Cody is perhaps not quite on the money in terms of what Lee Basham was saying.
00:19:20
Speaker
Yes, and I think you're right. So having looked over both the Cody piece and going back to the Basham piece with living with the conspiracy, I think there is a limiting factor here that the pragmatic rejection of conspiracy theory on the ground, there is nothing you can do, is based around the idea that if there are these malevolent global conspiracies happening in the background of our civilization,
00:19:46
Speaker
which are somewhat perfectly concealed from us, there literally is nothing we can do about them. Because we will, A, ever, we'll probably, if that, I'll try that again, we'll probably never know about them. And if we do find out about them, we can't do anything about them due to just how powerful those conspiracies turn out to be. So the pragmatic rejection applies to a very limited subset
00:20:14
Speaker
of conspiracy theories, it doesn't actually apply to your Watergate, to your Tonkins, or your Moscow show trials, because whilst they may be malevolent conspiracy theories, they're not malevolent global conspiracy theories.
00:20:30
Speaker
Now, at this point, I'm going to need you to step in at this point because David Cody starts talking about Morian facts, which is not a term I'm familiar with.
Morian Facts and Critique of Skepticism
00:20:40
Speaker
How does how does that bit all play out? Well, let me let me give you the quote and then we can talk about more. So Cody says,
00:20:48
Speaker
This kind of conspiracy theory is a radical, skeptical hypothesis. As a partial response, we should insist that some things are morey in facts. That is, they are better known than the premises of any argument that might appear to undermine our claims to know them.
00:21:03
Speaker
Mauryan facts also include many of the facts that the apparent possibility of a malevolent global conspiracy seems to undermine. In particular, facts about history, which we are only warranted in believing, on the basis of the testimony of others. In other words, we may not know how we can know that the Second World War ended in 1945 when we are presented with a sufficiently vast and malevolent conspiracy theory, but we still do know this historical fact.
00:21:32
Speaker
So Moore was an epistemologist who was interested in how we talk about kind of basic beliefs and how we use those basic beliefs to then justify other more complicated beliefs. And one of the examples that Moore talks about is the argument, so what evidence do we have that we have things like hands and limbs? It's kind of apparent, no matter how many skeptical doubts
00:22:00
Speaker
you introduce into my mind. I can see, experience, and feel the hands I have in front of me. And that's much better evidence, even though it's a kind of immediate empirical fact.
00:22:15
Speaker
which I've which is kind of unmediated to me than any argument that you can give me that actually it's some kind of vast delusion. The fact that I have hands is enough to warrant the belief I have hands and then I can start building my world up from there. So Moore's trying to reply to the argument of the skeptic of how do we know things but going actually there are some things I just know like the fact I have hands.
00:22:42
Speaker
And Cody is bringing in Morian facts of things where, look, maybe there is a vast conspiracy out there which affects our ability to know all sorts of things in a kind of institutional or socially constructed way. But there are still some things that we can kind of say we know.
00:23:04
Speaker
whether or not you buy into that scepticism, such as the fact that World War Two is not going on around us at the moment. Now, the sceptics response to that would be, well, David Coady, you live in Tasmania. The Second World War never really affected Tasmania. So how do you know the Second World War isn't still going on in Europe at this time? But Coady's response would be, well, I can just go to Europe. I can wander through the sea and I can go, look,
00:23:34
Speaker
where's the war? It's apparent to me that there is no war going on here because my senses tell me this and that's sufficient to know at least some claims about the world. Now I think what Cody is doing here is actually not really replying to Basham
00:23:51
Speaker
he's replying to Keeley and the idea of public trust skepticism, the idea that if you believe mature unwarranted conspiracy theories, then you are kind of obliged to start doubting a lot of things because you should doubt the very instruments of knowledge and the institutions of knowledge, which allow you to basically justify basic facts about the world. And Cody's going, well,
00:24:18
Speaker
I mean, it might be the case that I may doubt some things, but other things are just apparent, and that's enough to base my epistemology upon. That makes a bit more sense. I was a little bit worried maybe they were talking about Alan Moore, and that Maury, in fact, would be something to do with worshipping a snake god and... Have you seen that he's about to release a film? I have. I have not yet watched the trailer.
00:24:43
Speaker
It looks a little weird. Well, actually, the trailer was less weird than I thought it was going to be, because I assumed being Alan Moore, it would be very avant-garde. Instead, and this might be a terrible thing to say, it kind of feels like someone by the name of Last Name Morrison could have written that film. It kind of looks a lot like the kind of thing that he would produce.
00:25:12
Speaker
Maybe the wheel has come full circle. I think so. Morrison became more, and now more has become Morrison. Yes, so we might be looking at Morrison facts in films very soon, and not more in ones at all.
00:25:24
Speaker
Anyway, now, so, you see, he makes that point and then goes back to Basham's malevolent global conspiracy theories. Cody says, whatever else may be said about the epistemic implications of malevolent global conspiracy theories, they are not conspiracy theories as we know them. The conspirators of actual conspiracy theories, warranted and unwarranted, tend to be far from omnipotent. Their conspiracies, hang on, I've really read that bit.
00:25:52
Speaker
I've already read that bit. Why am I quoting that bit that I've already read?
00:25:56
Speaker
I feel that maybe when you did a bit of cut and paste earlier this evening, maybe you... I've bloody pasted the same bit in twice. No, I've gone down further. Yeah, here we go. Here we go. He says... That's how the sausage is made, people. Yep. He says, I think Basham's mistake can be traced to his failure to distinguish between two ways in which his claim that we must assume an answer to the essential issue of how conspiratorial our society is in order to derive a well justified position on it can be understood.
00:26:24
Speaker
It's true that our interpretation and evaluation of putative evidence of conspiracy will always depend partly on our prior beliefs about how conspiratorial our society is. Call these prior beliefs assumptions or background theories if you like, but this should not be understood to mean that they are immune to rational revision.
00:26:40
Speaker
Our attitude towards evidence of conspiracy should depend on our prior beliefs about our society, but our beliefs about our society may themselves be rationally revised in the light of evidence of conspiracy." And this does seem to be getting more at the heart of the sorts of things that Lee Basham has said earlier in his papers before he gets to the whole pragmatic rejection, but at the conclusion where he really talks about
00:27:04
Speaker
your attitudes to society and it's whether or not a conspiracy theory is warranted depends in part on the state of the society that we live in, which as he said, as Lee Basham has sort of said, we can imagine possibly what a society in which we can be sure there are no conspiracy theories might look like, it certainly doesn't look like the society that we currently live in.
00:27:31
Speaker
Now, the stuff that Cody says doesn't really seem inconsistent to me with what Lee Basham might think. I don't know. Basham, in his papers, he does kind of say we have an idea of what society is like, and that covers how we should think about conspiracy theories. David Cody is saying yes, but the opposite also applies. I don't know that that's inconsistent with anything that Lee Basham has said, is it?
00:27:58
Speaker
No, I think it's a mistake to say this is Basham's mistake. You might argue that what Cody does is go a little bit more formal on the discussion of prior probability in this chapter than Basham did originally in that. I don't want to use, I don't want to necessarily say he tossed it off, but it's a minor mention in the living with the conspiracy chapter.
00:28:24
Speaker
whilst Cody here is going, actually, we can say even more, but he's not presenting a critique of Basham's view. He's going, actually, there's even more we can say about revision of priors here, which is that, yes, you can think you live in a conspired world or an unconspired world, depending on the evidence you have available to you. It's a more sophisticated version of Basham rather than a revision of Basham.
00:28:53
Speaker
And I think it let us bring in stuff that you've talked about in the past as well about, depending on the kind of society you live in, that's going to color how plausible you find conspiracy theories. You've talked about Romania. We certainly see in the talk of conspiracy theories in our country at moment, there's a possibly a bigger uptake among sort of the Maori communities or minority communities, which
00:29:21
Speaker
People whose experiences of more malevolence from the government, perhaps, are more likely to believe in malfeasance on their part.
00:29:32
Speaker
And so, yeah, whereas Lee Basham kind of talks in fairly broad strokes about what the world is like. I think Cody is bringing the fact that it's not everyone's experience is going to be different in your particular society you live in and all the cultural context is going to change how you view these things, which seems right. So it seems like more like he's sort of filling in the gaps of Lee Basham's theory than disagreeing with it.
00:29:59
Speaker
Yes, and I mean, as he goes on to say, while Basham's claim would be true for the majority of contemporary North Koreans, the idea that your background information means that you might just doubt or not know what's going on in your society, the ultimate nature of their public institutions and information really is largely beyond their kin. It is not true for most readers of this book.
00:30:22
Speaker
Yeah, so different societies, different amounts of knowledge open to us is going to change how we think about things. Although going back to Lee's malevolent global conspiracy theory, malevolent global conspiracies, kind of the point of those ones was though that we wouldn't know, we couldn't know if one of these obtained because of the nature of those things.
00:30:51
Speaker
So, yeah, I don't know if... Again, it's a little bit the sort of the theory versus reality thing. I think you can make a theoretical point about, yes, conspiracy theories that by their nature are undetectable by us, could be going on at the moment undetected by us. But the reality is certainly we are aware of a bunch of them and
00:31:18
Speaker
there's going to be a lot about your particular context as to what you're aware of and therefore what you're more willing to countenance. And the issue here is also the North Korean example is the wrong example. Lee's point is that if there's a global malevolent conspiracy going on in the background it's going to be very well hidden and there's nothing we can do about it because we just don't have access to information about it.
00:31:45
Speaker
The North Korean example, North Koreans know that their governments are keeping things from them. They can't do anything about it because they're powerless due to the structure of Northern Korean society. Lee is concerned with the idea that we might live in what we think is an open society.
00:32:07
Speaker
But information hierarchies are such that there are still conspiracies going on at the highest level of government that we cannot do anything about because of their information control. North Koreans know things are being kept from them, often imperfectly.
00:32:24
Speaker
the North American doesn't know what is being kept from them. And now I feel as if I'm about to go into Rumsfeld. No one, unknowns, unknowns, unknowns, et cetera, et cetera. So yes, he takes issue with what sort of Lee says and brings things all to a head with this conclusion where
00:32:52
Speaker
It wraps things up by saying, Basham jokes that Kili's criticisms of conspiracy theory may be an attempt to cover up Kili's own involvement in conspiratorial activities, but the joke is also on Basham. Whether we're persuaded by Kili to reject conspiracy theories on epistemic grounds, or we're persuaded by Basham to reject them on pragmatic grounds, conspirators will be equally pleased.
00:33:14
Speaker
While joking aside, Pignan's point that Popper's critique of conspiracy theories has provided conspirators with an intellectually respectable smokescreen behind which they can hide their conspiratorial machinations is also applicable to the critiques of Keeley, Clarke and Basham. In this way, all these authors could be accused of being, no doubt inadvertently, enemies of the open society because they discourage an activity that is essential to its survival, conspiracy theorising. Which did... it seemed, um...
00:33:42
Speaker
a bit weird to end things that way, given that it started with Cody saying that Lee Basham is a defender of conspiracy theories and in that respect an ally of mine, but he ends up by lumping him with the supposed opponents of conspiracy theories, which doesn't seem accurate for one thing.
00:34:13
Speaker
It doesn't really also, I'm curious, what David Cote's actual views are? Is he just more absolute about it? That we should countenance all conspiracy theories? Does he end up being sort of particularist?
00:34:29
Speaker
Well, so you ask an interesting question because, as we will see in quite some time, I was actually doing some calculations as to how long it's going to take to catch up with literature. And the answer is probably well over a year, maybe two years, if we continue doing this every two weeks.
00:34:48
Speaker
we are going to see, at some point in the future, Cody's new position on conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorizing, where he's going to admonish anyone for even talking about conspiracy theories. Because by talking about conspiracy theories and using that term academically, we are essentially engaging in aiding the propaganda of Western states.
00:35:17
Speaker
Okay, that'll be interesting to get to. Certainly, in this point, it does just seem strange to lump Basham in with Keeley and Clark, given that everything we've read up until now has been Basham sort of critiquing Keeley and Clark. I mean, again, as we saw with the last paper, we looked at
00:35:40
Speaker
although the way the conclusion was arrived at seems a little bit odd. The eventual point that we shouldn't dismiss conspiracy theories and doing so lets people get away with stuff they shouldn't get away with, so it's good to examine them, I think is a position I agree with and that I think most of the people we've read also agree with. But just the journey there, yeah, seemed to have a few bumps in the road.
00:36:08
Speaker
Yes, I think what we're seeing here is that in the early papers, there is a binary between either you are a particularist or you're a generalist. Anything which looks ever so slightly vaguely, like a claim we are warranted in dismissing, conspiracy theories that look like X and Y is taken to be covert generalism, and those people are not particularists.
00:36:36
Speaker
As I think we will see with future papers, that discussion gets a lot more nuanced. There's some fairly interesting discussion to come about whether there are classes of conspiracy theories that we can go, yeah,
00:36:52
Speaker
maybe that those ones are a little bit unlikely but we are going to see more nuance as the literature moves forward. I think in part because people are about to start discovering they have a lot more in common when they start looking at the literature outside of philosophy which is a much more hard line in its generalism.
00:37:16
Speaker
So that's the end of the book, is it? It is indeed. Chapter 13. Unlucky for some. In this case, unlucky for Basham, given the way that Cody characterises his work. Indeed. So, as you said, this was the first connected volume, was it? It was indeed. Of philosophical writings on conspiracy theories.
00:37:35
Speaker
It ended up being very important for my work because Keeley's Of Conspiracy Theories in the Journal of Philosophy and Cody's edited volume were the two things that made the Department of Philosophy at the University of Auckland go, oh, actually maybe there is serious philosophical work to be done on this topic after all. So this book is important for the development of my work
00:38:03
Speaker
even though it actually turns out to be a really, really small subset of the wider literature going forward. Right. Well, there you have it. The end of David Coady's Pragmatic Rejection of Conspiracy Theories and the end of conspiracy theories, the philosophical debate. Let's close the book on this one. But not the end of the philosophical debate in general.
00:38:29
Speaker
is the end of this episode, though, I suppose. It is indeed. But patrons will be able to listen on in the patron bonus episode to, well...
00:38:41
Speaker
some of which is fairly standard, some of which is just even more standard than usual. So we'll be talking about President Trump and his case of COVID-19 and a variety of different conspiracy theories that have emerged during his short stay at the Walter Reed Medical Hospital. We'll be talking about Project Veritas, doing what Project Veritas does best,
00:39:10
Speaker
terrible stuff. Facebook putting the ban hammer down on QAnon again. And finally, finally we get an opinion from Josh on Bill & Ted Face the Music. You've been waiting for weeks. I know I have.
00:39:27
Speaker
I fear you'll be disappointed, but that's okay. If you want to hear about all of those things and you're not currently a patron, you could become one by going to Betrayon.com and searching for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. If you're already a patron, well then your work here is done. You can stride off your cape flowing behind you, re-reathed in a halo of golden light as I assume you travel everywhere.
00:39:51
Speaker
um and if you don't want to be a patron and don't want to hear that stuff well then then you'll sort it as well so i think everybody knows what they have to do um i certainly do uh it's say goodbye to everyone goodbye everyone goodbye everyone
00:40:15
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:41:16
Speaker
And remember, they're coming to get you, Barbara.