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A Conversation between Conspiracy Theory Theorists
31 Plays2 years ago
Josh and M review 7 (short) papers:
- “The Need for Accountable Witnesses” - a reply to M’s “When Inferring to a Conspiracy might be the Best Explanation” by Lee Basham
- “Treating Conspiracy Theories Seriously” - a reply to Lee by M
- “Between Generalism and Particularism about Conspiracy Theory” - reply to both Lee and M from Pat Stokes
- “In Defence of Particularism” - M’s reply to Pat’s reply to M and Lee
- “Between Two Generalisms” - Lee’s reply to Pat’s reply to Lee and M
- “Reluctance and Suspicion” - Pat’s reply to M and Lee’s replies to Pat’s reply to M and Lee
- “Conspiracy Theories and Their Investigator(s)” - M’s reply to Pat’s reply to M and Lee’s replies to Pat’s reply to Lee and M
Josh claims he can cover each in five minutes? Can he?
—
Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre
00:00:00
Speaker
Okay, so we've got our notes synced and the audio is recording. I think we're ready to go. Josh, are you all right? Your eyes? They seem to be bleeding. It's the reading, man, the reading! You made me do the reading!
00:00:19
Speaker
Well, it is Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre. Surely you're used to a little reading by now. A little reading? A little reading? You made me read seven papers! You promised me two and you made me read seven! Well, I thought it was only two, but then I realised you had to read another paper to understand the correspondence. And then I remembered you there were replies to those papers which made even more sense of the discussion. I mean, if it helps.
00:00:44
Speaker
It will make reviewing a book a lot easier in a few months' time.
00:01:03
Speaker
But the thing is… I now see through the world. Where you see empty space, I see the elder monstrosities that lurk in liminal spaces. Above the sky, I can glimpse the strange geometries that fold our reality into that of the third spaces.
COVID Testing and Vaccination Updates
00:01:16
Speaker
I have become a conduit for them, and the world will never be the same again. Is that all well and good, but what did you think of the papers? Oh, they were great. Actually, I really liked the way you were just agreeing or disagreeing, and I'm a bit of a gentle and genial way, especially like the
00:01:36
Speaker
The Podcastor's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denteth. Hello and welcome to The Podcastor's Guide to the Conspiracy. Here in Auckland, New Zealand, I am Josh Addison in Zhuhai, China. It's associate professor of philosophy and notorious South Seas pirate, Dr. M. Denteth.
00:02:00
Speaker
Maybe not the one you think. Yes, it's our second episode of the year, and we're all still here. That's nice. It's not even horrifically muggy here in Auckland, so I'm not willing death on either myself or all of you as I record this, as I usually am.
00:02:16
Speaker
And since last we spoke, I've had three more COVID tests because we have a few instances of Omicron in the community. And so the provincial government is making sure we have no more instances of Omicron in the community. So it's been testing, testing, testing.
00:02:33
Speaker
or week-long. Yes, whereas the messaging here is very much, look, Omicron, it's not here. We're stopping it at the border, but that can't last. It's going to show up eventually, so everybody please get vaccinated and we're just going to have to see what happens. Yes, and I see the vaccination of children has begun in earnest back harm. Yes, yep. Both of my children are now vaccinated. Younger one has had his first shot and then it's a few weeks until he gets a second, and then I'm due for a booster and
00:03:02
Speaker
I don't know, a month or two? I forget how long you're supposed to wait now. Four months, I believe. Four months. Four years, so I think another month or so.
Analogy and Paper Publishing Challenges
00:03:10
Speaker
I can go and get mine. So yes, it's Vaccination City in the Edison household. I mean, it's a very weird metaphor, Vaccination City in a household.
00:03:19
Speaker
I mean what are you a shining mountain on a hill or a shining city inside a mountain or a shiny mountain inside a planet or a shiny planet inside a solar system which would make you a sun. I mean this analogy just breaks down the more you think about it. Yes so let's talk about the new paper you have coming out then instead.
00:03:41
Speaker
Yes, so I've got a new paper coming out called Suspicious Conspiracy Theories. It's going to be in the journal Synthes. It's currently in the process of being de-anonymized. So it's gone through the review process. It had a minor revision. It was a very complimentary minor revision as well. The reviewers went, this is a great paper. Here are some small things you might want to add in, which I then did. And yes, very soon it'll be sent back to the publisher and all going well.
00:04:10
Speaker
it's going to be an open access pace. I say all going well because I'm still waiting on final authorization of my research funding to come through, which will then allow me to pay the extraordinarily high open access fee. So to make a paper open access so that anyone can download and read it, it costs somewhere around about 2,800 US dollars, which of course I'm not going to pay out of my own pocket. I'll use my research funds to do that.
00:04:40
Speaker
To do that, I need to get permission from the university to spend those funds, which means I need the funds to be finally authorized to go into my account so I can ask for them to leave the account. And the timing of the paper being accepted turns out to be ever so slightly awkward, and that I know my research funding is pre-approved.
00:04:59
Speaker
But it's not approved approved yet. So I need to kind of delay submitting the final de-anonymized version of the paper in order to ensure that when the publisher gets back to me with, so do you want to pay that open access fee? I can go, yes, yes, I can right now, as opposed to maybe in a few weeks time.
Philosophical Papers on Conspiracy Theories
00:05:20
Speaker
Can we delay things? Publishers are notoriously very fickle about delaying things.
00:05:26
Speaker
Well there you have it, the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. You come for the conspiracy theory stuff, stay for university bureaucracy. Oh, and the thing is, the further up the ranks you go, the more bureaucracy you have to deal with. Yes, no, I've heard about that. Anyway, sticking on the theme of papers and universities and so on, have we got a treat for you? As Alex Jones would say, a tranche, a tranche of papers. Yes, so as implied,
00:05:56
Speaker
uh by the intro there we have a collection of seven papers representing a sort of a sort of a good-natured conversation between a bunch of philosophers. Full disclosure I got through five and a half of them in full and and kind of ran out of time a little bit slightly before the end but the last one is one of yours anyway so I think you can
00:06:20
Speaker
You can give us the lowdown on that. I try to forget what I write whenever possible. Oh well you go, so it'll be fresh and exciting for you. So I think given that we have seven short but not insubstantial papers to get through in one go, maybe we better just play that chime and pile straight into them. Indeed. Welcome to Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre.
00:06:51
Speaker
So do we have a, do we have sort of an umbrella term for this collection? Is it that it's not like the Dentith papers or something like that? Well, so this would be nice if we could have done that term. It's going to end up being the basis for the edited collection I made taking conspiracy theories seriously.
00:07:10
Speaker
in that the first third of that edited volume is basically a correspondence around my paper when inferring to a conspiracy theory might be the best explanation, which was replied to in the journal The Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. So it was replied to by both Lee Basham and Pat Stokes. I replied to both Lee and Pat,
00:07:35
Speaker
Pat and Lee responded to each other. I responded to those responses. And eventually from that, the publisher went actually there's probably a book in this. And so that basically taking conspiracy theories seriously exists entirely because of this good natured discussion here. So we could call this taking conspiracy theories seriously conversation. Or we could not do it. I mean, really, it's up to you. Well, exactly.
00:08:05
Speaker
No, so as you say, these were seven separate papers published in Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective from 2016 to 2017. Interestingly, I noticed your first one
00:08:20
Speaker
this you at University of Auckland. And then by the end, you're in Bucharest. This was done over that transitional period. It was indeed in your in your academic career. So yes, so the papers in order are the need for accountable witnesses, which is a reply to your when referring to a conspiracy might be the best explanation.
00:08:39
Speaker
which is written by Lee Basham. Then we have treating conspiracy theories seriously or apply to Lee from you. Then we have between generalism and particularism about conspiracy theory, which is a reply to both Lee and you from now Pat Stokes.
00:08:54
Speaker
Then we have in defensive particularism, which is your reply to Pat's reply to you and Lee. Then we have between two generalizations, which is Lee's reply to Pat's reply to Lee and you. Then we have reluctance and suspicion, which is Pat's reply to you and Lee's replies to his reply to you and Lee. And finally, we can round things out with conspiracy theories and their investigators, which is of course your reply to Pat's reply to your and Lee's replies to Pat's reply to Lee and you.
00:09:23
Speaker
Sorry, I got very confused here. Could you explain that again from the top? Because that got very confusing. I could, but I refuse to on the grounds that it's silly. It makes more sense as we get through. Yeah, I suppose at the start, it is nice to see that level of camaraderie and general. It's all very polite conversation. We've seen some papers in the past where things have got a little heated. There's been some emotion on display, but this is all very much
00:09:53
Speaker
What's the term that gets used later on? Furious agreement. So a lot of people who are broadly in agreement with each other on a great many things, but just sort of suggesting things they might want to think about. Or at least that's how it seemed to me. I don't know, is there a sort of coded language in academia where what seems to me
00:10:16
Speaker
to be nice and polite is actually the gravest of insults when you sort of say, oh, this is all very good, but have you perhaps considered that? Is that your way of saying, you stupid son of a bitch, what the hell were you thinking? Or should I just should I take the charitable view and assume that all the all the good natured talk is as wholesome as it seems?
Moral Implications and Narrative Distinctions
00:10:37
Speaker
So it kind of depends. So there is a kind of cultural difference between say the way that philosophers talk in the US and philosophers talk in Australasia. So from my experience, and some American philosophers will of course disagree, but from my experience
00:10:57
Speaker
Question time in American talks is fairly aggressive in that people stake their claims and then they kind of fight over those claims by being brusque and succinct. Whilst in Australasia we have a much more polite norm of Q&A after a talks.
00:11:16
Speaker
And this polite norm is sometimes a case of people going, well, you know, we're all in it together. We're all on that eternal search for truth. Let's have a nice, polite conversation about these things, because really, we're not in disagreement, even though we could be. One of the worries people have about the American tradition of Q&A after talks is that people artificially set themselves up in opposition to kind of engage in point scoring.
00:11:43
Speaker
And Australasian philosophers, by and large, think that's a relatively stupid thing to do. However...
00:11:51
Speaker
Sometimes that politeness norm is in fact disguising the fact that you really really really hate the person and the view they're presenting and you're just required because of the politeness norm to phrase that hatred in the most genial way possible. Now in this particular correspondence
00:12:15
Speaker
everyone by and large likes the other, so there isn't any of this nastiness going on being disguised by politeness. But it is also interesting that we've got kind of three positions on the particular debate we're going to see. There's, and actually I'm trying to work out the best way to describe this, you might think of two of the interlocutors in this conversation, which is Lee and myself, as being the lock
00:12:43
Speaker
and Hobbes of the philosophy of conspiracy theory. Yes, I'm a little bit confused, to be honest. Isn't Lock and Hobbes the action movie with Dwayne The Rock Johnson and Jason Statham, in which case Pat Stokes is presumably the Idris Elba character? Although I have seen that film, I don't recall so many discussions of societal
00:13:09
Speaker
discussion around conspiracy theories, but that probably happened at the bit when they go back to Samoa, where I really I zoned out for a little bit until they started punching each other again. So what I'm taking from this is that Pat Stokes is a dress album with cybernetic and I would have gone for Pat Stokes being Vin Vin Diesel, but he's not in the Oh, yes, but I think I'm thinking of the metatextual stuff, which is Johnson and Vin Diesel's stupid vendetta against one another.
00:13:37
Speaker
Oh, I see. That does make a little bit more sense. By which I mean none. Anyway, yes. And that makes you the Michelle Rodriguez of the franchise. I'll take that. I'll take that quite happily. So that's a good sort of overview of where our interlocutors are coming from. Now, with seven papers to get through, we only really have time to devote about five minutes to each one, but that's okay because
00:14:00
Speaker
In large part, there's a lot of sort of restating of stuff that's come before in a lot of these papers. So I want to point out that this is Josh's sweet summer child moment here. And he always thinks we're going to be able to rattle through these papers in conspiracy theory, masterpiece theatre. If Josh can actually maintain a five minute threshold per paper, I'll be very impressed.
00:14:24
Speaker
Well, I have all the jokes on you because I've barely read several of them, so I think that'll allow me to get through them quite quickly. But starting at the start, the need for accountable witnesses. So this is the paper that Lee Basham wrote in response to your larger
Particularism vs. Generalism Debate
00:14:39
Speaker
paper when referring to a conspiracy might be the best explanation.
00:14:43
Speaker
And he says right at the start, he's quite clear that he's largely in agreement with you in terms of particularism and in terms of how you define what a conspiracy or a conspiracy theory is. And most of this first paper is him pretty much restating and advocating for his own views. In particular, the stuff that we've seen from before, the whole public trust approach and saying how that's sort of trusting in the public as the likes of Brian L. Keeley
00:15:10
Speaker
and Joe Asinski have talked about. He's not in favor of that and goes for a different view. And in the interval that he says, we might conclude this is where the initial phase of the epistemic debate ends and the proper departure for future research on the epistemic problems suffered by steep information hierarchies.
00:15:30
Speaker
One way to recognize these problems is to contrast warranted formation of social beliefs in small tight-knit societies, where mutual surveillance and mutual knowledge of personal character is high, to social belief formation in civilizations like ours, where epistemic reliance on others far removed and unknown to us is almost complete. This approach explores problems with the reliability of primary epistemic sources in our information hierarchies. Most of what he's talking about is a wider point about how we should be
00:16:00
Speaker
looking at these conspiracy theories from a societal context, which has always kind of been these things some people look at
00:16:09
Speaker
theories themselves that we've seen other people look at conspiracy theorists and then Lee was always looking about the society in which conspiracy theories occur but at the end of all of this he kind of gets to his only real I wouldn't even call it bone of contention but he only real bit where he parts company with you a little bit where he's talking about exactly how you should approach this this project of particularism and he talks about your approach as being one of attrition basically picking away at all the various arguments for generalism
00:16:39
Speaker
until it's clear that there is no argument for generalism, in particular, realism is the way. Whereas Lee thinks that, not necessarily instead of that, but as a complement to that, we could be looking at these primary epistemic sources that he was just talking about. Fatees is both approaches. The critique of primary sources and attrition are complementary.
00:17:05
Speaker
and finishes off by saying we also need an open society epistemology and ethics of discourse so this network can be fairly rational and actually fearlessly illuminating with the power of applying real accountability, the essence of particularism. Dentist's work is cutting edge. Mike drops, walk away. Yep.
00:17:25
Speaker
That's a nice way to finish things. Cutting edge, cutting edge is what you are. Yes, and this, I mean, this gets us into what's going to happen towards the end of this tranche of papers, which is exactly how we're going to go about investigating these claims. So as you rightly point out, Lee is very concerned about the kind of societies in which we live. So as we saw in living with the conspiracy and malevolent global conspiracy,
00:17:53
Speaker
We have the idea from Lee that we don't really live in an open enough society to be sure that conspiracies aren't happening around us. And so Lee is kind of envisioning a project here where we need to basically tear down our existing structures and rebuild society in such a way that we can basically be sure.
00:18:18
Speaker
that if conspiracies occur, they are investigated. And if we have a dismissive attitude towards conspiracy theories, it's because we're going about the investigation of those conspiracies in our society.
00:18:32
Speaker
Now, to a certain extent, I do share Lee's ideal here that would be great to tear everything down and start again. I mean, I'm concerned about the rampant racism, sexism, and queerphobia that exists in our society. And maybe the only way to fix that is to bomb the West into oblivion and start again from first principles, a position that many people find to be very disquieting.
00:18:57
Speaker
but at the same time I'm also aware that as an individual philosopher I virtually have no power whatsoever to restructure society sitting in my office here in Zhuhai. So instead I take as he points out the adjective approach and I go well if we just point out that all of these arguments for the prima facie skepticism of conspiracy theory are bad we can at least
00:19:23
Speaker
get rid of the worry that people are dismissing claims of conspiracy simply because they've been labeled as conspiracy theories. And so continuing on, from here we get to the second paper. And I'll point out that was exactly five minutes. Well done. Excellent. There we go. We're lapping now. So we come on to treating conspiracy theories seriously, a reply to Bashamond Dentith.
00:19:52
Speaker
One of the worst-born film I've been in. Basham on Denteth. It sounds like a small town somewhere in the countryside in England. A worthy holiday in Basham on Denteth. The quaint village of Basham on Denteth, established in 1768 by pirates, Basham on Denteth is known for its three primary exports.
00:20:17
Speaker
falls, radioactive water, and syphilis. Right, well that's okay. So again we can skip over a decent chunk of this one because it's a restatement of your approach to conspiracy theories that we should all be familiar with by now and a restatement of what Lee said before you get on to your replies to it.
00:20:44
Speaker
And the guts of it to me seem to start where you say, if we accept, and surely we do, is it weird to have me reading your words back to you? Or like you say, you've forgotten reading them, so it's a little bit even interesting. So there is this kind of weird phenomena where you go back to work that was written five, six, seven years ago.
00:21:06
Speaker
and you end up going, oh, I used to be able to write really, really well because you just kind of forget these little turns of phrase use. Why have I not used that again? Oh, well, this will be a nice stroll down memory lane then because you say,
00:21:22
Speaker
If we accept, and surely we do, that conspiratorial activity is not exactly rare, why are we so loath to talk about it when it comes to government and corporate activity? The answer is, I think a combination of the common wisdom, everything thinks this because everyone has been told to think this by people who already thought it in the past, as well as a certain kind of establishmentary in thinking.
Cultural Context and Interpretation
00:21:42
Speaker
It's best people think of conspiracy theories exclusively because we don't really want people questioning the very underpinnings of our Western democracies.
00:21:49
Speaker
Now what is interesting about the Sullivan Sunsteins and Vermules of this world, you've referred obviously to a paper by Merrick and Andrew Sullivan and of course the Sunstein and Vermule paper that we know and love, what's interesting about them is they recognize that conspiratorial activity is perfectly understandable in and perhaps even necessary to the functioning of a democracy.
00:22:09
Speaker
Sometimes governments need to keep secret what they are up to now to realise some future benefit. On occasion, businesses need to deny some claim in order to investigate it more fully, and yes, sometimes it is because governments and corporations get up to no good. Yet, said theorists would like us to ignore that last possibility, or at the very least to downplay it.
00:22:28
Speaker
And so with all that in mind, you talk about the practicalities of exactly what you are going to get up to around this and introduce, I don't know if this came as a sneak preview at the time or something, but you talk about what at the time upcoming project in Bucharest, the ethics of investigation, when are we obliged to take conspiracy theories seriously?
00:22:53
Speaker
And so go through what it is you're going to be talking about there, which is As you say speaking speaking in the past use Future tense for what is now past tense because it's already happened. Yes. Anyway, or maybe still on going strange. Hmm Is it well, I mean, I mean I'm still publishing on conspiracy theories So presumably I'm still in the process of answering some of these questions. So some of them have been answered and
00:23:21
Speaker
Some of them are in the process of being answered, some of them will be answered, and maybe some of them turn out to be unanswerable. Oh well. There we go, the passage of time. Don't believe in it. At any rate, you say we need to ask, when is it rational for citizens to trust officials? What sort of political culture and what kinds of social arrangements would ensure that it is, on the whole, rational for citizens to trust politicians and others acting in a public capacity?
00:23:50
Speaker
When is it rational for journalists and others to take conspiracy theories seriously and even to investigate them? Could it be rational to take a conspiracy theory seriously, even when it is not rational to believe it? So those are the questions you are announcing yourself as being looking into. And talk a bit more about the project and the risks of asking these questions and being wrong about them and so on and so forth. But finish off by saying,
00:24:20
Speaker
the last paragraph of the paper. My response to Basham then is to accept his challenge to get my hands dirty again by exploring just what it means to explore the problems inherent with investigating conspiracy theories and the kinds of informational hierarchies we have in the West. He kindly calls my previous work cutting edge. I hope to keep that edge keen over the coming year.
00:24:41
Speaker
to say, using exploring just what it means to explore the problems that I've used to explore twice in one scene and say that's more showing, poor showing. I did pause there slightly because I wasn't sure if I'd misread it but instead you had misread it so that's okay.
00:24:56
Speaker
I mean, I mean, it's not it's not. It's it's not incorrect. It's just it's just I could have used I could use a different slightly slightly clunky phrasing. At any rate, so so that's the two that's how things start. Both Lee Lee has has a little to say about you and you have a little the same reply and you're both perfectly nice and complimentary to one another. But then then along comes old Pat Stokes say as a thing or two to say section took six minutes. Very good.
00:25:26
Speaker
and actually I mean I should say that of course this is this is this is perfectly nice and complementary and everything as well but Pat decides that he'd like to voice his opinions on the matter indeed as we're about to see he's going to intrude into a conversation although I mean intrude sounds as if he barges in he was invited no by the editor to engage in this yes so he talks about
00:25:53
Speaker
The exchange up until now, which as he called it, has been largely one of furious agreement and says that this is a good thing. He's like, it's very nice to see that it doesn't have to be two people at loggerheads sort of tearing strips off each other. It can be people agreeing with none other, but making suggestions about ways that they could do things better.
00:26:17
Speaker
But Pat's going to part company with the two of you to some extent because he's, while he says that in
00:26:28
Speaker
this area of philosophy, people tend to be more particularist than anything. But he has some worries about particularism that he starts to get into here. So he says that while lots of philosophers go for a particularist approach, they acknowledge this definition clashes with the ways we generally talk about conspiracy theory. And this is something we've seen, as David Cody's talked about this a bit as well, hasn't he?
00:26:55
Speaker
We're even saying about the way in which conspiracy theories and official theories kind of interrelate to one another. So we can't just go with the simple idea that conspiracy theories are theories about conspiracy theories. There is something about the fact that we take conspiracy theories to be in opposition to official theories, which is a view which Curtis Hagen also pursues.
00:27:19
Speaker
So yeah, Pat Pat's very much getting it. Is it okay if I call him Pat? Should I be calling him Patrick? No, no, no. Pat will be fine. Yeah, see, so he's, he's, to begin with, I'm interested in this idea that, okay, it's all very well and good for academics to say this is what we mean by a conspiracy theory and therefore you can see conspiracy theories aren't necessarily bad. But there is still this colloquial use where people say you use conspiracy theory to mean
00:27:48
Speaker
Something which, as we will see, is not spectacularly well defined, but they mean a thing, and it's different from this more generalized usage that we've been seeing in the papers here, and maybe we need to account for that.
00:28:07
Speaker
After talking about this already, he says, we don't typically group officially sanctioned beliefs about al-Qaeda flying planes into buildings or Russian FSB agents murdering Kremlin opponents with polonium-laced tea with beliefs about the New World Order or the Clinton body count. Yet there's nothing structural that differentiates the first set of beliefs from the second.
00:28:25
Speaker
If there's a formal difference between Putin murdered Alexander Litvinenko and Bill Clinton murdered Vince Foster, it's hard to see what it might be. Appeals to the official status of one story but not the other don't work because an officially sanctioned story in one society might be considered a conspiracy theory in another.
00:28:44
Speaker
And so he goes on to say there are undeniably risks in a naive generalism that reflexively dismisses any explanation in terms of conspiratorial activity, but there's also a corresponding risk of allowing a legitimate target of critique to hide within an innocent larger character category of conspiracy explanation.
00:29:02
Speaker
And he wants to say that when people dismiss something as a conspiracy theory, they are thinking of a recognisable something that people do. There is something people have in mind when they say when they'll say things like that's just a conspiracy theory, he's just a conspiracy theorist, what have you.
00:29:21
Speaker
that people do have something in mind. And he says, for now, let's simply note that there is a recognisable cultural practice of conspiracy theorising. Conspiracy theory, as the term is popularly understood, has its own stylistic tropes, history and patterns of accusation.
00:29:42
Speaker
Conspiracy theory is, as Jovan Byford puts it, a tradition of explanation. That tradition is a recognisable one with a recurring cast of characters' narrative forms and reflex encounter moves. For instance, the tendency to accuse more and more people of involvement in the conspiracy in order to explain disconfirmatory evidence. Disconfirmatory? Disconfirmatory? I don't know. I don't like that word, and I won't say it again. I've heard it both ways. I've heard it both ways.
00:30:08
Speaker
He says the boundaries of such a tradition or style of explanation are naturally enough fuzzy and ill-defined, but it's clearly a far more concrete phenomenon than an explication of its basic epistemic form can capture. According to any critique of conspiracy theorizing, as a real-world practice needs to resist an artificial simplicity that would strip it of precisely the content upon which we could judge such a practice. So basically, Pat seems to be saying that
00:30:34
Speaker
Yes, being completely generalist about things is no good, if only because we know conspiracy theories do occur sometime. That's just an indisputable fact. But he worries that if we're just completely particularist about anything, we might be overlooking the fact that there is some sort of activity that we possibly are justified in being suspicious of.
Moral Risks and Community Approach
00:31:04
Speaker
right from the outset. And you're going to have something to say about that, but we'll wait until your next paper and reply to this. But Pat finishes things off by, he wants to suggest some sort of a middle ground.
00:31:18
Speaker
And he says, what then might lie between or beyond generalism and particularism? Perhaps something that might be described as defeasible generalism or reluctant particularism. Such an attitude will not begin from the premise that conspiracy theories are always false, as such it would not foreclose the possibility of ever investigating any conspiracy theory. It would, however, approach such theories with a certain reticence, given the social practice within which those theories are embedded and the moral costs associated with taking part in the conspiracy theory tradition.
00:31:49
Speaker
and this comes up a couple of times, but the word reticent means reluctant to speak specifically, not just a synonym for reluctant, and it gets on my wick sometimes. Completely irrelevant to everything else that's been said here. And what's interesting about Pat's work here is it's very much in the realm of the ethics of belief. So he's worried about the cost of accusing people of being involved in conspiracy theory. So his worry is that
00:32:14
Speaker
When people talk about conspiracy theories as a recognisable social practice, they're talking about the fact that there are people out there who accuse people of being involved in conspiracies with virtually no evidence whatsoever. And we should frown upon such accusations because essentially you are
00:32:34
Speaker
blaming people for activities on the basis of no evidence, and that is morally wrong. We'll get into this a little bit later, but I think it first came up in Lee's first paper, I think. The case of the firing of James Tracy becomes a bit of a... Who we interviewed on this podcast.
00:32:54
Speaker
Indeed. Much to your dismay. Well, I didn't know who he was at the time, I think. As I recall, it was when you did the interview and I put in some commentary afterwards. Yes, so this was someone I met at Joe Yusinski's first conspiracy theory conference.
00:33:12
Speaker
So yes, I didn't realise how much I disagreed with a lot of what he had to say when I heard what he had to say. Also, at the time that that interview occurred, the Sandy Hook stuff was very much about to occur, as opposed to had occurred. So I was also not aware of where James was going to go. Yes, no, if you're not aware, James Tracy, he was fired from his position.
00:33:41
Speaker
at Florida Atlantic University in Florida close to Miami for harassing the parents of a child who died in the Sandy Hook shooting sort of demanding that they produce the child's birth certificate and insisting that the sort of crisis actors and the child never existed and so on and so forth after he wrote a few things sort of started off in a very much a just asking questions sort of vein about
00:34:11
Speaker
what happened at Sandy Hook but moved fairly quickly into it. It's all a hoax and these people never existed. But at any rate, he's first mentioned as a conspiracy theorist who got fired for his conspiracy theories and then there's a bit of back and forth about
00:34:28
Speaker
I think it was in that one pat point. So he didn't get fired for being a conspiracy theorist, though. He got fired for harassing the victims of a tragedy, which makes people agree. He actually technically got fired for engaging for unauthorized activities. So he was running a blog called Memory Hole.
00:34:49
Speaker
in which on that blog he was engaging in Sandy Hook Truthrism, and he was doing that as James Tracy professor at Florida Atlantic University, and the university went, you've actually got no authorization to be presenting this work with your institutional accreditation. So he was actually fired on a procedural ground. Well, yes, because he was tenured, wasn't he? So they would need
00:35:14
Speaker
something more procedural. Yeah, they used to find something which showed that he was bringing the university into this interview, basically. At any rate, so we move on to, in defense of particularism. That was 10 minutes. Yes, well, there was a bit of fluffing around at the beginning, so that's okay.
00:35:33
Speaker
So you're replying to Pat's worries about what he thinks of as a sort of naive particularism. So at the start of it, you talk about how theorizing conspiracies is different from making an accusation of conspiracy, which as you say is the thing that Pat did seem to be concerned about.
00:35:53
Speaker
But you say that I worry that he's conflating two separate issues. Is the social and cultural practice really conspiracy theorizing, though? Or is it the hooking of certain views onto conspiracy narratives? And so your reply to Pat is that basically we're sort of conflating two separate things.
00:36:13
Speaker
and that could cause problems. You say, conspiracy narratives are cases where alleged conspiracies by the usual suspects, women, slaves, Jews, Catholics and the like, are used as convenient scapegoats. These narratives are irrational and that they are rhetorical bad habits. With a lovely little Ghostbusters reference there by way of example saying something's wrong in your neighborhood, who are you going to blame? Feminists.
00:36:41
Speaker
Normally it would be Jews, I suppose, but feminists is closer to Ghostbusters in terms of the scansion, so I think you made the right call there. So there's rhetorical bad habits which are not epistemically constrained, nor are they deployed on the basis of evidence.
00:36:56
Speaker
You take issue with his reference to Jovan Byford, who I'm not familiar with, but apparently is very much the generalist. He also seems to be committed to the idea that conspiracy theories only emerged in the French Revolution, which...
00:37:12
Speaker
It doesn't seem to make any sense, given that there are several books on, and this is where I got the term conspiracy narratives from, there are several books on conspiracy narratives in both ancient Greece and ancient Rome, looking at the way in which people blamed the usual suspects.
00:37:32
Speaker
to basically avoid having to take responsibility for actions and and the like so Bifid is both very much a generalist and like many generalists doesn't seem to know his history particularly well.
00:37:49
Speaker
So, yes, you talk about these narratives and how and the difference between conspiracy theorizing and then making accusations based on such theories. And that, you know, bringing up Tracy, talk about how the fact that you could he or indeed he could have and did for a while theorize about these mass shooting events being false flag events.
00:38:17
Speaker
without actually explicitly accusing people about what they eventually did, and that's when things went quite nasty. So you suggest that the Stokes probably should have focused on these problematic conspiracy narratives, and that by trying to treat conspiracy theories and narratives as sort of one of the same, and specifically referring to both of them as conspiracy theories,
00:38:39
Speaker
that could possibly cause
Challenges in Investigating Conspiracies
00:38:41
Speaker
problems. And I think we see such problems show up in Lee's reply as well. There seems to be a bit of, some of that looks to be based on a bit of a misunderstanding due to Pat conflating these two different things. And you talk about how separating out conspiracy theories and appeals to conspiracy narratives
00:39:02
Speaker
still allows for an evidence-based, particularist approach. Because as you say, after all, if the evidence, or if some of the evidence, I suppose, is that this looks like a redress version of a Jewish banking conspiracy narrative, then the appropriate evidential response is to ask, well, hasn't this been debunked? Because if it has, then we'll have evidence to mount against the new version. If it is not, then we need to investigate the claim further.
00:39:27
Speaker
And so you go through a bunch of that and conclude by saying, that being said, Stokes is right that there's a certain naivete to any particular risk response which hand-wavingly says evidence will win out. Human beings, unfortunately, do not weigh up claims dispassionately. Maybe we particularists are too inclined to think rational inquiry will save the day, or perhaps we think of such inquiry taking years or even decades. Maybe some of us just downplay certain reoffenders by saying no one takes those theories seriously.
00:39:57
Speaker
But note that's not the fault with particularism. Rather, it's a fault of particular, particularists. Some of us have been hasty in our defense of particularism, but our haste is not a mark against the thesis. It's instead a mark against the way in which we have propounded our views. Then we should thank Stokes for reminding us not to repeat the errors of the generalist. And yes, I do remember from the start of your original
00:40:25
Speaker
when inference to a conspiracy theory might be the best explanation. It did strike me as a little bit sort of generalist in the way you talked about what generalists get wrong. So yes, certainly too. Certainly it's good to be on guard for things like that. We never reviewed that paper though. So have you been reading papers off your own back?
00:40:48
Speaker
I'm pretty sure we did. We did. We did do that. It was very interesting. I mean, we quite deliberately didn't review when inferring to a conspiracy theory might be the best explanation because it would be rough. In the same respect, it's rather weird you summarizing my views on a podcast.
00:41:05
Speaker
It'd be really weird to review an entire paper by me in a segment called Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre. That would be an astounding act of hubris on my part. So I'm assuming you are now reading philosophical literature on conspiracy theories without my input, which is a really good sign. It shows that there is a future for you in this academic lark whatsoever.
00:41:31
Speaker
Well, that's true. I have clear memories of us recording a bonus episode where we talked about the paper and me because surely you must remember me recounting that experience of glimpsing the fabric of reality and all of causality and causation exploding in front of my face and giving me visions of a weird alternate universe where Brian and I had
00:41:54
Speaker
Had reviewed your paper and and I why would I have found that strange an alternative if we'd not talked about it ourselves in this This is completely new to me. I don't think there's any any evidence of this whatsoever I have a feeling that you you're not only just reading papers off your own bad, but either you're lying to my face about it or
00:42:20
Speaker
Your sleep issues are causing you to hallucinate podcast episodes we've never recorded. That's one possibility. I would venture that possibly you are suffering from memory altering brain worms that have simply destroyed your past impressions of that episode that we recorded. And I think of those two explanations, I know which one I prefer.
00:42:44
Speaker
also should point out seven and a half minutes for this pay per review. Well then let's crack on. So we come to between two generalisms. So this is now Lee's response to what Pat had said to the two of you.
00:43:00
Speaker
And so he starts by talking about, he summarises what Pat said, and basically, the Pat wants to find, as he puts it, a halfway house between particularism and generalism. Now, Lee's response to this is to say, but it's a mistake to think particularism is the opposite of generalism. The opposite might be labelled anti-generalism, conspiracy theories are prima facie true.
00:43:24
Speaker
So that's his first thing to say. The two aren't actually opposite ends of the same spectrum. They're kind of different things.
00:43:32
Speaker
And he talks about, again, focusing on society, talks about the social consequences of both generalism and particularism. But turning specifically to Pat's paper, first of all, he's not convinced at those suggested labels that Pat gave at the end of his paper, the idea of either a defeasible generalism or possibly a reluctant particularism.
00:43:57
Speaker
Because, as he says, all generalists have an ultimately defeasible caveat, because all grudgingly recognise that some conspiracies have proven true or well warranted. Which is not actually true. I mean, this is a bit weird, but there are some generalists who have gone, oh, all conspiracy theories are false. So there's a paper by Verum Swami et al.
00:44:18
Speaker
Which goes, you know, by definition, conspiracy theories are false. And most people's reactions to that have been, what about the conspiracy theories which turned out to be true? Very few people believe that all conspiracy theories are false and there are no true or warranted conspiracy theories. But it turns out there are some generalists who actually do believe this rather ludicrous claim nonetheless.
00:44:42
Speaker
I assume that means they get quite sort of no true Scotsman-y then, and anything you might say that is a, that is true. I do remember having a debate, a debate, a debate, a debate with Stephen Lewandowski when I was giving a keynote at
00:45:00
Speaker
at the University of Padova in Padua, which is the university, the old university city of Venice. He goes, well, there have been no false flags. And I went, well, what about the false flags which did occur? And he tried to then define away every false flag example I gave as not being a real false flag. So some people are committed to the no, no, you are wrong. I am right, but not many people.
00:45:29
Speaker
At any rate, and then Lee also isn't fond of the label Reluctant Particularism, because as he says, if Reluctant Particularism is defeasible to generalism by another name, conspiracy theories are prima facie false, but if presented with overwhelming evidence in their favour we will reluctantly concede they're well warranted or true, then this is merely relabeled old-style generalism. On the other hand, if Reluctant means we will not immediately embrace a theory but seek significant evidence for or against, then this is simply the Particularist position.
00:45:58
Speaker
So he thinks that certainly the suggested labels that Pat puts forward don't really sound like a productive way of looking at things. Lee seems to think Pat is just an old fashioned diet in the world generalist, which I think
00:46:16
Speaker
might be taking things a bit far.
00:46:33
Speaker
He's just really, really concerned that the process of actually investigating conspiracy theories can involve making accusations, and he feels that too many people make those accusations at too early a point in the investigation, which makes him reluctant to endorse particularism.
00:46:55
Speaker
even though he realizes that particularism is the sensible position to take. So he has a moral qualm about the way that conspiracy theorists go about conspiracy theorizing, but he has no qualms about conspiracy theories being something which can be true on the evidence.
00:47:16
Speaker
So he then talks about the public trust approach again, which we'll skip over in the interests of time before moving on to the discussion of that moral aspect that Pat was most interested in when talking about conspiracy theories. So Lee says, moving from the epistemic to moral, Stokes claims our fellow citizens are immoral to publicly share conspiratorial possibilities. Here, the immoral is a simple consequentialism.
00:47:43
Speaker
Sharing them without rejection does social harm, so they should not be shared. While he makes no attempt to show they do more harm than good, Stokes seems to assume that this is obvious, which I didn't really think that's what Pat was saying. I don't think he was saying it's morally wrong to share conspiratorial possibilities. I think he was just saying that there is a moral weight to making accusations. It is the worry that the accusations are made at two earlier points in the investigation. That's the crux of his concern.
00:48:12
Speaker
And so Lee gives a breakdown of Pat's position, which again doesn't really seem quite right, and Pat will say as much in the next paper. But I did wonder, reading a lot of this, it did seem like
00:48:27
Speaker
a bit of a misunderstanding and it did seem like exactly the sort of thing you were worried about in your response in the previous paper that by conflating conspiracy theories and this idea of conspiracy narratives, there was a little bit of talking past each other and Lee was possibly thinking that Pat was saying things about conspiracy theories specifically when actually he was talking about these narratives. And so it did seem like things were a little bit mixed up.
00:48:55
Speaker
So there's talk of all sorts of stuff. The one thread which I haven't gone into is conspiracy theories around AIDS denialism in South Africa, but they talk about that a little bit. Lee makes a case for generalism being actually immoral.
00:49:17
Speaker
because it I think because it can lead to all sorts of the Gulf of Tonkin leading to the Vietnam War and things like that he says the tradition of generalism of whatever formal guys reopens the path to moral disaster as it has been as it will be he's not he's quite quite quite clear in the idea that no generalism is actually morally bad not just epistemically bad
00:49:45
Speaker
So he has a fairly detailed conclusion, which itself concludes with the paragraph. Generalism serves to perpetuate, not confront, the real vulnerabilities in our information hierarchy. We should welcome its fading. A 21st century epistemic honesty beckons. Between the extremes of generalism and anti-generalism, the real halfway house is particularism.
00:50:12
Speaker
He's in no uncertain terms arguing that particularism is right in several senses of the word and is the most reasonable position on the spectrum which supposedly Pat was looking for in the first place.
00:50:26
Speaker
He also, and I mean this is an ongoing thing, he also does believe that generalism is on the way out and particularism is now centered.
Ethics of Belief and Societal Impact
00:50:35
Speaker
And I have to say, as someone who's been doing a lot of paper reviews for journals, and is also helping organize a conference on conspiracy theories happening next month,
00:50:48
Speaker
Generalism is not on the way out. It's still very much the dominant discourse in the discussion of conspiracy theory. Lee is optimistic that it's about to fade, and actually has been optimistic about its fading since the middle part of the last decade. But it's still with us, and I think it's going to be with us for a while. Are you talking about philosophy specifically, or just in academia in general? Both.
00:51:19
Speaker
There's been a resurgence in generalist defenses in the last year or so, so it's quite interesting. There's a vanguard action going on right now, and I'm right in the middle of it, if that works as a military metaphor, I don't know.
00:51:36
Speaker
Or so it'll do. Nine minutes. Nine minutes. Right. Well, so fortunately for us, we now have to pay the six, which I only kind of got about halfway through, to be honest. But I think I got the gist of it. So this is now reluctance and suspicion, which is Pat's response to what both you and Lee had to say.
00:51:56
Speaker
So he starts by saying, a central part of my argument in this previous paper is that there is a gap between how epistemologists use the term conspiracy theory and how the term is popularly used. My concern is that by defining conspiracy theory so broadly, epistemologists end up losing sight of the recognisable cultural practice of conspiracy theorising.
00:52:18
Speaker
as well established by this point in the debate that there's no prima facie reason to reject conspiracy theories on the basis of their formal explanatory structure alone, but that level abstraction is not, so to speak, where we live, and nor is it the level on which social critiques of conspiracy theory operate. So there's a bunch of things going on there, and yes, I don't see how you could call that a
00:52:37
Speaker
a kind of generalism if he's saying explicitly there is no prima facie reason to reject conspiracy theories. But he does seem to be quite interested in looking at the social level in the same way that Lee did. In response to your points about this distinction between conspiracy theory and conspiracy narrative, he doesn't seem so sure that you can make that clear of a distinction. He thinks there's too much, or at least there is interplay,
00:53:02
Speaker
between the two. As he says, for instance, it's remarkable how strongly the same tropes recur in otherwise disconnected conspiracy theories. For instance, the near ubiquity of false flag explanations by ubiquity, I think, as he goes on to say, he's talking about how they seem to be ubiquitous, specifically in the case of mass shootings, whatever one shows up.
00:53:22
Speaker
It seems you'll get someone claim instantly claiming it was a false flag. And so this is a conspiracy narrative. So I don't know what you'd say about that really. It is certainly seem to be the case that there are these templates almost for conspiracy theories that are just there waiting for when people want to use them. Often the templates are originating from the same proponents. So you'll get your Alex Jones who is claiming it's a false flag.
00:53:50
Speaker
And then that then flows through the community because I think one of the worries here is that Pat is thinking, oh, these things kind of self germinate and appear spontaneously after every result, as opposed to if you actually tell the causal story of
00:54:06
Speaker
Where is this false flag story coming from? It turns out to usually be the usual suspects, which actually does get us into a really interesting discussion about the role of particular, I can't remember who came up with the term, conspiratorial entrepreneurs, the people who come up with the kind of the grift of conspiracy theories they're using to sell their products or to establish their brand. And so it might be the case that these narratives are coming from them.
00:54:36
Speaker
at which point it's only ubiquitous because these people are being listened to, as opposed to conspiracy theories germinating in this way. And I suppose you could say also that these false flags theories are
00:54:48
Speaker
they're all kind of part of the same theory anyway. I mean, the people, the real conspiracy theory is that the government wants to take our guns away. And so they've been organizing all of these different events. And as a pretext for doing that. So any particular event that shows up and immediately gets the false flag template applied to it isn't them saying here's a brand new conspiracy theory. It's just here's the latest example of this conspiracy theory. Think about it.
00:55:16
Speaker
Incidentally, I was going to bring this up at one point, have you heard of the Pizzagate massacre? No, what is the Pizzagate massacre? The Pizzagate massacre is a low-budget pseudo-documentary, no not really, it's basically a sort of a thrillery, crimey story. I heard about it because our mutual friend Richard had heard about it from a
00:55:41
Speaker
the Gamefully Unemployed podcast.
00:55:47
Speaker
I haven't actually listened to the episode talking about it, but we watched it the other day. It's basically a story which is presented as an after-the-fact documentary about a person who believes in a Pizzagate-style conspiracy. There's this woman who is essentially a female, Alex Jones.
00:56:11
Speaker
a guy who believes in the sorts of things she says about lizard people running child slavery rings out of pizza parlours and he belongs to a militia and then him and another reporter who believes in this stuff go out and then things go a bit wonky and there's a bunch of shooting and so on and it's um
00:56:29
Speaker
It's a bit of a black comedy, like things do get quite silly in places, but at the same time it is quite disturbing, especially because it is quite a plausible sort of look at how that kind of thing could happen. And it's also just a good example of a
00:56:47
Speaker
film doing doing well with very little in the way of resources. So it's one to look at. I think as people have said, they've made a bit of a slip up in the way, or at least someone has made a bit of a slip up in the way it's been advertised, because it's sort of, it's made to look like the pizza gate massacre, it sort of kind of presents itself as just some sort of one another one of those grind house sort of
00:57:12
Speaker
faux 80s exploitation films or something when it actually isn't that at all. But anyway, it just reminded me of the sort of stuff as we were talking about it now. Back to the paper. So there's a bit of discussion around what Pat said, you said about stuff, and he seemed to be saying, he seemed to get the impression that you were sort of saying that there's this conspiracy theory and there's conspiracy narrative and never the twain shall meet.
00:57:40
Speaker
which I don't think you said. I mean, you talked about how the fact that you can appeal to this, this is part of a narrative that we recognize and have been debunked before, and that counts as evidence against the conspiracy theory that you're investigating. And I think in the next paper, you will actually say something along those lines. Pat, again, is interested in the ethics of it all. And when you talk about
00:58:07
Speaker
when people talk about that certain conspiracies or conspiracy theories should be investigated, he wants to know where that should come from. And talks about the moral aspect of things. And then talks about Lee's characterization and basically says, yes, I don't think that was a fair characterization, especially your, your five point, well, I think five points with a hidden sixth point summation of his arguments.
00:58:37
Speaker
specifically around AIDS denialism he didn't think were a proper one. And this is the point at which I kind of ran out of time and started skipping through things very quickly. He talks about the trace of your fear again and goes through a bunch of other things but finishes off by saying
00:58:54
Speaker
having gone through engaging with the Bashan's public trust ideas, social ideas of conspiracy and what have you. He says the picture of foundational trust sits awkwardly, to say the least, with the standing vigilance required to maintain a democratic polity. There are always good reasons to be suspicious of power of all forms, both overt and covert explicit and intrinsic.
00:59:16
Speaker
The work of identifying and uncovering power relations is indispensable, and it seems to involve a relentless and remorseless hermeneutics of suspicion. That tension between foundational trust and vigilance is a real and seemingly permanent feature of political and social life. What I've called reluctance here is an expression of that tension and awareness of being caught between the duty to view others as good faith interlocutors and the duty to uncover wrongdoing.
00:59:40
Speaker
the sort of generalized eager suspicion involved in entertaining and advancing conspiracy theories, abandons that reluctance and thereby misses that central dimension of human sociality. In a world full of untrustworthy people, the demand of trust remains. Yes, I mean, a lot of that seemed to be Pat sort of restating his position and arguing against the characterization of his position that Lee in particular had put forward.
Conclusion and Outro
01:00:07
Speaker
So, again, I think it's clear he's not
01:00:10
Speaker
not advocating for a real sort of a generalism. It is a reluctant particularism. I think Pat's mistake was to give his position to names, defeasible generalism or reluctant particularism. I think Lee is very much fixated on the defeasible generalism label.
01:00:31
Speaker
Well, really, what Pat is describing is reluctant particularism. He's not being a generalist who's saying, oh, there can be exceptions to the claim that conspiracy theories are always false. He's going, look, conspiracy theories can and often are warranted. I'm just reluctant to engage in the social practice of conspiracy theorizing because there are moral quagmires that we encounter when we engage in such a social practice.
01:00:59
Speaker
So, moving rapidly on to the final paper in this series. Conspiracy theories into the air. I did, yes, and did skip over quite a lot of material, I have to say. But so we come to the last one, conspiracy theories and their investigators, and you've got the S in investigators and brackets, because the central point is whether we're talking about a single investigator or a bunch of investigators.
01:01:26
Speaker
So you say at the start that you're only going to respond to the bits of paper that specifically concerned your own arguments.
01:01:35
Speaker
Lee can look after himself. You say, I want to focus on what I think Stokes gets right about his reply to... Let me start again and emphasize the right things in the right time. I want to focus on what I think Stokes gets right about his reply to me, the worry about how we deal with conspiracy theories and public discourse, and what I think he gets wrong, how I think an investigation into conspiracy theories would work.
01:01:58
Speaker
So sort of addressing that bit I mentioned before where Pat seemed to think you were saying that conspiracy theorizing and using conspiracy narratives were two completely separate things came in part where you talk about this imaginary conspiracy theory investigator who does nothing but theorize all the time but sort of sends other people out to investigate narratives or what have you and
01:02:22
Speaker
You sort of reply to that as sort of, yep, my bad. I was wrong to talk in terms of a single investigator doing these things and get on to the idea that the way we should really be investigating conspiracy theories is with a community of inquiry. I seem to just come out of—
01:02:44
Speaker
Is this something that had come in because you're writing from book arrest at this time? Is this something that had come out of the project or is that just sort of where you're thinking had moved to at that time? It was really more of how I was contemplating how the Moscow trials had been investigated by John Dewey and his commission because Dewey formed a commission of admittedly like-minded individuals to investigate the official theory of the Moscow trials that they were free in fear.
01:03:11
Speaker
and discovered upon investigation that actually they were a tissue of lies. And Dewey had also written on the notion of the community inquiry within the classroom. This actually links back to the period of time I was doing teacher training and the idea that one way to engage in good pedagogy is to get people to realize that actually we aren't individual learners or rational agents.
01:03:36
Speaker
We exist within communities and we rely upon community resources, so we should engage in problem solving as communities, communities of inquiring minds. And so it went well.
01:03:49
Speaker
Dewey did something similar with the Moscow trials, so let's actually just pass this out properly and talk about how a communal investigation into conspiracy theories would work. And so I basically argue in this paper, conspiracy theories and their investigators, that we shouldn't be thinking about lone investigators, the kind of person sitting in their armchair
01:04:13
Speaker
investigating things and writing books, we should be thinking about people using the epistemic resources of their society to engage in these investigations. Now, this is one of these things where I kind of conflate what I wrote here with the equivalent chapter in the book, Taking Conspiracy Theories Seriously, where I expand upon this idea again. But my notion is that when we're talking about these communities of inquiry,
01:04:41
Speaker
we need to be getting as many people involved as possible and that means that we need to involve people who are skeptics of conspiracy theories, people who are proponents of conspiracy theories and people who are basically agnostic about conspiracy theories because we want to have a kind of community decision that reflects everyone in a society so that when you get a decision
01:05:08
Speaker
from the community as to whether a conspiracy theory is warranted or unwarranted, it's going to be able to appeal not just to like-minded people but presumably people across the aisle as well. And so you spend a fair bit of time talking about exactly what these
01:05:25
Speaker
conspiracy, what these communities of inquiries might look like. First, basically apologizing for talking about a single investigator and giving Pat the wrong idea. And also for you, in the earlier paper you talked about dispassionate investigators, which in this one you say was possibly not the best choice of words, because again it gave Pat the wrong idea about what you were saying.
01:05:53
Speaker
Here you say, what you're trying to get across with the label dissipation is that an investigation can be informed by cultural laws, etc., but that does not necessarily mean that she's immediately or necessarily subject to them, which is to say that members of the community of inquiry will surely know about certain conspiracy narratives or the social practices associated with some cases of conspiracy theorizing, without necessarily having to in any way endorse or engage with them.
01:06:18
Speaker
Um, and basically you take it from there. So again, this is where I started skipping things, skipping through things very quickly, but basically the whole rest of it seemed to be you setting out how
01:06:31
Speaker
a community of inquiry into conspiracy theories might work and the things you might want to think about and the obstacles you might face. Concluding this is no different to how we debate the issues in philosophy or physics or sociology and so it should be the same when it comes to these things called conspiracy theories that is if our investigative communities of inquiry are properly constituted but that is a discussion for another time.
01:06:55
Speaker
And indeed it will be a discussion for another time, because there's a book that comes out of this. Also, six minutes. So I should point out that it took seven papers, took 53 minutes, 34 seconds, 0.56 nanoseconds. Well, that's not bad. But that's certainly more than enough. I think in my record skipping over your last paper, did I miss any salient points, you think?
01:07:19
Speaker
No, in part because we will be coming back to this when we start going through the book, taking conspiracy theories seriously. There's a much fuller and therefore more fulsome discussion about the community of inquiry approach in the final chapter of that book. Right, well there you have it. For you fans of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre, this must have been your dream come true. Seven papers, all papers all the time. Can you even stand it? I know I can't.
01:07:50
Speaker
And I think that better be all we have to say for you this week. Unless, of course, you're a patron because there's a patron bonus episode coming up. We'll be talking about a potential false flag in Barcelona.
01:08:06
Speaker
a potential false flag in the Ukraine, the arrest of a bishop in Aotearoa, New Zealand, how people are trying to stop childhood vaccinations, which are not mandatory in our home country,
01:08:24
Speaker
And a few updates on some classic characters from bonus episodes. We'll be talking about what's happened to Novak Djokovic. We'll be talking about what's happened to Jordan Peterson. We'll be talking about what's been happening with Donald Trump. And we'll also be having an update on whether David Icke has COVID-19 or not. And the answer to that is actually no.
01:08:47
Speaker
Well, good job. Now they don't have to listen. I'm fairly certain. Every single one of our patrons is glued to our podcast specifically for the David Icke content. And now you've gone and given it away for free. What have you done? I am a monster. Well, on that we can agree. So with those words ringing in our ears, I think the only responsible thing for me to do at this point would be simply say goodbye.
01:09:13
Speaker
And I'll say, I'm a monster, and I like it. And remember, remember, oh December, what a night.