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Juha Räikkä on Political Conspiracy Theories
22 Plays3 years ago
Josh and M review Juha Räikkä's "On Political Conspiracy Theories" from the Journal of Political Philosophy, 17(2) back in 2009.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
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Transcript
Captain Corrin's Space Adventures and Insurance Tips
00:00:00
Speaker
We present once again the adventures of Captain Corrin, space pirate, and insurance salesman.
00:00:17
Speaker
and starring myself as Quantum Jim. Tonight, Corin offers advice on health insurance. After a long haul, the interstitial vortices, Orion's belt, the crew and I were heading home with without swag. Quantum Jim's heart was palpitating from a watching two-way Haravids. So Tomat-kyo, the most fearsome navigator this side of Mutt's spiral, was guiding us into port when I spied a ship off the port bow.
00:00:44
Speaker
Good morn! Is there anyone out there listening? Over. Yes, hello. Over. Ah, hello. My name's Karen. Be any trouble, over. Ah, not really. Just a little bored, what with being cooped up in this impenetrable fortress of a spacecraft. Over. Impenetrable, you say? Over. No, yes, it's like the Titanic, but less prone to icebergs. Over. Well, that's space for you. So, sir, where would you last heart attack? Over.
00:01:12
Speaker
I never had a heart attack. Over. Darrr! So you're saying overdo for one then, sir. Over. Well, I suppose I might be heading towards one. Over. Aren't we all, sir? Aren't we all over? Oh, but I do exercise. Over. Oh, very stress inducing, sir. Over. I have a healthy diet. Over. Darrr, those quacks will always be changing their minds over that, sir. Over.
00:01:37
Speaker
Is my relaxation with my aromatherapy oils, murder? Ah, constricts the breathing, sir! Sir, you're a ticking time bomb of death, over. You think so, either? Well, you've already admitted you're heading towards your first heart attack. It was all the other activities you're doing, over.
00:01:54
Speaker
Hmm, never looked at it that way. Heart attack, you say, over? Die, which is why, sir, full medical insurance is the only way to go. Indeed, I bet that not only have you not had your first heart attack, but you'll still be awaiting an aneurysm, and of course the onset of the dreaded space animals, over. You're right. I am a, what did you call it, ticking time bomb of death, over.
00:02:18
Speaker
Luckily, I can send you a policy over the Spaceways to ensure you're against these ever encroaching melodies. Over. Oh, thank goodness we spoke over. Aye, sir. Now, can I interest you in some scary movies? They're extra horrific. Over.
Introduction to 'The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy'
00:02:42
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. Indenter.
00:02:51
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison, the doctor in Dentith. We are in Auckland, New Zealand. No longer. Still. Still. Still, yes. And at least one of our cases, but still out of lockdown. So that's a bonus, I suppose. You've been travelling around a bit though. Haven't left the country in a physical sense, but virtually you've been beaming yourself around the world.
00:03:19
Speaker
It's true.
Dr. Dentith on Social Media and Conspiracies
00:03:20
Speaker
So earlier this week, I was down at the University of Otago giving a talk on social media and just how bad Facebook really is. Well, that's kind of inside baseball joke. And then earlier today, I was presenting in Minnesota. But virtually, I wasn't actually leaving the country. That was at the 45th Midwest, Midwest, Midwest colloquium of philosophy.
00:03:45
Speaker
It's been a very long week. Especially from the fact you had trouble with Midwest, but were fine with colloquium. Well, you know, this is how speech-disfluency works. You can never make a prediction as to how things are going to work out.
Analyzing Reicher's Work on Political Conspiracies
00:03:58
Speaker
So, we are due another episode of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre, and so that's what we're gonna do. But it's new and exciting. We're hearing from someone we've never heard from before. And we're about to hear something else which is new and... Yeah. Right, I'm just not coping with words today. You've either drunk too much or not enough alcohol. It's not enough. I haven't even started yet. Right, so were you about to tell me we have a fancy new sting? We do. Do you want to hear it? I do. You get yourself tanked up and I'll listen to this.
00:04:33
Speaker
And now we join our hosts for another episode of Conspiracy Masterpiece Theatre. Could have used a little whale song, I feel. Had that sort of, had that sort of easy-going, smooth, slightly new, new AG vibe.
00:04:55
Speaker
Which of course is the antithesis of what this segment is about, because we're all about ripping papers apart with our analytic minds. There's no whale song going on when we analyse these papers. No. No, that is a literally true fact. I know. I do not tell lies, apart from that lie. Which point? You just don't know what I'm saying at all. It's paradoxes all the way down. But...
00:05:18
Speaker
not in the paper that we're talking about, which is of course on political conspiracy theories by Johar Reicher. That is correct. Of Finland, a friend of yours. Yes, I've spent time with Johar on several occasions now, indeed I've stayed in Turku, where he works in Finland at the University of Turku, and even given a talk in his department.
00:05:43
Speaker
There you go. So this paper was published in 2009 in the Journal of Political Philosophy. Was that a special issue? No, it appears to be just a standard paper on conspiracy theories and a standard journal in the standard year of 2009.
00:06:01
Speaker
So yeah, this is the first time we've heard from Johar in this series. So give us a quick overview of the man and his works. Well, how do you describe a film? Finish, I assume. Well, precisely. Basically, we're halfway there. So Johar is a philosopher who's written several papers on conspiracy theory now. He actually publishes two papers in 2009. And I had to try to work out which one he published first.
00:06:31
Speaker
so that we could kind of talk about them in order and I'm fairly sure on physical conspiracy theories is the first paper that was published this year in part because by the time the second paper comes out one of the people he's talking about is in the acknowledgments of that paper so I'm fairly sure that and this person is Lee Basham Lee read this initial paper got in contact with Yuhar and then that led to his contribution being accepted in the
00:07:01
Speaker
whatever refinements went on with Yuha's second paper that was published that year. So Yuha's work is basically at the intersection of trying to work out how we should treat conspiracy theories and how we should respect the common language usage of conspiracy theory. And as we will see in this paper and others, he does
00:07:25
Speaker
not quite tread the line as cross over the line backwards and forwards a lot. So sometimes he's all about going, right, we need to talk about conspiracy theories in the kind of particular angle. Other times he's very much standing to go, no, we need to respect how normal people talk about conspiracy theories. And this first paper is going to do a little bit of that.
00:07:51
Speaker
And it's another, a bit of a Greatest Hits one. This one refers to pretty much everyone we've talked about. I'm pretty sure Charles Pigdon gets referenced. I don't think Neil Levy makes an appearance in this one though.
00:08:09
Speaker
which he actually should at one point, but I don't think he does. But yeah, so it's a bit of a reaction against Brian Elkely and summarises the various reactions to Brian that we've looked at in the past. There's a lot of sort of
00:08:26
Speaker
going covering ground we've covered before so we might skip over some of the sections a little quicker than others but you always say that and we never do well yeah well i i think i think i restrained myself in my note taking this time but anyway we'll see um so there's no abstract as such but there is a sort of an introductory section um which contains what what what seemed to me to be a bit of a statement of intent i suppose which goes it's my turn isn't it
00:08:54
Speaker
Indeed, not standing on your toes there. No, you're sitting beside me on a couch. Well, that's all right then. In what follows, says Yuha, I will briefly analyse the view that most political conspiracy theories should be rejected on the grounds that they embody an almost nihilistic degree of scepticism about the behaviour and motivations of other people and the social institutions they constitute. Quoting Brian there, I think.
00:09:17
Speaker
This view has been widely criticized but I'll try to show that the objections presented so far are not wholly convincing. I'll then formulate my own argument against that position and argue that in a sense political conspiracy theories may not be much weaker explanations than standard non-conspiratorial explanations of political events. I'll also say a few words about political explanation in general in order to say something more about conspiracy theories.
00:09:41
Speaker
Which I think is a good good enough summing up as any So then it moves into section one of the paper which is titled political conspiracy theories And so this is so I mean that the point is very much and I think we've seen Our criticism of some earlier papers have been that they sort of talk about conspiracy theories in general But when you get down to it, they only their points only really apply to a smaller subset and shouldn't have been generalized So this one avoids that trap straight away by being very clear about the fact that we're
The Nature of Conspiracy Theories: Local vs. Global
00:10:11
Speaker
talking about
00:10:11
Speaker
political conspiracy theories specifically. He says the political conspiracy theories obviously in the political arena they're typically public rather than non-public theories. And in this case he gives an example of two private individuals engaging in a conspiracy against someone else and goes look that's
00:10:34
Speaker
Not what we're talking about. That's a conspiracy, but it's a kind of private affair that has no particular weight or importance. We're interested in the political ones, the ones which are of public merit. Yes, he says non-public conspiracy theories are relatively common, much more common than public conspiracy theories.
00:10:50
Speaker
And he then then refines this even further saying,
00:11:09
Speaker
A conspiracy theory that explains John F Kennedy's murder by referring to a plot by the CIA, which had important connections to the Mafia and Cuba, is a global conspiracy theory, although the main focus of it lies in local, i.e. national matters. Both global and local conspiracy theories should be distinguished from total conspiracy theories, which are outside the scope of my argument. Total conspiracy theories are sometimes referred to as global or truly global or mega conspiracy theories, but let us use the term total here.
00:11:36
Speaker
Total theories aim to explain the course of world history or the whole of global politics by referring to a conspiracy or a series of conspiracies. So basically, Lee Basham's malevolent global conspiracies. Yes, although in this respect, the kind of taxonomy that Yuhar is talking about here basically resembles that of Michel Bakun, who talks about event systemic and super conspiracies and the way that these particular conspiracy theories either look at small events
00:12:04
Speaker
systemic events in society or super-conspiracies of, by the way, ethnic group X is behind all the ills we see in our society. So in that respect, Johar is kind of reinventing a wheel here from sociology. But I think it's just to make a point of making sure that we're restricting ourselves to a particular sub. So he's not interested in, yeah, the Illuminati and Freemasons running the planet or what have you.
00:12:31
Speaker
He says, as opposed to total conspiracy theories, global and local conspiracy theories aim to explain only limited historical phenomena such as the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in April of 1986, the death of Princess Diana in August of 1997, the destruction of the World Trade Towers, World Trade Center Towers rather in 2001, or the rapid escalation of the AIDS virus.
00:12:54
Speaker
yeah section one is basically just a good bit of a good bit of definition setting the terms so that we know exactly what it is we're talking about all the way through. But then interestingly enough I say interesting enough because this is going to come back to haunt to my field towards the end of the paper he states
00:13:15
Speaker
Conspiracy theories that aim to explain only limited historical phenomena are often warranted, i.e. they provide the, more or less, correct explanation of events. This is understandable. Political conspiracies have been common in history as we know from original documents and the report to professional historians.
00:13:35
Speaker
Non-public conspiracies are a part of many people's daily life, and most of us know that unimaginable disloyalties, conspiratorial sexual infidelities... Oh, I like the idea of a conspiratorial sexual infidality. Well, I mean, if you've got two people hiding your fear from the other person's partner, that's...
00:13:52
Speaker
I know, but in this case, I don't want to have just sexual infidelity. I want conspiratorial sexuality. It does make it sound a little sore, doesn't it? And secret business portrayals happen every now and then. And that stuck out to me a little bit when he says, just his
00:14:14
Speaker
Well, it takes the more or less clear explanation of events because as you pointed out in the notes you were making, that's not normally the point that people start from. Most people start from, most people think conspiracy theories are unwarranted. Yuha is going, well, actually, by and large, most conspiracy theories that explain limited events are likely to be true.
00:14:38
Speaker
Yeah, that stuck out to me as being a little bit contrary to what we've seen. But then a little bit further on, he says that, however, when conspiracy theories turn into official wisdom, people cease to call them conspiracy theories. And so that one was, oh, OK, right. So.
00:14:53
Speaker
We're doing a little bit of the conspiracy theory versus official story, which David Cody really got his teeth into and others have as well. Which is part of that thing where some people go, look, we need to respect ordinary or common language when it comes to this pesky term, conspiracy theory. People don't tend to refer to accepted explanations as being conspiracy theories. So by sleight of hand, they'll go, look,
00:15:19
Speaker
most conspiracy theories of a kind of limited extent turn out to be true, but they're not conspiracy theories. We'll see how this argument concludes towards the end of the paper. Yes, so he puts here just a little bit more to save it here. He says, it follows that not all explanations that explain historical events by referring to conspiracies are called conspiracy theories.
00:15:42
Speaker
Official explanations can be theories, and they can refer to conspiracies, but they cannot be conspiracy theories, unless they're official explanations of wrong authorities. Now, that's the point when Neil Levy should come in, because Neil Levy's all about the appropriate authorities to refer to when we talk about conspiracy theories. That's where Juha goes, ah, you mentioned everyone else, you should have mentioned Levy at that point. Yes.
00:16:06
Speaker
The view carrying on the quote, the view that the well-known events on the 11th of September in 2001 were due to a conspiracy on the part of Al-Qaeda is not a conspiracy theory. This way of using the concept of conspiracy theory is not accepted by all writers in the field, but there are good grounds to follow it, as it is in line with the ordinary meaning of conspiracy theories. So yes, again, another appeal to the ordinary usage of language.
00:16:32
Speaker
I'm not sure again about this talk of not being accepted by all writers in the field.
00:16:42
Speaker
Cody definitely, as we saw, based his definition on a colloquial understanding of what it is to be a conspiracy theory and in opposition to an official story. But a lot of other, in fact, I would say most of the other writers we've looked at didn't go by that sort of a definition. So when he's talking about all the writers in the field, is he talking about philosophy or is he talking about academia more generally? Because I know in other disciplines,
00:17:07
Speaker
It's a little bit hard to tell given the state of the literature back in 2009 is radically smaller than it is now. So it's quite possible that in that limited subset then sure that was what was being argued there. But as they say on Wikipedia, more citation needed. Yes, I think so.
00:17:27
Speaker
But so that's the introduction section. That's just sort of setting the scene and the scope of the argumentation. So it moves into section two, Keeley's argument against conspiracy theories. And so this section is basically just a summarisation and a look at what Brian L. Keeley has had to say about conspiracy theories.
00:17:48
Speaker
And I think it looks, I don't have the references here. I think it looks at several of his papers, doesn't it? Not just the very, not just the 1999 one. I think there are a couple referenced, but certainly, as we'll see, the responses to it and his responses to responses will come up in the next section.
00:18:05
Speaker
But so, Yuhar writes, the view that most political conspiracy theories should be rejected has been defended by Brian Kelly. He defines a subset of conspiracy theories which he calls unwarranted conspiracy theories, or UCTs. And a little later, in Kelly's view, however, most conspiracy theories that meet UCT criteria are unwarranted. Conspiracy theories do not warrant outright dismissal, but we are entitled to suspect them.
00:18:32
Speaker
And this paper, more than any of the others we've looked at, I thought, does sort of trip over Brian's perhaps lack of precision in his earliest paper, where it wasn't clear if he's talking about all conspiracy theories or specifically those mature unwarranted ones that he's seen more concerned with.
00:18:52
Speaker
Well, sorry, let's let's focus on the mature unwarranted conspiracy theories, because you I was talking about unwarranted conspiracy theories as if Brian's argument is that he thinks that political conspiracy theories are unwarranted conspiracy theories.
Critiques of Keeley and Trust in Institutions
00:19:09
Speaker
But of course, the entire argument that Brian has in of conspiracy theories is focusing on one very particular subset
00:19:18
Speaker
of political conspiracy theory, the mature unwarranted conspiracy theory, i.e. the conspiracy theory which has persisted in discourse over time, despite failing to gain warrant at that time.
00:19:34
Speaker
So Brian's criticism about conspiracy theories is very much centred on a particular kind of political conspiracy theory. Now as we'll see later on in this paper, the mention of maturity, or mature unwarranted conspiracy theory, happens very late. Yuhar seems to base his entire argument on the idea that Brian has a particular view, which as we've seen in this series of paper reviews,
00:20:02
Speaker
isn't actually an accurate portrayal of Brian's position. Yeah, and so he goes on to recap sort of Kelly's views and the whole sort of public trust approach that if the problem with these, well, the problem with what Brian called mature unwarranted conspiracy theories, but as you say again in this way, he just ends up talking about unwarranted conspiracy theories. The problem is that if you really believe in them, you end up
00:20:30
Speaker
Again with that sort of epistemic nihilism, you end up being overly skeptical and unable to have any trust in any sort of public institutions. And yeah, reading through that section, there's a lot of
00:20:43
Speaker
There's a lot of usage of the word most. Brian thinks most conspiracies are bad, most of these things are bad, and a lot of the time that seemed a little bit too strong. It seemed like, in Brian's arguments, it was some of these things are bad in some cases, but it seemed like there was a bit too wide of a net being cast.
00:21:07
Speaker
And then ends up with the reference to Hume on Miracles, which is what Brian sort of based his first paper on. Although what's interesting about that is Yuha says, look, you end up with the idea that Keeley's approach brings to mind Hume on miracle, as if Yuha has made a connection between Keeley's argument and Hume's argument, as opposed to what's actually happening, which is Keeley brings Hume front and centre into the analysis.
00:21:36
Speaker
So it's a little bit weird to go, it brings to mind this other argument. I mean, it should bring to mind. It's actually stated clearly in the text that that's what's been riffed on.
00:21:48
Speaker
Yeah, so that, I mean, that's a quick gloss over section two of the arguments, but it's, he goes into a fair bit more detail and provides a lot of arguments, but basically he's summarising Kili's views, which we have looked at in the past. So we might as well move straight on to section three, which again is a summary of things we've seen before. In this case, Johar is summarising the various arguments that people have levelled against Brian's arguments.
00:22:15
Speaker
and these are all things that we've looked at before. Now this section is called Against the Public Trust Approach. Now actually this is a special message to Brian because we were having a discussion in the previous session of the 45th Midwest Colloquium of Philosophy which Brian gave about three weeks ago.
00:22:34
Speaker
And Brian was claiming that as far as he's aware, Yuha comes up with the title, Public Trust Approach, to encapsulate this erroneous view of Brian's work. I want to point out that actually it turns out Lee Basham did use that name back in 2001.
00:22:52
Speaker
But it's admittedly, it's a one line reference. So Yuhar is the one who suddenly has two sections on the public trust approach in his article. But it turns out it was actually coined by Lee eight years prior. Well, there we go. The more you know. So he starts off right off the bat by saying Kiwi's public trust approach to conspiracy theories has faced a lot of criticism and it has. We've read it.
00:23:19
Speaker
Although I've written some of it erroneously, but we'll get on to that later. So yes, as we'll see again, I think, and as we have seen, a lot of that criticism seemed to rest on a bit of a misreading of what his views were in the first place.
00:23:34
Speaker
Anyway, he goes through the whole lot. He talks about Charles Pigdon's reactions to Keeley. The interesting thing I thought that came out of that discussion is when Yuhar points out, it is clear that Keeley does not recommend a belief-forming strategy that systematically discounts conspiracy. All that he argues is that in the process of evaluating different explanations, UCTs, unwarranted conspiracy theories, tend to lose since the skepticism they entail is too extensive.
00:24:02
Speaker
Perhaps we are just justified in adopting a sort of a negative attitude towards UCT, since they have typically been such bad explanations. But we're not justified in rejecting them on a priori grounds, which is nice to see, because I mean, we've seen Brian has explicitly said in some of his papers, yes, you can't.
00:24:21
Speaker
You can't reject conspiracy theories on our priority grounds. You can't reject them just because they are conspiracy theories. And other papers that we've looked at have kind of ignored that point sometimes, I think, and made it sound like you were saying they were. So that was good to see.
00:24:37
Speaker
He goes through Steve Clark's reactions to Brian, which again, we've gone over where Clark tended to talk more about the conspiracy theorists and their attitudes than the conspiracy theories themselves. And then there's a good bit of Lee Basham versus Brian Elkely. And it's nice, nice to see Lee getting his dues now after not really being mentioned when I kept expecting to see him be mentioned in some of the earlier things we've looked at more recently.
00:25:05
Speaker
Yes, it is one of those situations where suddenly Basham enters the argument and we're going to see a lot more reference to Basham's work as the years go by. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, that made a lot of sense to me because it was Lee's arguments that were quite specifically opposing this public trust approach or whatever it was called at the various times.
00:25:31
Speaker
So Yuhar says that Lee's argument raises the question as to when the belief in a conspiracy theory requires more skepticism than we can stomach. What is an unacceptable degree of global skepticism? We cannot say, but perhaps we should if we're to apply Kelly's criterion of theory acceptance, namely the criterion that a theory should be rejected when it entails too much skepticism about institutions and testimony, which is, I think, one of the
00:25:57
Speaker
the criticisms people have had in the past of Brian's stuff that he says, yes, it's bad when an unwarranted conspiracy theory becomes a mature unwarranted conspiracy theory. But when actually does such a theory become mature? What does maturity count? Is it time or what? So it is, I think, a good point to have made there.
00:26:14
Speaker
Yes and as I said in the discussion of Brian's work in today's colloquium, maturity is hard to define. I mean there are ways to kind of pass it out by talking about the different senses of warrant but yeah working out when something matures is much more ambiguous than maybe it appears at first glance but then by necessity
00:26:38
Speaker
it probably is always going to be somewhat ambiguous because it is both a function of time and also effort. So although as we'll see Yuhara is going to argue against the public approach a bit, he isn't convinced by Lee's specific arguments, the ones that he he promotes, he says
00:27:02
Speaker
Yuha rather says, in general. However, I think Basham's argument too is problematic. The argument is based on an inductive reasoning since that since we have a history of terrible conspiracies, be they political or non-political, public or non-public, local or global, a conspiracy theorist is justified in continuing to hold to a theory, even if it entails, either from the beginning or at least in the end, massive skepticism and claims such as most members of the deep media are involved in the conspiracy.
00:27:31
Speaker
Which again, it sounded like slightly too strong a reading of what Lee was saying. I didn't think he was saying, you're justified in continuing this theory, no matter what. But it seemed to be like sort of we saw
00:27:50
Speaker
where, I've got my philosophers mixed up, Steve, where Steve Clark looked more at the conspirators than conspiracy theory. Lee, at least in those earlier papers, tend to look more at the sort of society in which conspiracies were occurring than the conspiracy theories themselves as much, and his arguments seem to be more alike.
00:28:11
Speaker
We don't know what a society where there are no conspiracies would look like, but it doesn't look like this one. And indeed, we'll see when we see more of Lee's work in the future. He'll start to actually put forward a kind of schema of talking about this with respect to what he calls the toxic truth. But that's spoilers. We'll get on to that soon.
00:28:33
Speaker
Now, at this point, I don't know if this is overly relevant to the argument, the overall argument of the paper, but you have made what I thought was an interesting point. I think this is going to be relevant and I'll explain after you read out the quote.
Genuine Conspiracies vs. Widely Known Secrets
00:28:47
Speaker
OK.
00:28:48
Speaker
He says large-scale secret actions such as extensive military operations should not be confused with genuine conspiracies. The Holocaust was planned and conducted with the connivance of many people and many organisations, as was the great terror of 1934-39 in the Soviet Union,
00:29:04
Speaker
but it is contestable whether these should be called genuine conspiracies, as it was generally quote-unquote known what was going on. What was not known was who was responsible, how extensive the action was and so on, but relatively early most or at least very many people did have a suspicion that the official stories were not completely correct. Perhaps we should distinguish between genuine conspiracies and conspiracies whose existence is widely known or presumed, which seems an interesting distinction to make, but I don't know if it's an entirely relevant one to this discussion.
00:29:34
Speaker
See, it is relevant because it's a cheat. So, effectively, what Yuha has just done, which is what Papa did back in the day, is rule out a whole bunch of conspiratorial activity. It's not really being a proper conspiracy. Look, there were vague hints of this going on. A true conspiracy is one that nobody knows is going on.
00:29:59
Speaker
and that's a cheat because you've basically just said look all of these examples of the conspiracies in history that we could use to bolster the claim that conspiracies are common and thus conspiracy theories are often warranted I'm going to say aren't proper conspiracies at all thus you've lost the entire evidence base for your claim that prior probability gives us a good way to say we should be suspicious of x or y
00:30:26
Speaker
Mm. And I mean, what I think that stuck out to me is the whole sort of sort of generally sort of everybody knows or everybody suspects, but they don't. Everybody knows, but they don't really know, which really reminded me of did you see in the wake of the Jimmy Savile accusations of a couple of years ago when all that stuff came out, there was on Have I Got News For You in Britain? They were discussing it. And Ian Hislop, the journalist who's on there a bit,
00:30:55
Speaker
But he's on every episode. I don't watch it that much. He's one of the team captains. He and Paul Merton are the rival team captains. That would explain why I've seen him in so many episodes of the few that I have seen. He did this whole thing about... In a sort of private eye.
00:31:12
Speaker
about Jimmy Savile and the stories of, you know, supposedly everybody knew about Jimmy Savile, but nothing was ever done about him and no newspapers ever wanted to go against him or anything. And he does this whole thing where he says, yeah, everybody knew, but they didn't know. Everybody heard it, but they never really knew about it.
00:31:28
Speaker
which always sort of made me think, gosh, if only there was a sort of journalist who investigated things and could find out if the stuff was true, but then he said... Who ran his own newspaper. I know. I know. Shocking thought. Shocking thought. He was trying to make this distinction between things that everybody knows and things that everybody knows and italics or whatever, which, again, didn't seem like a useful distinction. Anyway, not relevant entirely to what we're talking about now. So this section then rounds out with, of course, looking at David Cody's views.
00:31:58
Speaker
on Brian.
00:32:01
Speaker
And again, stuff we've looked at plenty in previous installments. And so it looks at the idea that you can think that a person or an institution is conspiring without actually losing trust in that person or institution in general. So the idea that Brian's saying, as your conspiracy theories get more and more elaborate and bring in more and more people, you end up having to just have no trust in anything whatsoever. And this objection is, well, no, you can think that maybe these government,
00:32:31
Speaker
this government department, say, is doing this dodgy thing over here, but overall, they still function as a government department, and so you can still have some level of trust in them. Although, but then having said that, my thought on that was, you know, maybe you can still trust things if they're conspiring, but should you actually? Because it made me think of the stuff we've talked about recently about the flat earth types, where
00:32:57
Speaker
They don't seem to realise just how much of science they have to chuck in the bin to really believe what they believe. And it seems, you know, lots of flat-earth types do seem to believe in science, but it's like, if you really accepted what you're talking about, maybe you shouldn't. So I think this objection could work both ways. See, I think the problem here is that because Yuha has not talked about the mature part of the unwarranted conspiracy theory,
00:33:24
Speaker
he ends up kind of missing the point. Brian's point isn't that if someone tells a lie you should lose trust in the institution. Brian's point is more if it's a mature conspiracy theory about say fact x or aspect y of our culture and this conspiracy theory has matured so it's persisted for a really really long time despite no adequate evidence ever coming in front of it.
00:33:53
Speaker
If you're the kind of person who believes that conspiracy theory, and it's mature, you kind of have to assume that the people who aren't accepting the reality of your conspiracy theory are probably actively working against you, because they're part of the conspiracy to deny the veracity of your conspiracy theory. So in that case, you kind of get a live-scale scepticism. So you're going to look, surely these people
00:34:21
Speaker
know that Princess Diana was actually assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, but for years and years and years they've refused to acknowledge that possibility, which means there's a large-scale conspiracy operating at all levels of the British government to ensure that we don't find out the truth of a time-travelling Lee Harvey Oswald who goes around killing the People's Princess.
00:34:43
Speaker
And that's kind of the point that Brian's trying to make here If you persist in the belief of mature, unwarranted conspiracy theories The conspiracy must be getting bigger and bigger Because otherwise, why isn't the evidence coming out? Yes
00:35:01
Speaker
So after this summary of all the various reactions to Brian's works, this section concludes, the question is, should we reject Keeley's argument because of the failure Cody emphasises? I think we should not. In my view, we are justified in rejecting a conspiracy theory if the only way to save it is to make claims of larger and larger conspiracies, even if this would not imply total skepticism.
00:35:28
Speaker
an implication that hundreds of people and dozens of institutions are involved in genuine conspiracy, is strange enough to warrant rejection. Therefore, I conclude that Cody's objection is not more decisive than those of Pigdon, Clark and Basham.
00:35:42
Speaker
So basically, yeah, having given this overview of the various reactions to Brian's arguments, Yuha is not persuaded by any of them, but nevertheless thinks you can argue against Brian's approach and does that in Section 4, a further argument against the public trust approach. We still have the still. Good. We do. Good. Yep. Keep it around.
00:36:11
Speaker
So this section starts. Keely is defending the thesis that most conspiracy theories are unwarranted. I don't think that's true. No, that stuck out to me straight away as I don't think he ever said most conspiracy theories are unwanted. He said a particular kind of conspiracy theories are unwarranted. Would that be the mature conspiracy theory? Yeah.
00:36:39
Speaker
Now, but nevertheless, assuming, as Yuha does, that Kili has the thesis that most conspiracy theories are unwarranted, it continues, therefore he's committed either to the view one, that most conspiracy theorists end up making claims of larger and larger conspiracies, or to the view two, that we are justified in rejecting most conspiracy theories for some other reason.
00:37:05
Speaker
The first view is empirically false. Typically, conspiracy theories do not begin with sceptical assumptions, nor do they end up with them. Kenny seems to recognise this, as he writes that some mature conspiracy theories entail pervasive scepticism of people and public institutions. And in that sentence...
00:37:23
Speaker
Yuha points out that he emphasizes the word some in some mature conspiracy theories but the word in that sentence that struck out to me was mature because I believe that is the first time that that word shows up in this paper and it's the first of any sort of acknowledgement that that's a word that Brian used so I
00:37:43
Speaker
And as I've covered already in this discussion, the lack of talking about maturity, I think, means that Yuhar ends up getting entirely the wrong end of the stick on Keeley's position, and is basically arguing against a misrepresentation of what Keeley's trying to say.
00:38:02
Speaker
Then moving on to the second of those two views. The second possible view to ascribe to Keeley, that we are justified in rejecting most conspiracy theories for some other reason, is normatively empty. To say that we're justified in rejecting most conspiracy theories, even if theorists do not make claims of larger and larger conspiracies, is a statement, not an argument.
00:38:22
Speaker
Keighley may be right when he writes that quite often we simply reject the theory, but the question why we would be justified in doing so is left unanswered. The pervasive scepticism that ultimately provides us with the grounds to identify unwarranted theories does not apply when conspiracy theorists do not have to expand the group of conspirators in order to save the theory. Therefore I agree with the other critics quoted that Keighley's public trust approach is problematic, although my reasons for concluding differ from theirs.
00:38:48
Speaker
And, yeah, I'm not quite sure.
The Value of Political Conspiracy Theories
00:38:52
Speaker
There was a quote, Keeley may be right when he writes that we quite often quote, we simply reject the theory, which I don't remember that specifically from his works. I haven't gone back a little bit. It did seem to be a little bit like it might have been taken out of context, that little fragment.
00:39:10
Speaker
Yes, I mean I think once again the problem here is Yuhar's not talking about the mature unwarranted conspiracy theory. So this entire analysis is once again skew with because it's not focusing on what Brian's trying to argue, it is indeed focusing on what it might take to be the caricature of Brian's view, the public trust approach.
00:39:33
Speaker
Although what is interesting in this section, the Rainbow Warrior turns up. The Rainbow Warrior example, yeah. One thing that I've been skipping over completely as I sort of made my notes, and as we've talked about this, is that there is a wealth of good examples of the sorts of conspiracies you have. It illustrates all of his points with examples. Although he should point out, by the time we get to this part of the paper, he's denying that some of these conspiracies would actually be conspiracies. Well, yes, yes.
00:40:01
Speaker
But yes, it does bring up the Rainbow Warrior, which we talked about a long time ago, I think, when it was one of the anniversaries of the bombing. But I think the point for that one was, in terms of sort of trust and credibility and warrant, you would have thought at the time it would be unthinkable. You think it was an unbelievable thing to say that the prime minister of a country, Francois Mitterrand, in this case of France, would sanction
00:40:28
Speaker
an essentially terrorist act in another sovereign nation. But that's what bloody happened. They blew up a boat in our harbour back in the 80s and accidentally killed someone. Which I should point is the first non-English act of terrorism on our shores. I mean, the English committed a lot of terrorism during their colonial history, but the French, they decided to join in very late in the game. Killed people too.
00:40:57
Speaker
Anyway.
00:41:00
Speaker
So carrying on in this section, he says, now it is very likely that most political conspiracy theories are unwarranted. Too often they suffer from epistemic failures. They may appeal to unlikely motives and include explanatory gaps. They may be inconsistent with the observed facts they acknowledge and provide failed predictions. Often a conspiracy theory can be rejected simply by pointing out that the alleged conspirators do not have any connections to each other, are too stupid to have designed such a vicious plan, or lack the technological and material resources to carry it through.
00:41:29
Speaker
Some conspiracy theories suffer from internal inconsistency. Others attribute omnipotence to the alleged conspirators. Now I should point out, earlier he'd said that most political conspiracy theories are warranted.
00:41:42
Speaker
But because he's changed his definition of conspiracy, because he's only been talking about genuine conspiracies, the ones that we don't really know about. Now look, most of these political conspiracy theories are going to be unwarranted because I've changed the definition of what counts as a conspiracy theory halfway through the paper.
00:42:03
Speaker
This leads him to say, further on, I assume what Keeley really wants to argue for is not so much the claim that most conspiracy theories are unwarranted, but rather the claim that political conspiracy theories tend to provide worse explanations of political events than other theories. The latter view is very popular, as conspiracy theories have a very bad reputation, and goes on to talk about the points we've mentioned before and have mentioned ever since the beginning of time that people
00:42:30
Speaker
will use conspiracy theory as a pejorative term, essentially, and try to write people off as conspiracy theorists. Nevertheless, neither one of those sentences really seemed to me to be a proper characterisation of what Brian was saying.
00:42:46
Speaker
No, and I'm just going to repeat again. Lack of analysis of the term mature and mature unwarranted conspiracy theory is what's not doing a lot of the work here. Or is the lack of analysis is doing a lot of the work, not analyzing it. Yes. I was right the second time. We got that.
00:43:09
Speaker
So nearing the end of the section we get to an interesting question is whether it is true that political conspiracy theories tend to provide worse explanations of political events than other theories. Shortly a little later if we concentrate only on local and global political conspiracy theories
00:43:26
Speaker
Are we sure that they are, generally speaking, worse than the other theories presented in the context of political argumentation? I'm not convinced, at least when the correctness of the theories is concerned, all kinds of theories appeal to unlikely motives and include explanatory gaps.
00:43:41
Speaker
And then a bit later, I thought, was an interesting point. Very often, I almost always, political events are explained in various rival ways that often differ considerably from each other. It follows that most explanations have to be wrong, which isn't something that really occurred to me, I thought. But yes, if you're
00:44:01
Speaker
If you're worried about things being more likely than other or whatever, no matter if you have a whole bunch of different explanations of any event, conspiratorial or not conspiratorial, presumably only one of them is going to be right. Maybe none of them.
00:44:17
Speaker
Which means that just as a matter of mathematics, you're going to have a bunch more unproductive conspiracy theories of any type just overall. But you're going to have, by that reasoning, that's going to be true of any explanatory endeavor.
00:44:37
Speaker
So it's not really a special feature of conspiracy theories. It makes me think of when I talked in my book, the philosophy of conspiracy theories, about how we need to talk about how tight or loose the connection is between the claim of conspiracy and the outcome we're trying to explain. And that in some situations you might go, look, it's only a really, really tangential way that the conspiracy is a causal factor of some event within the world.
00:45:04
Speaker
And sometimes it's actually very tightly constrained. It's very quite clear that this conspiracy led to this event over there, and it's the only real explanation we've got. It kind of depends on the character of the explanation. So yeah, sure, there are lots of explanations out there, most of which are going to be wrong. But what we need to be looking at is the nature of the explanation itself, because we can actually start discarding a whole bunch of them based upon principles.
00:45:31
Speaker
Yes, I think if we're talking about whether or not conspiratorial explanations have a better record of the non-conspiratorial explanations of the point as well, no matter if they're conspiratorial or not, they're all going to turn out to be wrong except for the right one, if that makes sense. And that's a tautologist, I think so. If indeed there is a right one. If there is indeed a right one, yeah.
00:45:52
Speaker
Yes, so that doesn't seem to give you a reason for privileging non-conspiratorial explanations over conspiratorial ones, which some people have wanted to do. And all of this brings us to Section 5 aptly called Concluding Remarks, because it is a conclusion of this paper.
00:46:11
Speaker
I mean, it would be a bit terrible if there was a Section 6. If it was, yeah, yeah. And one more thing, and then Section 7, actually. Yes, no, so that actually works out very well. So in his concluding remarks, Section Yuhua says, I have argued that the view that most political conspiracy theories should be rejected on the grounds that they embody, quote, an almost nihilistic degree of scepticism about the behaviour and motivations of other people and the social institutions they constitute, end quote, is not acceptable.
00:46:40
Speaker
Political conspiracy theories may not be much weaker explanations than standard explanations of political events. To grant that most political conspiracy theories are probably false is not to grant that they are much worse than other theories that aim to explain political events, at least when the correctness of the theories is considered.
00:46:57
Speaker
It is generally known that our attitudes toward political conspiracy theories may have important psychological and social consequences. Sorry, I've skipped a little bit there. He goes on to talk about the effects and the sort of psychological effects, which I think is sort of referring back to the Lee versus Brian public trust and how you feel about society.
00:47:19
Speaker
The view that we live in an ordered universe in which political conspiracies are ordinary things may give us hope that the world is not as absurd and chaotic as it sometimes seems. On the other hand, a belief in a conspiracy may lead to fear or sorrow.
00:47:32
Speaker
I'm just thinking David Bowie now. Sorrow. And then basically ends up with I think the point that we've kind of seen a lot of these things end on. It is important that in every country there are some people who are interested in investigative journalism and political conspiracy theorising. Conspiracy theorists have done a lot of good in the past. Undoubtedly, they'll do a lot of good in the future too.
00:47:56
Speaker
which reminds me of Charles Pigdon's papers where he's saying that these people need to be looking into these things and not let the powers that be fob you off with by calling something a conspiracy theory and like Charles he seems to be presenting that as an objection to Brian's views when in fact it sounds like something Brian would agree with. Yeah and what's odd about this is I'm not entirely sure where this concluding remark comes from because having said that
00:48:26
Speaker
most conspiracy theories are going to be unwarranted and having defined a distinction between things which look an awful lot like conspiracies that are known about versus the genuine conspiracies that we don't know about.
00:48:42
Speaker
I'm not entirely sure what good these conspiracy theorists can do, given that they appear to be chasing unicorns. So I don't see where this conclusion comes from, given the direction his argument takes. It's a conclusion that works for the first half of the paper before the bait and switch, but it makes absolutely no sense given what he does in the second half of the paper.
00:49:08
Speaker
Yeah, so I think this paper suffers from a bit of inconsistency and also suffers from an overly uncharitable reading of Brian's work. But that's something we've seen a lot. And so possibly means that in that initial paper, Brian needed to be a little more precise with his terminology. But given that he was basically right at the very beginning of the philosophical approach to conspiracy theories, I think that can probably be forgiven.
00:49:37
Speaker
Yes, I mean, as we've said several times on this podcast now, when you're one of the two people along with Charles basically inventing the discipline from whole cloth,
00:49:48
Speaker
it's understandable that your first paper might be a little confused in retrospect, because actually the terminology just isn't set in stone yet. And so there's no one to ping you for going, I think you mean this, because people are still going, oh, that's actually really clever. I hadn't thought of it that way. It's only subsequently you go, the last third, I think you engage in a term switch there, and it's a little bit confusing.
00:50:15
Speaker
Yes, so there we go. So that's the first we've heard of YUHA, but it's not going to be the last. No, because there are three papers produced in 2009 that we're looking at, two of which are by YUHA and the other one which...
00:50:30
Speaker
I mean, this is going to sound like a dig because A, I've just been... I've been crushing the dreams of Yuhar Riker by talking about this paper in the way that I have. But one of the papers, which isn't by Yuhar, is possibly one of the most important papers in the literature for some fairly interesting reasons.
00:50:54
Speaker
Well, you've set up a good one there. Is that going to be the next one? Or will we look at Yuhar's other one? Initially, I thought we'd do Yuhar's papers in a row, but no, I actually think we should do the booting and tailor paper next. I think Yuhar should be the sandwich around booting and tailor. Sounds saucy. Well, no, it's more sandwich-y. Some people like sauce in their sandwich. That's Sloppy Joe.
00:51:21
Speaker
I'm not even going to comment on your sluppy jar. No, you probably shouldn't. Or the fact you keep sourcing your sandwich. That's not evenism. Actually, it is. It is and it isn't. So that brings us to the end of this particular episode of this particular podcast. But of course, there is the bonus content to come for you lovely patrons who furnish us with this finery you see before you if you're watching the video version. And if you're just listening to it, take a word for it that there's a cool box with lights and but can I do the thing?
00:51:52
Speaker
That is your patron dollars in action right there. Tracey, Josh, engage in some casual profanity and I'll use the other function we've got. Well, I think every... and obviously... when you do... and obviously again, I think we can't... with a...
00:52:11
Speaker
I do apologise. And so you should. Also, just become a robot for a second. What? Oh, is that a robot voice? Doesn't sound like a robot voice. It sounds, I don't know. I mean... Stop. I'm gonna get all upset. Oh, for goodness sake.
00:52:41
Speaker
Can I have my voice back, please? Thank you.
00:52:54
Speaker
Did you just mute me? Oh no, that's female. I know, I do not understand how this is, I mean, this is the perfect Ferengi female. So this is female, but wait, I'm gonna make this into babies now. So this is us being babies. I dispute that. Really? I mean, you sound like a baby. I sound like someone who's huffed a bunch of helium.
00:53:21
Speaker
Well, I mean, now we don't have to huff you again. We can just use a voice filter instead. I see there's a mail filter.
00:53:29
Speaker
What does that look like? I know. It gives you a gravitas when you talk. So it sounds more like a troll filter. Or actually, no, this is what happens if you go on the TV news and they have to disguise your voice because you're a criminal. So I need to ask, what terrible things did you do when you were in the gang? Well, I only sold a few babies all the time.
00:53:58
Speaker
I see we have, can I have my voice back please? There we go. I see a female male baby robot, the four genders. Yeah, yeah. And then fully represented only and sidechain, which if we played music in the podcast would be very useful. Sidechain basically also ducks the music when you're talking over the top. So you can basically start a song and then you can interrupt the song. It'll also duck so you can be heard and then it goes back.
00:54:26
Speaker
Music only is meant to remove the vocals from songs. It does not do it well. No, I can't imagine. It does it very, very badly. But anyway, enough fiddling with our hardware. We save that for the bonus episodes normally. We do indeed. Yes, that was a double entendre. We know what we're doing.
00:54:51
Speaker
We should probably finish this episode, actually, because we've hit the rambling portion a bit harder than usual, I think. So maybe we should just figure out quickly. Thank you patrons. You allow us to dick around like that and waste everybody's time. If you want to encourage us to do that, I'm not sure I'm selling this properly. No, you're selling it perfectly. If you want more of this malarkey,
00:55:14
Speaker
Because unlike Joe Biden, we're all pro Malaki, then you should become a patron. It costs you, at the very least, a dollar a month. They can actually give more if you so desire. And then you get access to the patron bonus episodes, the Discord server. And yes, I know patrons, we're not really doing much with the Discord server at the moment. I've got a plan about that, but I was kind of expecting to be in China by now.
00:55:41
Speaker
at which point everything was going to go ahead but there's all sorts of stuff going on in the background which has kind of taken my attention away from it but we will get back to making the Discord into a much more vibrant place in the future and indeed what would make it even more vibrant would be more patrons. So for a dollar a month you get a Discord server, you get bonus episodes and you often get a Declaration of Love by us to you on a weekly basis.
00:56:08
Speaker
because yeah, I don't think anyone could dispute the fact that our patrons are actually the best people. Yeah, and we're always going on about it. Anyway, I should say of course that not only do you get access to a Discord server, but you get a bonus episode every week and this week's bonus episode is going to be a bit of a talk about what you have talked about just in the recent past.
00:56:33
Speaker
Yes, so a paper is going to emerge from the presentation I gave at the 41st Midwest Colloquium of Philosophy, which I'm also giving to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Auckland next week. But patrons are going to find out a little bit about what I was talking about this week.
00:56:53
Speaker
in part because I've been so busy I haven't really had time to prepare any content for the bonus episode and also why not talk about a paper I just gave on conspiracy theory to other people? Why not indeed? So patrons, strap in for that if that floats your boat. Everyone else obviously thank you for listening anyway because you're our audience and without you our existences do become that little bit more pointless.
00:57:19
Speaker
And to all of you, Patreon or not, I think it's simply just time to say goodbye. And for me to say... And his mother. The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy is Josh Addison and me, Dr. M. R. X. Denterth. You can contact us at podcastconspiracygmail.com and please do consider supporting the podcast via our Patreon. And remember, Soylent Green is meepers.