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What’s a Blik? (Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre)
39 Plays1 year ago
Josh and M review Glenn Y. Bezalel's "Conspiracy Theories and Religion: Reframing Conspiracy Theories as Bliks” which appeared in Episteme in 2019.
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Transcript
Introduction: Avoiding Stereotypes and Understanding 'Blicks'
00:00:00
Speaker
So this week we have to not make jokes about African accents and the topic of this week's Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre. Not even if I do my best Kevin Kline South African impersonation. No. And don't even think about doing Morgan Freeman. Tim Curry from Loaded Weapon 1.
00:00:20
Speaker
marginal but still no okay so i can say blick as long as i don't say blick no no it's the other way around so blick not blick uh she maybe it's the other way around after all blick perfect blick no no no blick blick blick
00:00:41
Speaker
Blick, what is a blick, anyway? That's a very racist thing to say. No, I mean, what's a blick? Oh, it's an unfalsifiable but meaningful world view to some individual or set of individuals. Is that not just religious belief? As we're about to find out, maybe yes, and maybe not.
Podcast Launch and Episode Theme
00:01:04
Speaker
The podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy featuring Josh Addison and Em Denton.
00:01:15
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy here in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Edison. And sitting right next to me so close, we're essentially the same person. It's Dr. M. R. Extentive. The lights are blinding my eyes, Joshua. The lights are blinding my eyes. Well, keep that to yourself. It's not actually a metaphor and he's not singing a weekend song either. We don't think he's not a good person.
00:01:39
Speaker
oh no one's a good person last week we said we were going to try doing a video record and we tried you can't deny that we tried we did not actually come up with a video version of the episode Josh that assumes that our old video episodes were good or at least
00:02:04
Speaker
So much better than what we recorded last week. And I think the marginal utility is only marginal. OK. Well, anyway, we're trying it again. This week, I don't know about you. I'm making no promises as to whether there will be a proper video episode for you to watch. But there might be. We might get it right this time. We might get it less wrong this time.
00:02:22
Speaker
We might. We might. We might. So we'll see. Watch this space.
Reframing Conspiracy Theories as 'Blicks'
00:02:27
Speaker
Of course you can't, because you're probably listening to it because it's not the video. But anyway, we have a Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theory episode. I'm not 100% convinced this isn't some sort of prank that you've played on me, this particular paper. It seemed a little bit odd, a little bit ootray. So we're looking at conspiracy theories in religion, reframing conspiracy theories as blix.
00:02:49
Speaker
And this came out in Episteme or Episteme, depending who you talk to. Back in 2019. And I only actually found out about it in about 2021, when a member of the reading group I run will mention, oh, you know, you're cited in this paper. Have you read it? You sure are. And I was going, I have somehow missed it. And then I read it and went, hmm.
00:03:15
Speaker
That's definitely a paper. It's definitely a paper published in an academic journal of some repute. And I take exception to the characterization of some of the particularists in this paper, although not necessarily the characterization of my view, except maybe I do.
00:03:34
Speaker
Okay, well, I think perhaps then we'd better play one of those wacky little chimes to make everything official and proper-like, and then start talking about the paper properly. I think I'd play a sensible chime. Please do. Sensible chime for a sensible podcast. Welcome to Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre.
00:03:57
Speaker
Sensible time, for a sensible time, would have rhymed. And also would have rhymed with rhyme. I'm just saying. Blime? I have notes, that's all. Grimes. Grimes. Right, so we are talking about, as you say, the paper called Conspiracy Theories and Religion, colon, reframing conspiracy theories as blix. I wish you wouldn't pronounce it that way. It's the only way I know. And this is by Glenn Y.
00:04:22
Speaker
Bizielle? Bizalel, I'm not quite sure. I apologize to the good Dr. Professor. I also don't actually know their specific title, but whatever they are. Yeah. Popishes, we say, in Epstein back in 2019, and it's my turn to read the abstract. It certainly is. Go. Go now.
00:04:39
Speaker
Conspiracy theories have largely been framed by the academy as a stigmatized form of knowledge. Yet recent scholarship has included calls to take conspiracy theories more seriously as an area of study with a desire to judge them on their own merits rather than an a priori dismissal of them as a class of explanation.
00:05:00
Speaker
This paper argues that the debates within the philosophy of religion, long overlooked by scholars of conspiracy theories, can help sow the seeds for re-examining our understanding of conspiracy theories in a more balanced and nuanced way.
00:05:15
Speaker
The nature of religious belief is elemental to understanding the epistemological foundations of the conspiracy theorising worldview amidst what we may call conspiratorial ambiguity. Specifically, RM Hare's concept of blix, which are unfalsifiable but meaningful worldviews, offers a way forward to reframe our approach towards the theory of conspiracy theories.
00:05:42
Speaker
So that blix are unfalsifiable but meaningful worldviews. Just hold on to that, because it's going to be a while before it comes up again. And then it's going to come up a lot. I don't know if that definition actually comes up during the paper. I think it does. It might briefly. But they don't commit to the definition in the actual practical working through of the argument, as we are about to see.
00:06:10
Speaker
That begins with an introduction, how like them. I don't have anything else this person's written, but I'm assuming it's characteristic. It says, ever since the Tower of Babel, and I'm cutting out a little bit of biblical text here, the links between religion and conspiracy theories have been obvious, though really commented upon. Although the Academy has long studied the worldview of the former, the attention of scholars on the outlook of the latter has gained momentum only recently.
00:06:35
Speaker
Further still, the comparisons and contrasts between religion and conspiracy theorists are only just beginning to emerge, and then cites Keely Barkin, Robertson, Dyrin Dahl, and others.
Rational Justification in Religion vs. Conspiracy Theories
00:06:45
Speaker
Ever since the Tower of Babel, a location in the world that never actually existed,
00:06:51
Speaker
the links between religion and conspiracy theories have been obvious. Like I said, this paper, I don't know who this person is, but I'm assuming philosophy of religion is possibly their main area, because there's a lot of scripture in this paper. I might have chopped out more than I should have then. I think it made more sense. But anyway.
00:07:08
Speaker
It does. I want to say in this section, I think actually the next section afterwards, and maybe the one after that as well, does a lot of setting out of what's come before and the state of things in general. So this feeling bit, it's all about the fact that academia in general has, in general, not just philosophy, has treated conspiracy theories as irrational, much like they've treated religion.
00:07:33
Speaker
Now, I agree with the first part. It turns out that most scholars, apart from the particulars, treat conspiracy theories as prima facie, irrational, or unlikely to believe. I don't think that's true with religious belief. I mean, it might be the case in philosophy,
00:07:51
Speaker
that the consensus is that atheism is a more sensible belief system to have. But I don't know that's true in the wider academic world. Well, I wouldn't have a clue myself. Because as someone who reads quite a lot of social science on conspiracy theories, it's actually fascinating how far social scientists, particularly social psychologists, go
00:08:17
Speaker
to avoid even mentioning religious belief when talking about conspiracy beliefs. So they will draw attention that there are similarities between paranormal beliefs, for example, and conspiracy beliefs, and they'll draw comparisons between cultic beliefs and conspiracy beliefs,
00:08:39
Speaker
And yet no one ever really talks about religious beliefs and applies the same lens of analysis they do to conspiracy theories to religious beliefs. Almost as if people are going out of their way to go, well religious beliefs are beliefs held by sensible centrists in our society and many sensible people, including other social scientists,
00:09:00
Speaker
have religious beliefs so obviously those are normal and sensible beliefs unlike those wacky conspiracy theory beliefs which might resemble some of those religious beliefs but of course we know that religious beliefs are normal and conspiracy theories are bad well certainly this paper is seeking to um to change that attitude but i mean right from the start it does say that while in general conspiracy theories have been treated as irrational not all of academia
00:09:25
Speaker
saying, indeed, the recent spate of interest in conspiracy theories has been characterized by scholars wishing to take them seriously as an area of study and a desire to judge them on their own merits, rather than an a priori dismissal of them as a class of explanation. See, for example, Dentist 2018.
Challenges in Academic Comparisons
00:09:40
Speaker
That's in 2018. I published a lot of papers in 2018. You sure did. Joe Yusinski complained about it recently because he has written a paper which cites some of my work and he's going, just tracking which papers, because you have to do 2018a, 2018b, in my case 2018d, he said just tracking which citation is the right one. Painful, he's going, Joe, you should use a citation manager, it would make your life a lot easier.
00:10:06
Speaker
That's why I recommend bibdesk, the citation manager which is free for your LaTeX workflow. We're not being paid to advertise this, I'm just doing it out of the kindness of my own heart. What a hero. So the introduction goes on to basically say that work on philosophy of religion could be applied to the philosophy of conspiracy theories.
00:10:28
Speaker
saying, as I will detail below, Popper's work on falsification and the problem of demarcation inspired debate among philosophers of religion about the nature of religious belief, most notably a celebrated symposium in 1950 where Anthony Flew, R.M. Here and Basil Mitchell offered their understanding of religious beliefs through the use of parables.
00:10:49
Speaker
I argue that their debate, still overlooked by scholars on conspiracy theories, is elemental to understanding the epistemological foundations of the conspiracy theorising worldview amidst what we might call conspiratorial ambiguity, with RMH's approach of Blix offering a way forward to reframe our approach towards the theory of conspiracy theories.
00:11:08
Speaker
Now, actually, it's become... I want to say running joke, but it isn't actually funny in any way, but certainly characteristic of the fact that philosophy papers all seem to start with their definitions, and it's the thing we have to go through first. This one has no definitions at all, which I think becomes a problem later once you need to read between the lines a little bit to work out exactly what they mean by things like conspiracy theories and exactly what they're thinking of when they're talking about conspiracy theories.
00:11:36
Speaker
throughout the paper that bi-conspiracy theories are either irrational, but meaningful beliefs, or a-rational, but meaningful beliefs. So they're denying the notion that there's any kind of meaning to a conspiracy theory, rather a conspiracy theory presents you with an idea of someone's worldview. And as I'm going to say later on in the discussion, I don't think they're talking about conspiracy theories at all,
00:12:02
Speaker
I think they're talking about conspiratorial mindset or conspiracy beliefs, whilst the particularists are talking about the content of the theories and going, is it warranted to believe the theories given the propositional content within, looking at evidence, appeals to expertise, and the like.
00:12:20
Speaker
Beziel is really looking at conspiratorial mindsets, which is a different kind of debate. But this takes us on to section two, religious and conspiracy theorist worldviews. And yes, worldview seems to be the word that comes up an awful lot in this.
00:12:36
Speaker
Since his just as followers of a religion are part of a tradition and practice, so too are conspiracy theorists participating in what Johann Byford has called a tradition of explanation cited in Pat Stokes' 2018 paper. And it is this worldview that needs a greater understanding.
00:12:53
Speaker
and having gone through what they take to be the conspiracy theorist worldview. I've skipped through these sections fairly quickly because, as I said, there is a lot of summary and a lot of sort of overviews and a lot of citations of papers that we've looked at before.
00:13:09
Speaker
But I had to pull out one piece where, having talked about the conspiracy theorists' worldview, they say, I therefore take issue with M.R.X. Dentist characterisation of generalists. Oh, sorry, I should say before this. It's all one of the things referred to as the Bunting and Taylor paper introducing the concept of generalists and particularists. It says, I therefore take issue with M.R.X. Dentist characterisation of generalists as viewing conspiracy theories as typically irrational. Again, paper 2018.
00:13:37
Speaker
A. With particularists willing to judge specific conspiracies as rational, depending on the evidence. Rather, drawing on the rich literature and the philosophy of religion, I concur with Malcolm that...
00:13:55
Speaker
That is the misunderstanding. It is like the idea that we're not justified in relying on memory until memory has been proven reliable. I'm not sure who Malcolm is in this. He was in the middle, Joshua. He was in the middle. And also in Jurassic Park. Quite clever. Really?
00:14:11
Speaker
Now, this actually does point toward the big debate that's gone on in the philosophy of religion. Because you get people say, like Kant, who's of the opinion that you need to give a rational basis for religious belief. So it goes for an a priori notion of, you know, we can show that the principle of charity as ascribed to the works of Jesus Christ is actually a kind of logical axiom that ends up being the kind of golden rule, etc, etc.
00:14:39
Speaker
And then there's been a movement in the 20th century, and I guess moving into the 21st century to go towards a more mystical understanding of religious belief by going this, this seeking of rational basises for religious belief kind of ignores the special character of religious belief.
00:14:58
Speaker
So I'm not necessarily against the idea of exploring these, we might say, different standpoints on exactly where religious belief stands, but it is interesting that they are going with the notion of, you know, there's something either
00:15:14
Speaker
Irrational but meaningful or a rational but meaningful to religious belief and thus if there's a comparison between religious belief and conspiracy beliefs not conspiracy theories here, but conspiracy beliefs then
00:15:29
Speaker
It might be the case that conspiracy beliefs are of a similar irrational or irrational belief, which is still meaningful. And I don't think they do enough to actually make that claim that the similarities are so close that the lesson we learn from one must apply to the other because the debate in the philosophy of religion is still going on as to whether we need a rational basis for religious belief or not.
00:15:58
Speaker
So you might end up being, well, the similarities are important, but it also might be the case. You still need irrational basis for
Differentiating Conspiracy Theories and Beliefs
00:16:04
Speaker
those beliefs. Yes, so it refers to conspiracy theories as groundless or irrational. Well, groundless is often necessarily the same as irrational.
00:16:15
Speaker
not conspiracy theories. They say the groundlessness of the conspiracy theorising worldview means that as an epistemological reading of society it requires no rational justification. Indeed framing the debate in this rational versus non-rational context misses the essence of what conspiracy theories are and why people hold them although again
00:16:37
Speaker
specifically defined what conspiracy theories are. Although individual conspiracy theories may well be assessed on their particular merits, conspiracy theories as a general disposition or worldview should be understood as a different category.
00:16:50
Speaker
And I don't necessarily disagree with that last sentence as long as it reads, although individual conspiracy theories may well be assessed on their particular merits, conspiracy beliefs as a general disposition or set of worldviews should be understand as a different category.
00:17:11
Speaker
Because I'm not against the idea of saying, look, there are certain people with conspiracy mindsets or conspiracy beliefs that make them see conspiracy theories or, sorry, the existence of conspiracies where maybe conspiracies don't exist. And we can do analyses into what's causing that, whether it's a psychological issue, whether it's a bad set of priors, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But they're not making that right distinction there.
00:17:36
Speaker
distinguishing between conspiracy theories with propositional content and conspiracy beliefs as kind of mindsets or worldviews. They're saying, oh, we should treat conspiracy theories as a worldview, but that's not what the debate between generalists and particulars is about. Yes, so it goes on to flesh out this idea of a conspiracy theorising worldview. It appeals to Barkan, is it Michael Barkan?
00:18:03
Speaker
It's either Michel or Michael Bakken. Appeals to Bakken to claim that the conspiracy theorising worldview involves three key features. The belief that nothing happens by accident, nothing is as it seems, and that everything is connected. And goes on to say it's a truism that Bakken's three-part definition is typical of the monotheistic religious mindset. At which point I say no.
00:18:29
Speaker
because I don't think that monotheists are of the belief that nothing happens by accident. There are lots of monotheists who go, look, some things are under the guiding hand of God and some things are not. And this
00:18:44
Speaker
This makes me think of John Bishop, our old philosophy of religion lecturer, and he used to have this big thing about how almost all of the philosophy of religion literature, which deals with proofs for the existence of God, concern Omni-God. So you're all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving God, the Omni-characterism of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence.
00:19:09
Speaker
And he points out that actually most theists don't believe in Omni-God. If you actually ask people about what they think God is, they do not describe Omni-God. They tend to have at least one or two of the Omni features, but not all three. Or if they do hold all three, you can prod them and they'll be willing to give up on, say, one of them. And usually they give up on omniscience, the idea that God can't know everything because it makes free will kind of illusory.
00:19:39
Speaker
And I think they're doing the same. He's doing the same thing here. He's going, Oh, you know, monotheistic belief has these particular characteristics. Okay, so yeah, but most monotheists are going to disagree with you there, because most monotheists will say that some things do happen by accident.
00:19:55
Speaker
Now this is one of the points where there's a whole bunch of scripture. So many Bible verses. I think this is the bit that actually quotes from the Bible and the Quran and something else. I think it's sort of trying to be a bit more broad in its discussion of... Ecumenical I believe is the term Joshua. Ecumenical. But essentially a lot of this paper, a lot of the section
00:20:14
Speaker
is based around the idea that we was trying to show that conspiracy beliefs are like religious beliefs in significant ways. And as I was getting to this part, it was when it started to occur to me that we haven't, hasn't specifically said what, how they're defining a conspiracy theory. And by talking about the groundlessness
00:20:34
Speaker
It certainly seems like, very much seems like they're not using the sort of definition that, say, you would use. The idea of a conspiracy theory is simply any theory that cites a conspiracy as a salient cause. Because I don't see, you know, as we would often say, even the official version of 9-11 is a conspiracy theory. But according to what they're talking about, that doesn't seem like something that would qualify.
00:21:01
Speaker
It certainly doesn't think it has the qualities that they've discussed so far when talking about conspiracy theories. And indeed, it seems that what they're talking about here is Popper's conspiracy theory of society. Because Popper does get cited a bit here. Because Popper, with his conspiracy theory of society, is the idea that there are some people out there who believe that conspiracies are behind everything. And, as Charles Picton argues in the very first paper
00:21:30
Speaker
we ever covered in this series. Popper revisited or what is wrong with conspiracy theories question mark. He points out that poppers arguing against a misrepresentation of what people actually believe. Conspiracy theorists do not believe that everything is the result of conspiracies and background. What they believe is that there's at least one conspiracy which is a salient cause of the event they are concerned with.
00:21:56
Speaker
Whereas, when this paper talks about conspiracy theories, it's often, it's again, talking about this mindset, this worldview and the idea that people adopt conspiracy theories for psychological reasons because they agree with the way they think the world works or have you, certainly doesn't talk in any way about evidence about people who might believe that a conspiracy theory is true because they believe the evidence points towards it or something like that.
00:22:25
Speaker
It does point out one difference between conspiracy beliefs and religious beliefs, saying, which sounds fair.
00:22:49
Speaker
Yeah, I mean that's my complaint about the social science work which headset the similarities between religious belief and conspiracy belief and then goes, well you know, religious beliefs are normal so we're not going to interrogate those.
00:23:05
Speaker
But conspiracy belief? Oh, so weird. So, so weird. To believe that people might be scheming behind your back. Who would even countenance that thought? Yes. God would. Well, obviously, but apart from that. No, but it...
00:23:20
Speaker
It goes on to talk more about how conspiracy theorists work and continues to make me suspicious about the kind of definition that they're using when it says things like, I'm saying it referring to the paper, not the author as an object. Maybe I should say they. They say, just like followers of religion seeking to make sense of divine mysteries, David G. Robertson, 2017, points out... Good friend of mine!
00:23:41
Speaker
points out that conspiracy theorists have
00:24:11
Speaker
intuition, although a fair few that are.
Unconventional Evidence and Synchronicity
00:24:14
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, for example, David Icke has a lot of channel information of his conspiracy theories. So David's point is right. There are some conspiracy theorists out there who are relying on
00:24:27
Speaker
evidence that's not typically accepted as normal by, I'll put in the scare quotes here, and the video reviewers can see this, ordinary epistemic agent. And of course, there's a big debate and standpoint of epistemology about exactly how we work out who an ordinary epistemic agent is, which is normally a white man, probably about 40 years, and Josh, you're an ordinary epistemic agent. Congratulations.
00:24:54
Speaker
But yeah, as he points out, there are lots and lots of examples of cases where people use different types of evidence. David, like, famously believes that synchronicity shows that a belief is justified and true. If he has an idea and he finds that idea in a book, a TV program, or a movie within some amount of time of having that idea, and there's some degree of similarity, then the idea must be true.
00:25:22
Speaker
However, you just used the word some. I did. That's not what they said. Not included in here. You said some conspiracy theorists, whereas this one just says conspiracy theorists as a category, which again makes the whole... I mean, they've got the weasel word of Heather propensity. Some of them do.
00:25:42
Speaker
Yeah, it goes on to talk a fair bit about Popper and falsification and that sort of stuff, and then talks about Keeley's response. Was this his first paper we looked at or his second? Yeah, so all of conspiracy theories. And the response to...
00:25:57
Speaker
the claim that conspiracy theories are unfalsifiable and which as we've seen before and Brian sort of pointed out that it's not unfalsifiability isn't as much a problem for conspiracy theories as it is for say scientific theories because part of a conspiracy theory is the idea that the people behind it will be actively trying to stop you from finding out about it. Which is not the case in other areas. I do feel they do Brian a bit dirty here.
00:26:26
Speaker
They kind of make him appear to be the all-conspiracy theories are unwarranted guy when he's not. Its mature conspiracy theories are unwarranted for the reasons of there isn't enough evidence to believe them at a given time.
00:26:43
Speaker
Yeah, the bits of Brian that are quoted seemed a little bit non-representative of the paper as a whole, and it sort of took some bits that seemed to be kind of out of context, where Brian would sort of... It made it sound like Brian was saying, yes, conspiracy theories are all unfalsifiable, but that's okay, whereas his point was a bit more focused than that.
00:27:03
Speaker
And so this section ends, finishes up by saying by revisiting the conspiracy theorising worldview. Worldview. Worldview. This study seeks to reframe our understanding of conspiracies as a competing blick that makes sense of the word in contest with other blicks, still having not really defined the word blick in the main body of the paper unless I missed it.
00:27:23
Speaker
No, no. And indeed, the next section, the explorers, the garden and the celestial city, is going to get us closer to Blix, but not quite. Not quite, not quite. Section three, I kind of skipped over quite quickly, a lot of parables, a lot of parables in this section.
00:27:42
Speaker
It starts with Anthony Flew's gardener parable, which if you've looked into philosophy of religion before, you've possibly come across the idea, the invisible gardener, the idea that two people come upon a section of ground and one person claims it's obviously tented by a gardener and the other person says, well, where are they? And he says, oh, he's an invisible gardener who's invisible and inaudible and you
00:28:09
Speaker
can never see them actually doing anything or any actual effect. It gets to the point where the opponent says, well, hang on, what's the difference between an invisible, inaudible, intangible, completely undetectable gardener and no gardener at all, which was meant to be an analogy with religion. So I mean, people say, well, you're God, we can't see God or observe direct feel, touch or smell God.
00:28:36
Speaker
So what's the difference between that and there being no God at all? And that's inspired a bunch of debate in the area of religion. I can't remember, was flu a theist or an atheist? It's been too long. Yeah, it has been too long as well. I remember studying this in my MA. But my MA also was when I was at university, when beer was cheap.
00:28:57
Speaker
That's all I'm going to say. Now it is interesting that if we're using this as now an analogy for conspiracy theorists, that we know conspiracies have occurred. Yeah, I mean you might go, well they're not occurring now, but we have known they have occurred.
00:29:14
Speaker
whilst the whole problem with the gardener parable is that we've got no evidence for intangible gardeners, which is why you end up going, well, you know, what's the difference between an intangible gardener and there being no gardener? I am talking about God!
00:29:32
Speaker
Whilst in the conspiracy case, case of, you know, I mean, this could be the result of a conspiracy. Oh, but conspirators don't, no one believes that. People know conspirators have existed. You might try and frame an argument saying that conspiracies don't go on now, but you still have the historical precedent of saying there have been conspirators in the past. So there's an important disanalogy between the intangible gardener and the conspiracy conspirator that you suspect is behind some result.
00:30:02
Speaker
And so it goes on, it doesn't seem sympathetic to flu's particular peril. There's another, the peril of the celestial city, which involves two travelers walking along a road, one of which whom thinks it leads to this celestial city and the other whom thinks it leads nowhere, but it's the only road, the only road that they can be walking down and the expectations for what's around the corner, despite the fact that they're both doing exactly the same thing. But the point is that it all finishes up by saying,
00:30:30
Speaker
We may move away from- Josh, can I just put a correction here? What they should have said was, we may fly away from flu's conclusions. They really missed a trick. They could have. Yeah. Oh well. Bidden to say they say we may move away from flu's conclusions and suggest that so too history has shown us that events are conspiratorially ambiguous. This is not only to say that history is interpreted in different ways from a variety of worldviews and perspectives, but that we should concede that sometimes one may never really find out what the truth is.
00:30:59
Speaker
As he himself described religious truths as beyond human capability, to see it as it fully is, so too does Ferguson in 2017, himself a critic of conspiracy theories, can see that historians studying secret networks and conspiracies struggle with the problem that networks really maintain readily accessible archives, and so the gatekeepers of truth may well hamper our ability to get to the truth. In both matters of religion and conspiracy, therefore, we can see an epistemic distance.
00:31:23
Speaker
as HEC 27, 2007 calls it, that separates us from the truth we are seeking. Which, again, in the present day, if you're talking about something where a conspiracy may be behind it or may not, then yes, we might not know. And there are historical events that may have been the result of a conspiracy or may have been chance or cock up or what have you, or may not, and maybe we'll never know. But there are events that we know for damn sure were caused by conspiracy theories as well. Which is why we have to assume
00:31:52
Speaker
The operating definition of a conspiracy theory is, it's not true. Or at least it's not, it's not evidence or something. Yeah, and finishes up by saying, thus when Popper and others dismiss conspiracy theorists as irrational, it may be said that they fail to realise that conspiracy theories do not share the grammar of positivists in the way that they later talk about matters of fact.
00:32:16
Speaker
As Wittgenstein put it, they play a different language game, which philosophers would do well to examine from within the context in which they derive their meaning. It is in this spirit that we may move on to here's own a parable of lunatic, where he coins the term blick, which I argue captures the essence of the conspiracy theorizing world view. World view. World view. World view. Yes. I hiccuped when I said it. That's the effect it had on me.
00:32:40
Speaker
So that takes us to section 4. Now, like I say, the word blick has only come up just a couple of times so far in the first three sections out of five. In this section it comes up a lot. It seems like every second word is blick. This section has so many blicks it should call itself hans.
00:33:00
Speaker
Bit of UN Weapon Inspector humor here for you. I know our audience likes a reference to a UN Weapon Inspector for the early 2000s. You can invade my Iraq, baby. That's what they deliver. You can invade my Iraq. Yes. And so it talks about...
00:33:17
Speaker
It gets into the idea of blix and the idea... And this is where the definition comes up again. That different people can see the world differently, essentially. The lunatic they talk about is a person who, you know, appears to have a world view completely different to everyone else's, but completely compelling and consistent to the end. Just like Donald J. Trump. Who will be talking about in the patron bonus episode? Quite a bit. Because he's got...
00:33:43
Speaker
he's got a world view and that world view is really quite interesting this week. It certainly is. But so this one it says, so these differing world views of the protagonist are blix, meaningful if unfalsifiable beliefs about the world around us.
00:33:58
Speaker
They are the mental spectacles, to borrow Charles Dickens' phrase in The El Curiosity Shop, through which we view the world around us, framing what we see and how to interpret the phenomena we witness. Such blix are therefore prescriptive in nature, as the holder minds very much about what goes on in the garden in which I find myself, cited in Pecorino 2001, impacting one's view on the reliability of the gatekeepers of knowledge and the evidence they produce.
00:34:22
Speaker
Now, this is where I start to go, don't quite understand blix, because they're meaningful if unfalsifiable beliefs about the world. But they're also prescriptive in nature. They impact one's view on the reliability of the gatekeepers of knowledge.
00:34:42
Speaker
Which means that they sound meaningful, but also they sound like they should be falsifiable. Because they weigh on evidence. If they weigh on evidence, surely that means counterweight might also affect your worldview. Yeah, do they weigh on evidence or do they weigh on what you will accept as evidence or what you'll accept as reliable?
00:35:06
Speaker
I mean, maybe, but I'm just never entirely sure what blix are according to the account in this paper. Yes, what says crucially as here goes on to observe, one cannot counter a blick, an unfalsifiable belief about the world, with facts or evidence.
Understanding 'Blicks' and Evidence Interpretation
00:35:22
Speaker
And yet they still weigh on your appreciation of facts.
00:35:25
Speaker
evidence. I know the impression I got was basically the meme of the Big Lamowski meme of the yeah well you know that's just like your opinion man that kind of felt to me like we what you were getting at with Blix it's like yeah you believe this and I believe that and we can't change either of our minds about that it's just just the way it is man
00:35:48
Speaker
Yeah, and this is my problem with the way that they go through this view, which is they're talking about conspiracy theories, which are theories with propositional content, when actually what they're talking about are conspiracy mindsets or worldviews. So they're assuming conspiracism. The notion of there being a conspiracy mindset is a kind of default view, which informs all conspiracy theories. What you should be doing
00:36:18
Speaker
at least in my educated opinion, going, well, look, there are conspiracy theories and there are some people with conspiracy mindsets. And we can talk about the conspiracy mindset people, the people with those conspiracy beliefs. And we can separate that from is a particular conspiracy theory warranted or unwarranted?
00:36:40
Speaker
Because there's a huge debate going on there as to, once again, if official theories actually count as conspiracy theories, depending on what your view of conspiracy theory as a concept is. And it's going to be separate from the debate about conspiracy mindsets or conspiracy beliefs.
00:36:57
Speaker
So the paper meanwhile goes on to say, blix frame how we see the world and without a blick there can be no explanation for it is by our blix that we decide what is and what is not an explanation. This is true whether we have a blick that God exists or does not exist or indeed if we have a conspiracy theorizing worldview or not. And then goes on to a bit of discussion about between David Coady and Brian Keeley about how it's difficult
00:37:23
Speaker
to distinguish between warranted and unwarranted. There's a whole debate about the demarcation problem with working out whether a conspiracy theory is good or bad, because as Brian says, there's no mark of the incredible that tells you upon first glance whether a conspiracy theory is warranted or unwarranted. You need to actually look at the evidence. So when
00:37:47
Speaker
David and Brian are talking about the difficulty of the label conspiracy theory and the fact that people apply an analysis of conspiracy theory before investigation of whether theory is, you know, warranted or unwarranted. There's a worldview thing that's going on there, which is that people have a worldview as to whether they think the things labeled as conspiracy theories are good or bad.
00:38:12
Speaker
But they're still having a discussion about the demarcation problem of once you start analysing conspiracy theories themselves, it's difficult to do without doing an actual analysis of the individual parts. At this point in the paper it started getting into Wittgenstein and I had to tap out to be honest, it was getting a little bit... I think I was suffering from blick poisoning at this stage, I'd been
00:38:36
Speaker
I mean, you are looking quite pale. I always do. But yes, this section kind of lost me a little bit. When we did conspiracy theory, truth or language game, that had a lot of Wittgenstein in it. And you seem to have more stomach for Wittgenstein in back when we looked at that paper. I don't remember that. Maybe I might be suffering from a kind of amnesia due to too much Wittgenstein.
00:39:03
Speaker
But that could well be it. The paper, though, does say, although we may not go so far to suggest that conspiracies regulate all of the conspiracy theorists' life, as religion does for the believer, nevertheless the conspiracy theorising worldview creates a different, quote, form of life and serves a real function for him, whether in terms of his politics, relationships and approach to authority. A person's blick shapes his interpretation of the world and the events occurring within it. For a paper published in 2018, why that pronoun?
00:39:32
Speaker
I don't know. I've got to pick one. Well, you don't, you can alternate. But anyway, and basically it suggests that there's nothing we can do to distinguish between good and bad worldviews, but does say that blix are not invitations to stop thinking, rather they sharpen our thoughts and help us recognize the paradigm in which we think.
00:39:57
Speaker
And there's the other thing which I find interesting about the Blick thing, because it's obviously a self-reflective state. You're not just in a Blick.
00:40:07
Speaker
You're aware. Well, at least you can be aware. You're in a blick. So, yes, I don't know. After saying the word blick more times than I think a person should, we get to the final section, which now I complain when people call the first section introduction and what have you, but this one, the final section is not called conclusion, it's called reflections. Which is a very religious way of doing it.
00:40:33
Speaker
It is, but also good on them for a bit of... for spicing things up a bit, giving us a bit of variety in the papers we look at. I approve. And the reflectory period for this paper is five. Good. That was refractory. Yes, it is. Okay, you're making a hilarious pun. We'll play on words.
00:40:50
Speaker
I'm so funny. I'm just hilarious. Yes. So, the Reflections section says, whether one believes that conspiracy theories are a result of crippled epistemologies, quoting Sunstein and Vermule, did they actually pass a law that every paper about the philosophy of conspiracy theories has to talk about Sunstein and Vermule? I think if you're a generalist, you have to cite them. Right.
00:41:14
Speaker
And bad thinking, Kasam, 2015. Or, quite the reverse, that it is intellectually vicious not to be a conspiracy
Conspiracies as Competing Worldviews
00:41:22
Speaker
theorist. That's Charles Picton. In 2017, such a debate is played out on the wrong plane as it misses the underlying blick or foundational knowledge which shapes a person's worldview surrounding conspiracies, whether as theoriser or sceptic.
00:41:35
Speaker
To be sure, Pigdon's ecumenical understanding of conspiracy theories that there is nothing inherently suspect about conspiracy theories as such, Pigdon 2017, is more helpful in showing the bankruptcy of a principled scepticism about conspiracy theories per se, Pigdon again. Nevertheless, even he is locked into the secondary, particularist debate over whether conspiracy theories are a result of epistemic vice or virtue, concluding that the virtuous policy is to proportion belief to the evidence.
00:42:02
Speaker
And that's because they're not recognising that Charles is not talking about worldviews. No. Charles is talking about particular conspiracy theories. So it finishes up by saying, to understand religious and conspiratorial worldviews, therefore, we must discuss them at the level of our blix, our intuitions, rather than focus on whether conspiracy theorises are bad thinkers or not.
00:42:26
Speaker
As Hate 2012 concludes, intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. That is why debates between skeptics and believers about the veracity of conspiracies or religious beliefs are merely so much labour and effort lost in the words of Kant. Whether you take part in such a discussion or witness it being played out on Twitter or among friends, it is clear that reasons are the tale wagged by the intuitive dog.
00:42:48
Speaker
And she was her dog. Yes. And finally, finishes up at the end by saying, in this vein, the very term blick is a catch-all and neutral neologism that captures people's unfalsifiable but meaningful beliefs, meets Cody's challenge to come up with a single expression to cover the differing approaches towards conspiracy theories, irrational or not. This will not only help depoliticise the debate, but also shift the focus towards understanding the differing worldviews surrounding conspiracy theories. World views.
00:43:15
Speaker
And the thing is, I don't necessarily disagree with aspects of the conclusion. I think it's useful to talk about worldviews because I think there are some people who are prone to conspiracy beliefs because they have a worldview where they see conspiracies, where conspiracies are not. In the same respect, I think there are some people, and these are going to be in terms of blix, who,
00:43:44
Speaker
claim not to see conspiracies where they ought to be seeing them. So, for example, the kind of people like Christopher Hitchens, who was really, really adamant despite the evidence that the American government and the UK government had a legitimate reason for the invasion of Iraq due to those weapons of mass destruction. He could not see the conspiracy in front of his eyes. So it cuts both ways.
00:44:09
Speaker
And so I think there is something to be said about making a demarcation between talking about the warrant of conspiracy theories and talking about conspiracy beliefs and being really clear when we're talking about worldviews versus establishing the warrant of particular theories. I think that's a project which we ought to have discussions about. I just think they're conflating them.
00:44:36
Speaker
Yeah, like, I don't know, the tone I got from most of the paper was that it was kind of saying conspiracy theories are like religious beliefs. And people, philosophers, religion, other religious people have put a lot of effort into
00:44:53
Speaker
justifying and making religious beliefs acceptable epistemologically kosher, if there is such a thing. And so that means if they are the same, then we could use those religious ones on conspiracy theories, all of which assumes you think positively of religious beliefs. I think to an atheist argument saying that religious beliefs are actually good
00:45:18
Speaker
Are not convincing and therefore would be no more convincing if you are applying similar things to conspiracy theories and Yeah, I mean it doesn't like you say it's it's all about it seems claims to be talking about conspiracy theories But is really only talking about world views and so it misses out facts like
00:45:37
Speaker
No, it doesn't deny that conspiracy theories have occurred, but as it talks about, it mentions Watergate in the paper, it mentions Iran-Contra, but it never really addresses the fact that there are conspiracies that have been proven true by evidence, and that it's possible to prove a conspiracy theory true by appealing to evidence.
00:45:58
Speaker
I mean, maybe they'd say, you know, certain people's blix are such that they're never going to accept certain things or what have you, but taking a particular viewpoint, that's kind of okay anyway. You don't have to have a universal view on whether conspiracy theories are all irrational or irrational. Yeah, you just need to say, look, if you're given evidence for a conspiracy theory and you've got no pre-existing reason to think the conspiracy theory is bad, you need to investigate it.
00:46:27
Speaker
But maybe that's just your blick. Maybe it's our blick. That's the cat's blick. The rattling you're hearing there is the cat who's just wandered in from the bedroom. Just decided to start shaking its bell. Is this causing as much issue as possible? Maybe that's what we need, because we're at the end of the paper. Maybe we need to have your cat to come in and announce.
00:46:50
Speaker
announced the end of the podcast proper by ringing its bell. Yep, that sounds official to me. So it must be the end of the episode. So yeah, it's like a different paper. I get different, different from what I'm used to reading in this series, I guess. Didn't find it super convincing, but yes, has some interesting ideas. Says the word Blick a lot. Yeah, as I say, talking about conspiracy beliefs versus conspiracy theories and talking about that distinction, useful.
00:47:19
Speaker
It doesn't quite do it. At the same time, it's interesting. I'm not saying interesting. Good. I'm just saying it's interesting. So, that is all for this episode. We of course have to go off and record a bonus episode that only our patrons, only those chosen few... Well, keep in check to point out that last week you actually made the Patreon episode on Podbean Public.
00:47:48
Speaker
And then Philip got in contact to say, am I meant to see that? So I logged back in and I made it patron only. I thought I checked that. Oh, well, there we go. So sometimes if you're lucky, I've done the same. I've uploaded an episode. The trick is if you click
00:48:08
Speaker
patron before the upload is finished. Sometimes it clicks back when the upload is finished to free. Always wait for the upload to finish because I've done it multiple times. I shall have to double check. That's how Drew got to listen to so many patron bonus episodes in the past. But now, now he pays us the good money for the piss poor content.
00:48:33
Speaker
And what piss-poor content do we have for you this week? We've got the master of the piss tapes himself, Donald Trump. We've got a film update where a film character turns out to be an agent for the KGB. We've got bombs disguised as USB sticks in Ecuador.
00:48:52
Speaker
Alex Jones apparently has been squirreling away money for a rainy day, an actual conspiracy about contrails, not cam trails. The ICC has an arrest warrant out for Puso, and possibly the best paragraph I've read in the Guardian of recent note about Stephen Seagal.
00:49:16
Speaker
Well, that's a high bar to pass. Indeed. So if you'd like to hear us talking about all of that in depth, and assuming that we don't cock up the settings this week when we upload the Patreon episode, you'll need to be a patron if you want to hear it. If you want to become a patron, go to patreon.com and search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy and you can just sign yourself up. Simple as that. It is. We never give you our contacts anymore. You can actually email the podcast that podcast can... no.
00:49:45
Speaker
Podcat, what's it gonna do? Isn't it in the actual outro?
00:49:49
Speaker
Oh, maybe it is. Maybe I should just shut my mouth. In the early days of the podcast, and actually that's a long time ago, we had two email addresses and we always gave out the wrong one. Because one of them we weren't checking and the other one we were, but always gave the wrong one. And that's why we ended up putting it in the outro so that we never get confused about the email ever again. I'm still confused.
00:50:16
Speaker
We also gave out Twitter stuff, but you're not on Twitter anymore. I'm not. I still am. Because that appears to be where the majority of people still are. Do you know that on Twitter anti-Semitism has gone up by 100% ever since Trump took charge? Not Trump. Musk. Musk sure has. I mean, he's the Trump of Twitter. He is the Trump of Twitter. There's no doubt about that. Anyway, monkey fluids is my name.
00:50:39
Speaker
On Twitter. And Monkey Fluids is his game. If you need Monkey Fluids, Josh has gallons of them just sitting in his garage, going off, needs to be sold. It needs to be sold now. Ana is so annoyed by the amount of Monkey Fluids you just store in that garage. And after the flooding, it's now flood-damaged Monkey Fluids, which some people say, she makes it better. It's got a more interesting kind of punches to it now.
00:51:09
Speaker
Also, Monkey Fluids is my name on YouTube. It's also my father's name. If you're to look on the Monkey Fluids YouTube channel, you might, might, maybe, but no promises.
00:51:23
Speaker
see this episode up as a video. So you could watch. And if you do, if the video is up, the cat does make an appearance. It does. So as you can see the cat, you can watch our fleshy mouth holes deliver the words. I prefer the time with the orifice. Yep, yep. You can actually see our orifices in action if that's the kind of thing you want.
00:51:44
Speaker
Yep. But that's it for this episode. So thank you for listening, patron or not, but thank you extra to the patrons. We'll see you next week. Probably. Goodbye. One of the lights has just gone out, so we know the episode has to go to an end. Go to an end? Yes. Go to an end. Co-em. The podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy stars Josh Addison and myself, Associate Professor M. R. X. Dantas.
00:52:13
Speaker
Our show's cons... sorry. Producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please do consider joining our Patreon. And remember, keep watching the skis.