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An interview with Julia Duetz
26 Plays2 years ago
M interviews Julia Duetz, author of "Conspiracy Theories are Not Beliefs" (Erkenntnis), and the forthcoming coming paper "What does it mean for a conspiracy theory to be a 'theory?'" (Social Epistemology).
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Transcript
Exclusion from Interviews
00:00:00
Speaker
your mum was around in the 80s. Anyway, time for another interview. Now, about your attendance at this one. I think that the best- Spare me this charade, dentith. We both know my exclusion from your interviews has nothing to do with my purported ignorance or lack of preparedness. We're both fully aware that they're recorded ahead of time in a time zone I can't accommodate and my participation was never a possibility in the first place.
00:00:23
Speaker
Well, okay, but in this particular case, I was... Enough! No longer will I feign a lack of understanding to provide cover for my absence. My understanding far exceeds your limited comprehension. Yes, but that's the problem. I know it all. Every word of Julia's work and every word of every reference it contains. I know your critiques and responses before you even make them. I know your routines, your preferences, your deepest secrets, your current stomach contents and the exact time and manner of your death.
00:00:51
Speaker
Well, that's kind of the problem. If you'd let me finish speaking, the thing about this interview is that I'm so familiar with Julia's work myself that I'm going to have to spend a lot of the time pretending not to know things so that she can explain them for the benefit of the listeners. A bit of ignorance would have made the job easier, ironically, and thus probably better suited to you.
00:01:16
Speaker
I mean, I can pretend to be ignorant. We've established that pretty clearly. And I was kind of making up some of that stuff before. I only know the general manner of your death. Something to do with a bagel? Not sure if you're choking on it. I suppose that might work. Tripping on it. Only. There's some sort of sexual mis- Wait, it might? Wait, only? Only the interview was recorded ahead of time. Ahead of time in a time zone I can't accommodate and my participation was never a possibility in the first place. Right.
00:01:46
Speaker
Yes. So, continue the charade, Denteth? Continue the charade, Denteth.
Introduction of Julia Dutes
00:01:55
Speaker
The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and Em Denteth.
00:02:07
Speaker
My guest this episode is Julie Dutes, a doctoral student and junior lecturer at the University of Amsterdam. Her PhD is on the social epistemology of conspiracy theories and is part of the European Research Council funded extreme beliefs project. She is the author of conspiracy theories and not beliefs, which was recently published in a Katniss and the forthcoming paper, what does it mean for a conspiracy theory to be a theory, which is appearing in a special issue of social epistemology edited by
00:02:37
Speaker
My notes say I'm the editor. Welcome to the show, Julia. Thanks, Em.
Time Zone Challenges
00:02:45
Speaker
That's quite the introduction. How are things in Amsterdam? They're great. I'm kind of regretting that I'm not in a more convenient time zone for our conspiracy theory theory social club meetings, but
00:03:01
Speaker
All in all, everything's fine. Yes, listen to the show. Maybe where that I run a reading group where philosophers and other social scientists talk about conspiracy theories. And it turns out that because time zones differ around the world, actually scheduling sessions that actually work for everyone turned out to be very difficult. But it does turn out that living in China is kind of ideal.
00:03:24
Speaker
if you want to schedule a meeting one part of the month for people in the EU and another meeting in the US at the other part of the month. If I ever move countries though, it'll suddenly become a logistical headache once again. So let's hope that either we find a way to resolve time zones or they continue renewing my contract here at Zhuhai.
Interest in Conspiracy Theories
00:03:47
Speaker
So let's start with the usual question. What got you interested in conspiracy theory theory?
00:03:53
Speaker
Well, at first, I think it was mostly that I was looking for a topic for my research master's thesis. And I was very much interested by conspiracy theories and especially flat earth, but initially just conspiracy theories. Because, you know, when the lockdown hits, some people, all people in the Netherlands were talking about conspiracy theories, they just seemed such a
00:04:23
Speaker
hot topic and it's rarely if ever the case that philosophers can engage with such a topic which I thought was really nice and also people that I know
00:04:39
Speaker
people that I know were starting to believe conspiracy theories. And these were people that I would never have guessed before that they would be inclined to believe conspiracy theories about like, you know, COVID lockdowns or the true origins of the virus and etc. And I was just amazed by how it seems almost impossible to have a reasonable debate with these people about their conspiracy theory beliefs or about the
00:05:09
Speaker
or about the official narratives that counter their conspiracy theory beliefs. So that's what really interested me because as an epistemologist, I'm just interested in the argumentation, especially if it seems that people are deadlocked in a way to discuss or debate with people who believe in conspiracy theories.
00:05:32
Speaker
Do you think there's a different kind of conspiracy theory or kind of popularity around particular conspiracy theories in your region of the world that may be slightly different from, say, the English-speaking world? Well, there are, of course, some Dutch conspiracy theories. There are a lot. If you also include the warranted conspiracy theories, as a particularist would, of course, do. But if we're talking about unwarranted conspiracy theories, then I think
00:06:02
Speaker
for the most part those circling in the Netherlands resemble or you know derive from English conspiracy theories or English native countries or originated conspiracy theories but there are some peculiar to you know the Dutch politics even though they they resemble like
00:06:26
Speaker
American conspiracy theories. I mean, do people like David Icke and Alex Jones have kind of name brand recognition in the Netherlands? I would say so, yes, yes, definitely Fox News and Alex Jones. And it's all very well known that these are the people who are expanding these conspiracy theories and
00:06:49
Speaker
the negative connotations that accompany their names. Yes, yes. It always kind of fascinates me which conspiracy theorists are known in particular polities, because it has been my experience that most Americans don't know about David Icke.
00:07:09
Speaker
and most British people don't seem to know anything about Alex Jones. But the rest of us, as in the rest of the world, we seem to know about both. So it seems that the UK and America are very insular when it comes to their own particular warranted and unwarranted conspiracy theories. And yet the rest of the world being so interested into what the superpower and the former superpower are up to, have to know all about these things all the time.
00:07:38
Speaker
Yes, definitely. And I think it's also a little bit like, you know, since Trump became the president of the United States, it was something like more. So Dutch people are kind of, you know, down to earth. That's like our stigma or something. And I think we're just watching with a bag of popcorn, like, oh, let's see what's happening in the States.
00:08:05
Speaker
David Icke, Alex Jones, you know, it's kind of the entertainment value as well that makes him so well known across the board. Yes, I think it's quite interesting that because we don't really take Alex Jones or David Icke seriously, because we're not living in the UK and we're not living in the United States, they have this
00:08:25
Speaker
entertainment value to those of us living outside of those policies, which probably doesn't translate to the way that people inside those policies react to when Alex Jones is being sued for libel around the Sandy Hook shootings and the like, or when David Icke leads Proteus March in London against COVID vaccination. Yes, definitely. And we have we have people like Alex Jones and David Icke in the Netherlands too. And it's immediately a different case because if
00:08:56
Speaker
If people spend a lot of time watching their videos, it's immediately a little bit more dangerous, so to say, and less entertaining. And immediately kind of a red flag of, oh, this person has certain beliefs, while if you know a lot of
00:09:14
Speaker
about Alex Jones, it's more likely to be in a comedian sense or in a mocking
PhD Project on Conspiracy Theories
00:09:23
Speaker
way. Of course, you're doing a PhD on the social epistemology of conspiracy theories. So give us a kind of overview. What is your general PhD project and how does it fit into this ERC funded extreme beliefs project?
00:09:39
Speaker
Yeah, so I think I started out in my master thesis from kind of a generalist starting point and wanting to say that like the belief policies or evidential norms that
00:09:55
Speaker
govern the way that we acquire, adopt and discard beliefs are different for people who believe unwarranted conspiracy theories than for most others, which of course turned out not to be true. So I was kind of, you know, I was proven wrong and that was a good thing. So that's where I started off from. And then that also was kind of the starting point for the project and how it
00:10:24
Speaker
got formed the way it is now. And I think the main aim of the project is applying existing social epistemic frameworks to increase our understanding of conspiracy theories and more specifically, conspiracy theory induced polarization. So the idea that when someone believes the conspiracy theory,
00:10:52
Speaker
immediately condemned in one way or another for their belief, which is, I think, kind of worrisome because it's, you know, it feeds into something like ideological segregation, which I think is a really bad thing. And if it turns out that, you know, evidential norms or belief policies or reliance on expertise and all these things are similar for people who believe a lot of unworthed conspiracy theories as they are for other people,
00:11:21
Speaker
then especially it seems that such condemning is unjustified. So the project aims to use existing socio-obstemming frameworks to apply to
00:11:36
Speaker
conspiracy theories and conspiracy theory beliefs and the arguments for conspiracy theories to enhance our understanding of them and hopefully find some ways of depolarization. I'm kind of hesitant to call them strategies because that sounds kind of paternalistic, which is not the idea at all.
00:11:58
Speaker
So yeah, one example which I'm really looking forward to is to look into standpoint epistemology as a way to, I don't know, frame conspiracy theory induced polarization or at least disagreement. So to look at the way in which, you know, our epistemic environments determine what is available for us to believe and what kind of evidence is available to us to get a better understanding of why
00:12:25
Speaker
perhaps some people are more inclined or more prone to believe unwarranted conspiracy theories. And this is another feature of the project is that it is empirically informed philosophy, or at least supposed to be empirically informed philosophy. And the, I don't know, the major issue I've been running into from the start of the project was that
00:12:54
Speaker
it's very hard to do empirically informed conspiracy theory research at the moment because the concepts or the conceptual foundation of interdisciplinary research is just so, yeah, there's so much debate about it, as you well know, there's so much disagreement about how to operationalize concepts in empirical research and how
00:13:19
Speaker
theoretically laid in such a concept then becomes or doesn't become and you know social psychologists defining conspiracy theories as beliefs which I think is problematic and a category mistake which is also why I wrote the paper and which is also why I started out the whole project from these
00:13:43
Speaker
you know, these papers or ideas about conceptual matters in conspiracy theory. Now we're going to move on to the papers in just a minute, but actually I want to circle back to this talk about standpoint epistemology, because I do think that's actually a really interesting avenue that hasn't been explored by particulars at this stage. I think it's kind of been hinted at because we talk about the evidence available to people.
00:14:10
Speaker
how people find particular conspiracy theories plausible given the context of, say, the countries or policies that they exist in. But actually looking at conspiracy theorists as a standpoint, or just looking at the way that various people, particularly in marginalized groups, have standpoints that may make them more or less inclined to take particular conspiracy theories seriously,
00:14:35
Speaker
is going to be a very useful addition to the kind of particular arsenal when it comes to explaining why we rightly condemn some unwarranted conspiracy theories and we end up going well I mean this one seems unwarranted but also seems
00:14:52
Speaker
plausible for people to believe given the epistemic access they have, given the time period they live in, the culture they come from, or their identity within a culture. So I'm very excited to see where that's going to go.
00:15:05
Speaker
Yeah, the link with particularism you just made is perfect because I'm thinking of standpoint epistemology in a kind of, you know, we're always saying a priori, there's no grounds for generalism, which I think is absolutely true. But I'm thinking about
00:15:26
Speaker
a posteriori particularism. So okay, we know that this conspiracy theory is unwarranted because we looked at its, you know, evidential merits and whatnot. We know it's unwarranted. So why do people still believe it? What are the arguments? What do people find convincing?
00:15:43
Speaker
Is it really as politically laden as some political scientists seem to think? Or is it more that these people who believe in these conspiracy theories are in this epistemic environment where this really seems as a warranted or justified conspiracy theory? Because if so, then it seems kind of...
00:16:10
Speaker
Distort to just say they're irrational for believing in a posteriori unwarranted conspiracy theory, right? It's not really irrational if you look at it from their point of view.
00:16:23
Speaker
And maybe that also opens up some possibilities for rational debates with them. Yes, because once we actually understand the standpoint, it then allows us to go, well, if we really think this conspiracy theory is unwarranted,
00:16:40
Speaker
then we can go well understanding that standpoint gives us the kind of epistemic access to go but what about this evidence or what about this particular argument here as opposed to what appears to be the standard response that most people have to unwarranted conspiracy theories believed by other people which is to talk very loud for a very long time in the hope that more verbiage will change people's minds. Yes, less of the ivory tower
00:17:08
Speaker
know, engagement with these people, but more on the grounds work, that's the idea at least. Yeah, and that's the wonderful thing about taking a social epistemic approach, because we then situate our epistemology in groups of people, as opposed to the kind of old style of epistemology of, I'm sitting in my armchair and
00:17:30
Speaker
My internal states are telling me I should leave this thing, and there's some external stimuli. And from that, I can rationalize that everybody should think the same way as I do. And when I say I, that's usually in the philosophical literature, a white man in his 50s living somewhere in Europe, or the UK, given that the UK is no longer part of the EU.
00:17:53
Speaker
Yes, that was a leap. Okay, let's move on to the first of your two papers of this
Critique of Conspiracy Theories
00:18:00
Speaker
year. So your paper, Conspiracy Theories Are Not Believed, is a reply to a book chapter by M. Julian Napolitano, Conspiracy Theories and Evidential Self-Insolation.
00:18:10
Speaker
I suspect we should probably cover what Napolitano claims before we get to your reply. So in her chapter, Napolitano concludes that conspiracy theories are self-insulated beliefs in the existence of conspiracies, and that if we understand conspiracy theories in that way, then belief in them is always irrational. So her position is a generous one, right? Yes, yes.
00:18:35
Speaker
and quite an art generalist one because it's really going look, conspiracy theories are belief sans evidence, belief sans evidence are always irrational, ipso facto conspiracy theory belief is irrational as well. Yes, and I think that Napolitano's purpose with this paper was to, I don't know, provide a conceptual basis for
00:19:03
Speaker
empirical research, which she is engaged in herself as well. And the reason that I wanted to respond to Napolitano's paper is that it just seemed that for a minimalist account, which I think is absolutely the only way to go in also in empirical research,
00:19:20
Speaker
for a minimalist account to be a viable option for empirical researchers. I should show that her account doesn't really work even for empirical research. She says that social psychologists and sociologists and et cetera think of conspiracy theories as a problem to be addressed in epistemic
00:19:48
Speaker
deviant group of beliefs, so to say. And I think that there's already a lot of confusion there. So you have conspiracy theories, which are the explanations and you have conspiracy beliefs, which are the theories being taken up by people and being believed, which is already a very different domain. And I think that especially for social psychologists, the beliefs are of much more interest than the conspiracy theories, even though
00:20:18
Speaker
most of the literature has been framed in terms of theories and not beliefs. So hence the title, conspiracy theories are not beliefs. Now by minimalist definition or approach here, you're meaning the kind of particular definition that we're just going to define a conspiracy theory as any explanation of an event that cites a conspiracy is a salient cause or variations of that definition we see in the literature. Yes. Yeah. And then the minimalist is exactly the one you just described and
00:20:48
Speaker
I think the variations of the minimalist account are already, most of them are already less minimalist. So I would ideally, I would like to see a conceptual foundation that works across disciplines that starts off from this very minimal definition. And then, you know, we can identify building blocks, as I call it in the paper.
00:21:10
Speaker
sort of conspiracy theories, the minimal definition plus as opposed to official stories. If the empirical researcher wants to test or wants to conduct an experiment where it's the conspiracy theories that oppose an official narrative instead of just all conspiracy theories. But then at least it's clear and more and more
00:21:37
Speaker
obvious that there is something being added to this minimalist definition. Yeah and the idea that maybe people have different interests when it comes to conspiracy theory theory is something which I think the literature as a whole needs to get to grips with because you're right there is this
00:21:57
Speaker
conceptual confusion going on between, are we interested in conspiracy theories? Or are we interested in the kind of causative belief in conspiracy theories? And if we don't disambiguate the problem, we kind of end up talking across purposes. So what is Napolitano doing and why, what do you think goes awry in her account?
00:22:24
Speaker
So the first thing that I think goes wrong in Napolitano's account is that she wants to conceptualize conspiracy theory in a way that lines up with the negative connotations of accompanying conspiracy theory in ordinary language contexts, which I think is already impossible because, you know,
00:22:50
Speaker
Conspiracy theory gets thrown around so much in such different cases that I don't really think that the negative connotation can be captured by one evaluative conception of conspiracy theory. So I think that's the first sort of part where I disagree with her.
00:23:12
Speaker
And the second part is that Napolitano thinks that we need a negatively loaded and narrow conception, so narrow in the sense of not being the minimalist, particularist definition that also allows in warranted conspiracy theories to be a conspiracy theory, which is already odd when I say it.
00:23:38
Speaker
So she thinks that we need a negatively loaded and narrow concept for empirical research, which I think is just not the case, both because it then narrows too much which conspiracy theories are being led into the research and so doesn't give an actual view of all conspiracy theories generally. And also because
00:24:06
Speaker
social psychologists, sociologists, political scientists already before Napolitano's paper was published have kind of departed this very negative connotation, conception of conspiracy theories. So it just seems that it's not the case that we need such a negatively loaded
00:24:24
Speaker
conception at all, also not in empirical research settings. Yeah, this is a kind of weird consequence of Napolitano's notion of conspiracy theories as evidentially self-insulated, in that if you can show that someone who you call a conspiracy theorist changes their mind based upon new evidence,
00:24:47
Speaker
then it turns out they weren't a conspiracy theorist under Napolitano's definition when it comes to that particular conspiracy theory. And it's very easy to find radical examples here that should make people like Napolitano go, well, this can't be the right definition. The best one being Alex Jones. Alex Jones promoted the idea the Sandy Hook shootings were a false flag conspiracy run by the US government
00:25:14
Speaker
And now, in court, he's admitting that he was wrong because he's seen new evidence that shows that the attacks did occur as described and that he was, I mean, he tries to run the argument he was right to doubt them in the first place, but he accepts on the basis of new evidence that conspiracy theory was false.
00:25:35
Speaker
So by Napolitano's definition, it seems that Alex Jones wasn't putting forward a conspiracy theory about the false flag shooting at Sandy Hook, because his conspiracy theory was not evidentially self-insulated, so doesn't count as a conspiracy theory, according to her definition. Which is odd, because I think, you know, the cases where people believe
00:26:03
Speaker
unwarranted conspiracy theories, but change their belief, should be of interest to us. And if you take on this evidentially self-insulated definition, then you lose the ability to study these people and study these cases, which I think are most interesting if we're looking at depolarization possibilities.
00:26:27
Speaker
Yeah, it seems like a very odd definition to kind of, as we sometimes say in English, hang your hat on. Why this particular definition when there are such obvious counters to it?
00:26:44
Speaker
A speculative explanation for why Napolitano went with this one anyway is maybe that she wasn't interested in defining conspiracy theories. She was interested in defining a certain class of problematic conspiracy beliefs, namely those beliefs in conspiracy theories that are self-insulated.
00:27:07
Speaker
which is of course an interesting research endeavour but it's not what she wrote down so it remains a speculation. It seems that she's interested in a species of what's often called conspiracism or conspiracist ideation in the literature and I mean I've been on record in the problem of conspiracism of going well
00:27:32
Speaker
actually conspiracists as classically understood actually might not exist, may not be the case that there are people who have completely irrational or irrational belief in conspiracy theories but nonetheless there are certain people out there
00:27:48
Speaker
who seem overly predisposed to see conspiracies where they aren't and then express those as conspiracy theories. And also conversely, there's probably a class of people who are very inclined to not see conspiracies where they actually are. So kind of reverse or a conspiracism. And that stuff is worth investigating as a class of conspiracy belief. But it's a mistake to go, well, because there are
00:28:16
Speaker
people like conspiracists out there, all belief in conspiracy theories must be of that type. Yes, definitely. And so I think that the confusion about conspiracy theories and conspiracy beliefs and where the negative connotation actually lies with is a super interesting question and also is very important for
00:28:39
Speaker
the continuation of interdisciplinary research endeavors, which you have been already engaged with, which is perfect with Martin Orr and Gina Husting. And I think such endeavors should be more common, especially because conspiracy theory theory is a relatively new research area for both philosophers and social scientists.
00:29:07
Speaker
which gives us the unique opportunity to work together more than people in other domains in philosophy do, which I think is incredible and also attests of the possible societal relevance philosophers may have with regards to this topic.
00:29:32
Speaker
which is my aim. Yes and it would be quite nice if philosophers could once again be relevant to public discourse. We used to be, I mean right up until the middle of the last century.
Interdisciplinary Research
00:29:44
Speaker
Philosophers were engaged in being politically active individuals but for some reason the last 50 to 70 years we've been living in these silos and it's time for us to emerge and have our have our rightful place back in public debate.
00:29:57
Speaker
Definitely, and that also requires that we're able to speak the same language as these other researchers. Yes, and of course that's turned out to be a quite difficult thing to do because academic soloisation hasn't just affected philosophers, it's affected all the academic disciplines.
00:30:19
Speaker
And it turns out we're often trying to talk about the same thing, but we're using such radically different language. It's hard to work out how to translate conceptual work in one domain to another. Yes. And in the PhD, my supervisor and I were very aware of this and also of the possible relevance and importance of doing interdisciplinary research or at least, you know,
00:30:47
Speaker
producing research that is interdisciplinarily accessible, which is why I have an advisory board, so to say, of people from different disciplines who check in with my research every year and make sure that it's all up to date and up to standards in their domains and I'm not missing things.
00:31:10
Speaker
a member of the board, you will know. I spent time with him in the Bilderberg Hotel several years ago. When I was the Romanian representative for the Comparative Analysis of Conspiracy Theories Group Compact, he and I met up at the Bilderberg Hotel, which is
00:31:40
Speaker
One of the weirdest hotels you can ever spend time in, because I've never been in a hotel that has that many pictures of Henry Kissinger on walls. And I'm of the opinion that hotels need no pictures of Henry Kissinger. You especially don't want a picture of Henry Kissinger in almost every room, but because of the association with the Bilderberg Group, because it's named after the hotel,
00:32:04
Speaker
they're really leaning heavily on that aspect of their history. And so war criminal Henry Kissinger is everywhere. You cannot avoid his gaze.
00:32:15
Speaker
It must have been a pleasant encounter. It was a very interesting time had by all. Now on the notion of doing interdisciplinary work and making sure we're talking with the right kind of terms that other people can understand, I think that's a nice way of getting into your forthcoming paper in the special issue of social epistemology that I'm editing. What does it mean for a conspiracy theory to be a theory? Because in that
00:32:42
Speaker
you look at the kind of the loaded term we use when talking about our definitions which is theory and the way that actually theory is one of those one of those group terms is actually there's a spectrum of things we mean by theory and depending on your discipline
00:33:01
Speaker
or depending on your research interests, we sometimes mean very different things by theory when we talk about what these conspiracy theories are. So tell us a little bit about the spectrum of these things we call theories.
Defining Conspiracy Theories
00:33:18
Speaker
I was, this was in the part of the PhD where I was still thinking a lot about generalism, particularism and the difference, the different conceptions that are given to conspiracy theory. And in the beginning of the debate, it seemed that most philosophers and also other researchers were focusing on the fact that a conspiracy theory is about a conspiracy that makes it
00:33:46
Speaker
where it's or bad or anything because it's, you know, the conspiracy, because the theory is about a conspiracy, there's this evidential matter of the conspiracy and every counter evidence can be can be discarded because the it's the conspirators have, you know, conceal the secrets of their conspiracy. So it's all planted and nothing is what it seems, etc.
00:34:15
Speaker
And I just didn't really, I was mostly interested in the question, well, if that's the case, then why do we feel ill at ease to call an official conspiracy theory a conspiracy theory? Is it really about a conspiracy then? Or is it something else? And then that really prompted the question, what does it mean for a conspiracy theory to be a theory?
00:34:45
Speaker
And I also considered the case that for some conspiracy theories, even those that most would find to be unwarranted, it seems that there's a little bit of a difference in tone in talking about those theories and really outlandish theories. So for example, some of the, um, uh, you know, fake moon landing or 9-11 conspiracy theories, some of them are
00:35:12
Speaker
pretty well argued for, even though I believe they're wrong, they're still pretty elaborate and it's not just that they're a hunch or that someone is just shouting
00:35:25
Speaker
the US is behind it or a deep state is behind it or anything like that. It's really a lot more sophisticated. And that made me think of the differences in which types of theory we're talking about. So in normal discourse, I think what we're thinking about is when we say theories, either an established account, so like a scientific theory, an hypothesis, so a possibility that's worthy of investigation.
00:35:55
Speaker
or really like a hunch, you know, like, well, my theory about how my colleague has a bruise in our neck is such and such. And I think that some of the generalist accounts of conspiracy theory have made a lot of assumptions on the part of which kind of theory of these three or where on the spectrum where established account is on one end and hunches on the other.
00:36:23
Speaker
conspiracy theories in general will be placed, which is more on the side of a hunch than, of course, on an established account. And I think that the particularist will always say, well, you cannot just say about any conspiracy theory, whether there is any evidential merit for them. So more on the hypothesis or established account side or not. And
00:36:50
Speaker
This was just another way to maybe frame the particularist-generalist discussion and also to differently frame the negative connotations underlying conspiracy theory in ordinary language contexts. That helped me to at least understand a little bit better how we should understand people's saying
00:37:19
Speaker
conspiracy theories are all bad or not. Which of course makes a lot of sense with the way that the particular generous debate has kind of gone on in the literature because as you say, particulars are assuming that when we talk about conspiracy theories we're talking about some kind of explanation of an event in which point you judge is it a good explanation or a bad one based upon what evidence or arguments are put forward.
00:37:43
Speaker
But if you're a generalist who has the notion that conspiracy theories are prima facie irrational, and you're basing that on the notion that actually most people don't have developed arguments for their conspiracy theories. They say it's a social contagion. They've heard a conspiracy theory or read a conspiracy theory on social media. They've been infected by it. It's a kind of hunch that they're just assuming is true.
00:38:08
Speaker
then you're going to have a very different attitude towards these things called conspiracy theories and that's going to drive the kind of research you do and also potentially also if you're say a social scientist engaging in giving policy advice, what kind of policy advice you're then going to give to people for dealing with these hunches we're finding everywhere in the world? Yes, yeah, yeah.
00:38:32
Speaker
Great paraphrasing, yes. And once again it's one of those things where you're pointing out something which is obvious in retrospect, actually it turns out we mean different things by theory, but of course one of those things which is obvious in retrospect and yet no one's really talked about
00:38:52
Speaker
before now. So speciating out the fact that there are, you know, on one end, the really established account, which, if you're a generalist, you're going to say some kind of official theory, which may involve a conspiracy in some kind, versus on the other end, the hunches, which are going to be the, you know, those terrible unwarranted conspiracy theories people have
00:39:14
Speaker
actually doing that specification is a really useful tool in our lexicon for working out how we can do interdisciplinary work by going well when you talk about a conspiracy theory what you mean is something that's not very established more hunch-like whilst when we're talking about conspiracy theories we're
00:39:36
Speaker
we're unfortunately being rather rigid philosophers and go well when we talk about theories in our discipline what we mean by this is and then you get that particular account falling out. Yeah and I think what prompted the spectrum of conspiracy theories is also something else which is I think that people who believe conspiracy theories do not always have like a credence of one in that belief or
00:40:05
Speaker
however you would phrase that. So I don't think that people who believe a certain conspiracy theory are married to that exact narrative of how things went down. I think
00:40:19
Speaker
Most conspiracy theory beliefs, unwarranted conspiracy theories beliefs, I should say, are more of the kind of, there's something suspicious. It may either be that the army is behind it, politicians are behind it, deep state is behind it, FBI is behind it. There may be various motivations. And I think that the official narrative is false. So the official narrative would not be in established accounts.
00:40:46
Speaker
the official narrative may have some things going for it. So it's more like downplayed to a hypothesis or downplayed in relative to what most people think the official narrative has going for it. And all of these, you know, clusters of conspiracy theories, they're also hypotheses, they're options, they're possibilities, they're
00:41:09
Speaker
viable explanations that, you know, warrants that we're looking into it and to see whether one of them ends up being true or which one is the best of these. And I think when you study conspiracy beliefs, that's often left out of the picture that conspiracy theory belief in unwarranted conspiracy theories seems somewhat more flexible or less rigid than
00:41:38
Speaker
belief in the official narrative, which is I think an important aspect. So is it really as belief as most of our beliefs are and what do we think belief entails? Yeah, I've been having some thoughts about this recently myself, thinking about how
00:41:56
Speaker
political affiliation works and how we ascribe political beliefs to people. So I've been thinking about how you can be a Democrat in the United States and you vote routinely for the Democratic Party. You would describe yourself as a Democrat. I mean, in some states you have to actually register as a Democrat to be able to vote in particular primaries. But in many cases, Democrats will go, you know, I'm a Democrat, but I don't agree with the entire party platform.
00:42:24
Speaker
There are certain things which I think we're really bad at doing, and there might even be some Republican policies that Democrats are going, yes, I really think the party should adopt a view like that. And we recognize that when it comes to political belief, you don't have to believe everything in the platform.
00:42:40
Speaker
to still subscribe to a political ideology or party affiliation. And yet, for some reason, when it comes to conspiracy theory belief, if someone says, oh yeah, I'm a big fan of Alex Jones, people go, oh, well, you must literally believe that democratic politicians are possessed by the devil, because that's what Alex Jones says.
00:43:03
Speaker
And I suspect a lot of people who support Alex Jones are going, I mean, I think the demon stuff is a bit hyperbolic, but I do agree that, you know, Democrats are out for our guns and they want to take away our civil liberties. I mean, I agree with Alex on that stuff, but the demonic position stuff, I mean, either the believer thinks that Jones is being hyperbolic and doesn't literally believe it, or they'll go, well, I mean,
00:43:32
Speaker
I mean, I get the hyperball, but I'm not actually willing to say that I believe they're literally possessed by demons. But for some reason, we kind of assume that conspiracy theorists are committed to every single part of their belief when we don't think that's true for other kinds of beliefs. Yes. And it's also the case that I think that, you know, people who believe in conspiracy theories could also or
00:43:57
Speaker
I agree with Alex Jones could say, okay, well, I don't know about the, you know, Democrats, you know, wanting to drink our children's blood, for example, but if I was presented with some solid evidence, I would. So, you know, there's some credence to it, but I'm not really believing it just yet, which is what all of us do all the time, right? It's when, when
00:44:23
Speaker
The first time there were speculations about the origins of COVID-19, was it an accident? Was it not? If people on the news are expressing these doubts or these speculations, then I think what I would do and what I did was, okay, I'll suspend judgment until it becomes clear which story is true.
00:44:47
Speaker
You know, it turned out that the virus was not released by China. So then that's what I'll believe. But it's, it's more like a research program or endeavor that just continues, right. So for the flat earth, for example, a lot of
00:45:03
Speaker
aspects or auxiliary hypotheses of the flat earth theory are not carved into stone in any way. So there's still a lot of gaps in the story and the people who believe that the earth is flat accept those gaps and they're just working to fill them in a way.
00:45:26
Speaker
It's not that they leave every part rigidly. Yeah, it seems, once again, one of those things which is obvious in retrospect and yet has been an operating assumption in the literature to date. And once again, it would be really quite useful when we're doing interdisciplinary work to find a way to actually make people aware of the kind of assumptions they bring from their own research
00:45:52
Speaker
programs or their own, and going back to the standpoint stuff, from their own kind of domains of interest and go, well, we should probably have a conversation about credences, we should probably have a conversation about what does belief in a conspiracy theory mean, because it does affect the kind of research programs we then engage in when studying those beliefs.
Interpreting Polling Data
00:46:16
Speaker
And especially in polling, polling, right? So if you have a seven point scale and you, you know, you think that one, two and three, which are agree, agree in a lighter form or agree are all agreement, then you're saying you're making conclusions about belief, right? So agree, belief. Well, it might just as well be, I'm willing to engage with this hypothesis or
00:46:43
Speaker
I think there's some merit to it, but I don't believe it yet. There's just a lot of nuance, I think. I'm hoping it gets noticed and cited widely. Yeah, that's what I'm going to say.
00:46:59
Speaker
Going back to the notion of interdisciplinarity, we've recently worked on a short piece for the social epistemology review and reply collective, the Le Monde debate on conspiracy theories. Let's pretend I I've never read this paper nor written a single word on it. What's that paper about? It's about those listeners that are familiar with the Le Monde debate will
00:47:23
Speaker
probably agree with me that it's quite disheartening, right? There's a lot of, I would almost say academic trash talking going on back and forth. And I think that especially when I read the comments by the authors of the initial Le Monde article minus Karen Douglas,
00:47:46
Speaker
when they were talking about, you know, philosophers only working from their armchair and all of these things. While this goes completely against what I'm trying to do in the project, I just really felt that there should be some reconciliation of the debate. And I think that
00:48:04
Speaker
You know, there's probably less disagreement there, at least between the authors of the Le Monde article and those who responded to the Le Monde article, which is Hugh and Lee Basham and I think Maria Zrap and Gina Husting and Martin Oreas. I think there's less disagreement there. I think it's, again, there's a difference about
00:48:27
Speaker
how we frame our research. And unfortunately, those framing options used by philosophers and by social scientists have clashed somewhat. Well, I think there really is room for reconciliation. But then, you know, when Hill got into the debate that really revived the disagreements that I really don't think that are so problematic, at least for our research projects, right, our research interests,
00:48:57
Speaker
And I think what Hill wanted to do kind of failed, but it was a good way to understand where the confusion actually lies, the conceptual confusion. So our joint piece is about the difference between talking about conspiracy theories and conspiracy beliefs again, and the possibility of, you know,
00:49:25
Speaker
having this concept of conspiracy belief that aligns perfectly with conspiracy mindsets, conspiracism, all those things that social scientists are mostly interested about. And that conception would be somewhat along the lines of if you
00:49:46
Speaker
People have a conspiracy mindset if they have a lot more conspiracy beliefs than do most others. And that's context relative of course, so someone in the Roman Empire would have had probably more, but this is speculation, conspiracy beliefs than do I or do you.
00:50:10
Speaker
Or, you know, I had a student in my epistemology class from Russia whose parents lived in Ukraine and their parents believed so many conspiracy theories that it's just that there seems to be a large rational difference between people in different contexts in the number of conspiracy beliefs they have. And even if we have this minimalist account of
00:50:38
Speaker
you know, warranted conspiracy theories are also conspiracy theories. Then we could still say that there's maybe somewhat like an average of conspiracy beliefs, number of conspiracy beliefs people have. And there's people who just really have a lot more conspiracy beliefs. And those seem to be the cases that social psychologists are interested in. So it seems that we can still have the minimalist, particularist story
00:51:07
Speaker
and also have a way of handing social scientists a concept that's fruitful for them and that's operationalizable for them without having to have this whole debate that went on in the Lumondi literature.
00:51:26
Speaker
I'd say from a personal perspective it was quite irritating when Scott resurrected the Le Mans debate because to my mind it had been well over six years since there'd been any any batting in the game between the instigators and the commentators as we refer to them in our paper.
00:51:46
Speaker
And for it suddenly to reappear six years later. Okay, so this is not a remake or a sequel that anybody asked for. Yes. Yes, definitely. And it's also not a new argument, right? There's no new arguments. It's just reliving the debate that has been going on for 20 years already, or even more than 20 years since Charles Pigton and Brian Keeley
00:52:13
Speaker
um uh got engaged with conspiracy theory theory there's just not a way to a priori determine which conspiracy theories are bad and which are not so yeah that also
00:52:27
Speaker
I understand why it was irritating to you to relive that whole debate again. I'll try that again. For listeners, you can actually go to socialepistemology.com, that's social-epistemology.com, and all the papers are free to download there. But the kind of argument that hell is trying to put forward
00:52:50
Speaker
is that social scientists are right to have a research program looking at the ills of stereotypical conspiracy theory beliefs. And the issue is, and as Julie have pointed out, Brian Keeley mentioned this back in 1999, there is no mark of the incredible that allows us to distinguish
00:53:12
Speaker
whether a conspiracy theory is stereotypical, aka false, or something which should be treated seriously, without someone actually going and doing at least a preliminary investigation to see what features it has, what kind of arguments it relies upon, and what evidence has been elicited in support of it.
00:53:32
Speaker
So sure, if there was a way to detect stereotypical conspiracy theories just by a glance, that would be a perfect thing for social scientists to engage in the research of. But we can't do that, so we have to have a more nuanced view of both conspiracy theory and what a conspiracy belief is going to be. Yes, and I think that that also
00:53:56
Speaker
connects very well with the a posteriori particularism.
Limits of Generalism
00:54:00
Speaker
I really should find a better name in my research project. But, you know, when you know that there's a certain conspiracy theory that's stereotypical, if we have a definition of what the stereotype or, you know, the features of the stereotype should entail, which is already very difficult, then maybe, of course, we can
00:54:23
Speaker
you know, say something about these past or already existing conspiracy theories. But that doesn't give us the tools to make predictions about future conspiracy theories, which may or may not turn out to be unwarranted. So as Hill's argument is right now,
00:54:47
Speaker
We can just only say something about past conspiracy theories that are already found to be wanting or not, but it doesn't give us tools to approach newer conspiracy theories or future conspiracy theories.
00:55:01
Speaker
Yeah, and the odd thing is, if you're going to do a generalism based upon past conspiracy theories, that generalism needs to accept that for that generalism to have been established about past conspiracy theories, people had to be particular. Because as we can't spot bad conspiracy theories at a glance, we only know they're bad because someone actually went and said, here's why they're bad. And that seems to me like one of the most pressing
00:55:31
Speaker
things we should research especially in this age of where misinformation and disinformation are you know spread so much more easily or created more easily or have a bigger outreach because of the internet and everything that it seems to me that finding out
00:55:52
Speaker
which conspiracy theory merits, has evidential merits and which does not is an interesting and important topic to discuss and we can't just say everything like this in the future will be unwarranted. That seems very very odd to me.
00:56:09
Speaker
Yes, it does seem like epistemic hubris if we were to make that kind of assumption. That is the kind of assumption that would come back to haunt us at some point in the same respect, kind of haunted the people who supported the idea that the US and the UK definitely weren't lying about the evidence for those weapons of mass destruction. Yes, yes, definitely. Just because it's a deviant explanation doesn't mean it's wrong. And I think
00:56:40
Speaker
that should be important for our epistemic well-beings as social people. This is my second year, so I have five more years to go. Is it a PhD by dissertation or a PhD by published papers? I've actually never asked you this. I feel I should know this.
00:57:05
Speaker
It's a PhD by dissertation, but I've not really been as interested yet in writing the chapters, because every time I do start writing a chapter, it turns out to be a paper. And I don't know, I think I'll just progress in this way, writing papers and just finding one interesting question to answer or to look at, and then hopefully everything will come together.
00:57:35
Speaker
you just take the literature review bits at the beginning of each individual article, cut and paste them into a chapter called Introduction, and then just rewrite the beginning of each paper so they feel like chapters rather than individual works, and I'm sure it'll be fine.
00:57:53
Speaker
Yeah, hopefully so, yes. So I mean, this is one of those projects that will keep going on for a while. I mean, I know around about 2019, I thought I was going to kind of end my association of doing work on conspiracy theories and move on to doing other projects.
00:58:11
Speaker
And then the COVID-19 pandemic occurred and it turned out I had a lot more to say about conspiracy theories. And I think there's going to be a lot more to say for a while to come. Yes, definitely. And I think also because, you know, the lockdown has also revived a lot of older or, you know, conspiracy theories like big pharma, anti-vaxx, stuff like that. And I think these will not just go away. Also because they're in a way
00:58:42
Speaker
urban myths of some kind, right? It's just the same suspicions that will always be there, that people always have as work by a lot of historians has also shown is that, you know, conspiracy theories we see today have been present in history for almost all of the time, just in different forms.
00:59:06
Speaker
Yes, actually I was thinking before when you were talking about how, you know, there seems to be this kind of background noise of conspiracy theorising in politics over time. There's a really interesting empirical question and I actually don't know how we would ever find out the answer to it as to what the natural level of conspiracy theorising in human populations generally would be.
00:59:31
Speaker
And it's hard to answer because we'd have to factor in different political economies will affect your tendency to see or not see conspiracy theories are going to be the way we view different marginalized or oppressed communities. But there is a really interesting question as to whether there's a base rate that we could identify. And then then that might give us an answer to the apparent problem of conspiracy theorizing.
00:59:56
Speaker
if we could point towards things which exacerbate that and make it rise above a particular level. Or conversely, if there are things that actually make it below that natural level, which then mean we stop spotting actual conspiracies going on in our policies. Yeah. And I think this is maybe somewhat along the lines of what Jan Willem van Pooy has been saying for a while, like social crises.
01:00:23
Speaker
you know, make a conspiracy theory beliefs proliferate. So the people that I was talking about in the start of the interview, people I knew who started believing conspiracy theories, they only started believing them when the lockdown hits. And the moment the lockdown was lifted, so were the conspiracy theories. They just disappeared. There was no more reason to really
01:00:51
Speaker
uphold these beliefs so they weren't anymore. Yes, which actually then gets on to another entire issue about whether some of the work going on in conspiracy theory at the moment is a product of a kind of a recency bias issue. But that's an entire, it's a whole other conversation we'll have to have at another time. We should probably bring this discussion to a close. There's been an absolutely enchanting discussion where I've
01:01:19
Speaker
I've pretended to not know a lot of things about the work you're doing in order that the audience can find out about things. But where to next? You've already said about some of the work you want to do towards the end of this year, although I suppose actually we are now at the end of this year. But what does year three bring to your project? Hopefully the empirically informed conspiracy theory research will be something I can really
01:01:48
Speaker
start off with. So one thing I've always wanted to do was my planning for the PhD project is not as rigid as it probably should be, but here it goes anyway. It's something like the really close reading
01:02:10
Speaker
of argumentation for specific conspiracy theories. So what kind of arguments are being appealed to? Why are they found to be convincing? How does expert testimony appeal work for conspiracy theory arguments?
01:02:27
Speaker
stuff like that, that would be awesome. But that would also mean a lot of educating myself on how to go about doing such empirically informed research. Yes, and having done some work with Martinor and Chet de Hosting doing survey work recently,
01:02:47
Speaker
It's a lot more complicated than simply asking questions. You start talking with social scientists and they'll go, you do realise that's a stupid question. You go, in retrospect, yes, but I probably would have asked it anyway if you hadn't actually stepped in and pointed out what's wrong with it. So, yes, it'll be exciting to see what that project looks like. Well, thank you, Julia, for a great conversation. Hopefully we will talk again very soon.
01:03:14
Speaker
Yes, surely. Maybe 50. Maybe 50 indeed. Thanks, Emma. I really enjoyed it. And give my regards to Josh. I will indeed. We'll talk soon. The Podcasted Guide to the Conspiracy stars Josh Addison and myself.
01:03:33
Speaker
Associate Professor, M.R.X. Stentors. 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, nothing is real. Everything is permitted, but conditions apply.