Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Secrecy and Conspiracy (Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre)
72 Plays2 years ago
Josh and Brian review the 2017 Episteme article "Secrecy and Conspiracy" by M R. X. Dentith and Martin Orr.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Guests
00:00:09
Speaker
The podcast is Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Edison and Professor Brian L. Keeley.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy here in Auckland, New Zealand. I'm Josh Addison and with us as usual from Los Angeles, it's professor of philosophy and gold medalist at the 1997 Autumn Olympics. Brian L. Cuthy, how are you, Brian? You just keep embarrassing me with that little factoid there, Josh. Well, why would you keep it to yourself? The only reason I won is that literally I tripped everybody else that was in it and that's, you know, we try not to speak of that.
00:00:47
Speaker
I thought that was part of the rules, but anyway, maybe the least said the better. Now, we have a Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre episode for you this week, and we're returning to that wacky M. Denteth, who, if you recall from the last time we spoke, someone I went to university with many, many, many years ago, but who has since gone on to become a bit of an influential figure.
00:01:11
Speaker
Yeah. And as I mentioned, I had met him at that conference in Miami a couple of years back. They had some interesting things to say, but I have not really had a chance to interact with them very much since then.
00:01:24
Speaker
other than reading the papers. It was an interesting paper. I'm glad we I'm glad we were able to read it. And now we can talk about it.
Focus on Conspiracy Theory Discussion
00:01:30
Speaker
And now we can make it public because, you know, we've been keeping it a secret that we had read it for quite a while now. And now we can we can make that public. Yes. So this paper is one that ended with Martin Orr, who has been spoken about a bit on this podcast as well back in twenty seventeen.
00:01:47
Speaker
And the name of it is secrecy and conspiracy. So this is going right back to the absolute genesis of this podcast, the very first episode of it. We talked about what the definition of a conspiracy and one of the one of the key three things is that it involves secrecy. But this paper takes a bit of a closer look at that.
00:02:06
Speaker
and to say exactly what do we mean? Because we have seen, of course, we've seen papers in the past where people have argued in most extreme cases that if you ever know about a conspiracy, it's not really a conspiracy because it's not secret anymore, which is kind of one end of it, but this one takes a relatively detailed look, I guess, at just this one secrecy conspiracy of the whole definition.
Defining Conspiracy and Secrecy
00:02:33
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it's interesting that, well, first of all, it's interesting that Martin Orr, the co-author, is not a philosopher, as we've talked about before on the podcast. I believe we've interviewed him on the podcast before, but as a sociologist.
00:02:50
Speaker
Yeah, which is a slightly different take on things, but also maybe particularly appropriate for thinking about terms of secrecy because there are all sorts of social reasons for keeping secrets. Also, a lot of the analysis has to do with the structure of organizations and such. There's a lot of ways in which having a sociologist
00:03:13
Speaker
you know, give their opinion and kind of weighing in on on different elements of conspiracy theories. It was, you know, good on good on him that they brought in a sociologist for this discussion. So the one paper we looked at of by Martin and Jenna Husting,
00:03:30
Speaker
was a bit of an eye opener for me, an actual sociology paper where you can do research and appeal to empirical data. I was like, is that allowed? Are we allowed to talk about the real world when we're doing this sort of thing? But yes, it's a good source of real world examples all the way through this paper. So the paper begins with an abstract which reads,
00:03:52
Speaker
In the literature on conspiracy theories, the least contentious part of the academic discourse would appear to be what we mean by a conspiracy, a secretive plot between two or more people towards some end. Yet what exactly is the connection between something being a conspiracy and it being secret? Is it possible to conspire without also engaging in secretive behaviour?
Sociological Perspectives on Secrecy
00:04:11
Speaker
To dissect the role of secrecy in conspiracies, and thus contribute to the larger debate on the epistemology of conspiracy theories, we define the concepts of conspiracy, conspirator, and secret and argue that while conspirators might typically be thought to commit to keeping secrets once their conspiracy is underway, the idea that conspiracies are necessarily secretive to start with is not as obvious as previously thought.
00:04:32
Speaker
Yeah, and I thought it was interesting, too, that there were some there's some emphases there in the abstract. It's they argue that while conspirators might typically be thought of, thought to commit conspiracy theories once their conspiracy is underway, the idea of conspiracy conspiracies are necessarily secretive is not to start is not as obvious previously thought. Right. So they're they're they're playing around with it's, you know,
00:05:02
Speaker
some of these things seem reasonable, but how reasonable are they? Yes, and drawing distinctions straight away from different timeframes in the conspiracy. But so it moves to the introduction, in which they say our purpose in this paper is not to rehash the debate as to whether belief in conspiracy theories is rational or irrational. Rather, we are interested in what counts as conspiratorial. What is the domain of these things we call conspiracies? Specifically, we're interested in the role of secrecy.
00:05:30
Speaker
in conspiratorial activity. They make it fairly clear from the start that they're using the very much non-pejorative definition of conspiracy theory with as little baggage as possible. I think they just have it as any explanation of an event which cites a conspiracy as a salient cause.
00:05:49
Speaker
The introduction has a bit of a discussion around why conspiracy theories and conspiracies carry this extra baggage, and that's possibly what you're talking about with the sociologist influence there being able to give a bit of motivation around it. But it then goes on to point out that there's surprisingly little in the literature defining secrets or secrecy.
00:06:09
Speaker
And so this paper suggests the definition that person S1 keeps P for proposition, I guess, secret from S2 if and only if S1 believes S2 does not know P and S1 intends to keep S2 from becoming aware of P. And so obviously, one of the upshots
Awareness of Roles in Conspiracies
00:06:30
Speaker
of this definition is that you can keep a secret from someone without conspiring.
00:06:34
Speaker
simply if you're acting alone. Conspiracy, it's not enough to be keeping a secret to be conspiring. There are other conditions there.
00:06:44
Speaker
This has always been one funny thing about thinking about conspiracy theories is this idea that they have to be plural, that they have to involve multiple people. The idea that if Lihar V. Oswald did it by himself, as the official story says, that technically it's not a conspiracy because it, by all accounts on the official story,
00:07:07
Speaker
you know, Lee Harvey Oswald didn't even, you know, tell his wife that he was thinking about assassinating the president. And it's kind of, it's always been one of those kind of odd things that if it's only one person involved, then it is not a conspiracy.
00:07:24
Speaker
in the same sort of way that a secret which is kept to just one person, if I just simply decide, or I know something myself, maybe it's often something I know about myself, that I know that all these years, Josh, of us doing this podcast secretly,
00:07:44
Speaker
I just hate your beard, right? And I've never told you, I've led on that I liked your beard the whole time, but I really, it just, I just think it really looks bad on you and I just loathe it, right? That it's not really a conspiratorial secret if I keep it to myself. And
00:08:05
Speaker
And it's odd that, you know, secrets don't require it that it be plural, right? That can still be a secret. But in order for it to be a conspiracy theory, I have to tell somebody else. Like, I have to tell, you know, your partner and say, you know, don't you hate Josh's beard too? And they say, yes, but oh, we can never tell him. You know, it would really disappoint him. So, okay, now we're conspiring, right? Because we're keeping the secret amongst ourselves. But as long as we keep it singularly, it's not
00:08:34
Speaker
a conspiracy, although that does seem a little odd in a lot of cases. It's the idea that a person could be doing the same things, having the same plans, and yet just because they haven't mentioned it to someone else it is or it isn't.
00:08:53
Speaker
True fact, I haven't been without a beard since 2007 when I shaved it for a wedding. I took one look in the mirror, said, no. And I took one look at my wife and she said, no. Grew it back, never changed it. But anyway. And for the record, that was a... Oh, of course, of course. I've always thought the beard looked quite nice. I'm a big fan of beards in general, yours included. Anyway.
00:09:16
Speaker
So this introductory section wraps up. Our contention is that whilst much conspiratorial activity involves secrecy, the nature of secrecy in conspiratorial activity is much more complex than is currently acknowledged in the literature.
00:09:30
Speaker
When two or more people plot towards some end, there is the question of not just must we keep our actions secret, but also from whom must our actions be kept secret. Our argument is that when these two questions are considered carefully, it turns out that secrecy, at least as it is generally understood, is not always necessary for conspiracy.
00:09:48
Speaker
So that brings us into section two. So what is a conspiracy?
Monolithic vs Diverse Conspiracies
00:09:53
Speaker
And this is a bit of definitional stuff that we've talked about many times before, but they use the example of cover-up conspiracies and
00:10:03
Speaker
that which can come into varieties you can either be covering up a conspiracy in process or discovering up the discovery partial or whole of a conspiracy by someone else. I think that the point that I took out of this one was the idea that
00:10:20
Speaker
intent matters and that there's a difference between deliberately misleading someone and simply not advertising that maybe you've done something wrong or done something foolish. So they say a cover-up based upon members of the public failing or not knowing to ask the right questions is still a conspiracy and a lie by omission is, after all, still a lie.
00:10:42
Speaker
Think of it this way. If no one knows what you're up to, no one knows what questions they should be asking to uncover your potential misdeeds. Indeed, in a relatively closed society, this is precisely how governmental and corporate agencies get away with conspiracy. No, they will surely say. We weren't covering that up. You just didn't ask about it.
00:11:00
Speaker
Yeah. And it's interesting. They bring up the example of the American, this American case of FOIA, right? The Freedom of Information Act, which is, you know, this kind of interesting thing. I actually be curious to know whether there's anything equivalent in the New Zealand context of can, can
00:11:18
Speaker
Obviously, every country has official secrets in the sense that there are things that are classified that are considered of national security interests and therefore this will not be revealed even if we are asked. We will neither confirm nor deny the existence of this agency. But in the States, we have this idea of FOIA, which is if it's not a classified document and it is requested,
00:11:47
Speaker
then the agency is supposed to cough it up if there is no good reason for keeping it secret, which is a unique thing that was developed actually as a result of conspiracies in the 1960s. The FOIA law was passed in the early 1970s, but it's a uniquely American thing.
00:12:09
Speaker
But as this points to is this idea that you can only, you can't go on fishing expeditions, right, you can't go in and ask for all files to do with anything secret. No, you have to ask about a very specific thing.
00:12:24
Speaker
and that's why there's famous cases in the history of American journalism where something got published or got released as part of a report and it might make reference to an operation Jenga. Then as soon as you've got a name and it's not explained, then you can, let me contact this agency and ask for all documents associated with Operation Jenga, this name that I've just discovered.
00:12:51
Speaker
and then legally they're supposed to then, okay, you've discovered that there is this thing with this name. Now we are compelled to release it to you. But until you even have a question to ask with some specificity, then it can remain a secret. Yes. We have the Official Information Act here in New Zealand, which is similar. I don't know exactly how it works. You only ever really hear about it when
00:13:18
Speaker
someone is trying to find something out via the Official Information Act in whichever government department is responsible as sort of being obstructive or dragging their feet or, or they'll, someone will point out that, you know, this, this person, this critic of the government has taken months and months to get anything out of the Information, Official Information Act, whereas this person who's sort of pro the government is able to get their responses instantly and so on, but I don't know exactly.
00:13:43
Speaker
Um, the, the, the legal ins and outs. But at any rate, this, this moves the paper onto section three, who are the conspirators?
00:13:51
Speaker
which starts, does everyone in the conspiracy have to be in the know, or are some members of the conspiracy going to turn out to be dupes or patsies? For example, if you run your conspiracy from the corporate office, does the person who delivers your coffee halfway through the meeting where you decide to falsely claim tax credits count as a conspirator? Is the person who couriers the objectionable material to the branch office in on it, or are they just an accessory?
00:14:14
Speaker
Who counts as a conspirator versus who as an accessory might seem like a trite question, but it speaks to an interesting characteristic of conspiratorial activity, just who knows exactly what is going on. As it turns out, being in a conspiracy means sometimes being part of a very peculiar kind of secret.
00:14:31
Speaker
So they talk about the idea of hierarchical organizations. Being in a hierarchical organization can mean that not everyone acting to afford a conspiracy needs to actually know the details of the conspiracy or even needs to know that they're involved in a conspiracy. They might just be doing what they're told, which they think is a perfectly benign activity, but they're being told to do that at the behest of someone else who actually knows that they have
00:14:58
Speaker
more malevolent motives. And so we get into the old assassination of Julius Caesar, which I know is a favorite example of Ian's. Yes, yes. Actually, this actually reminds me of what was it? It's a scene in one of the Kevin Smith movies, either one of the Clerks movies, either Clerks 1 or 2. But there was that whole discussion about the Death Star. Yeah.
00:15:23
Speaker
Yes, the contractors on the desktop. Did they know they were collateral damage? Then there's the contractor who happens to be there while they're having the conversation. It's all contractors know what they're doing. If you're working for a mob boss, you know that you're working for a mob boss. Therefore, you have some degree of culpability. It's playing around with some of these same ideas of why assume necessarily that the person delivering the coffee
00:15:48
Speaker
doesn't know about the conspiracy and it's like yeah this is part of my bonus is that you know if we can if we can cheat on the taxes then i'm going to get a bigger bonus next year you know that you know if anybody knows about what's going on conspiratorial in a company it really is the person delivering that you know the tea and the and
00:16:05
Speaker
and the staff members and so forth. You could kind of turn this kind of point on its head and suggest that even in hierarchical societies or hierarchical organizations, we shouldn't necessarily assume that people low down in the hierarchy are necessarily uninvolved or at least unknowledgeable of the conspiracy. They might very well be and may well be happy to keep the conspiracy.
00:16:29
Speaker
Yes, so you also have the assassination of Julius Caesar example as an example of a conspiracy where some members of the conspiracy can hide their true goals from the others. So some of the conspirators thought that they were going to be giving power back to the people, whereas the likes of Marcus Brutus was like, actually, this is to make me Emperor. We're not to restore the Republic.
00:17:00
Speaker
And so at this point, they introduced the idea, which is something that you see people talk about a bit when you have a conspiracy theory. As I mentioned, the idea that over a certain size, conspiracies become more and more unlikely. There was that paper by Dr. Grimes, I forget his first name.
00:17:20
Speaker
That was the one that caught a lot of people's attention, where he tried to give a mathematical formula of exactly how long you can expect a conspiracy to remain secret, given a certain size of it. But this play argues it's more nuanced than just straight a numbers game. So they say the idea between a monolithic and a diverse conspiracy is the distinction.
00:17:48
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm curious, I mean, I thought that was one of the interesting things, so one of the interesting things that this paper brings up and really pushes on.
00:17:57
Speaker
Yeah, because there's a way in which my own work has been kind of lumped in with Grimes, whereas in my original paper, I give a kind of a qualitative account that says something like, you know, the larger conspiracy gets, you know, just by sheer probability, the larger number of people involved in conspiracy, the more likely that somebody is going to either screw up or spill the beans or be
00:18:20
Speaker
take the incentive to be the whistleblower and so forth. Then Grimes' paper is a quantitative version of the same point that I'm making and tries to spell it out in ways that I find so many assumptions have to be made in order for the numbers to work. I've always found that paper problematic.
00:18:43
Speaker
But then the move that's made by M and Marty here is to say, again, even if it's numbers, it's not sheer numbers. It has to be the right kind of numbers. There has to be a degree of diversity. And actually, I don't think they cite it.
00:19:03
Speaker
But there's a similar move that goes on in the philosophy of science about the kinds of evidence. You know, when you're when you're trying to confirm your theory or disconfirm your theory, when you're building up evidence that is supposed to be in on behalf of your of your theory, you know, the more evidence, the better, of course. Right. It's like that's that is that makes sense that, you know, the more evidence you have on behalf of your theory, the better you should feel about your theory.
00:19:29
Speaker
But of course, it's not just the more evidence, it has to be diverse evidence. So multiple, a particular paper coming out that supports your theory, that is additional evidence.
Secrecy's Role in Conspiracies
00:19:41
Speaker
15 copies of that exact same paper don't constitute additional evidence because that's not diverse evidence. It's got to be 15 different papers. And even better, 15 papers by 15 different labs, 15 papers by a single lab.
00:19:56
Speaker
would be evidence, better than copies of the same paper. There's this notion that within the philosophy of science that evidence as justification needs to be diverse by some metric. Then the debate comes like, well, what kind of diversity is required? Does it need to be different people? Does it need to be different points? Probably yes on all of those things.
00:20:22
Speaker
And the kind of the mirror that they're doing here is that, yes, you know, multiple people being involved, you know, that there would be more people involved means that, OK, it's more likely that your conspiracy would be uncovered. But like, for instance,
00:20:39
Speaker
One of the reasons why the most successful conspiracies are those carried out by organized crime is because often those people are united either by family connections, they're all members of the same family, or maybe they have an ethnic connection. They're all from the same village in Italy or they can draw their same connection to a district of
00:21:07
Speaker
the former Soviet Union, right? But the point of that is like, oh yeah, there's significantly less diversity in goals, in values, and so forth, that they all kind of see themselves as having a connection that goes beyond merely, you know, monetary advantage.
00:21:26
Speaker
as they point out in the paper, that a conspiracy theory that involves a variety of different organizations, that's the kind of diversity that should undermine belief in a conspiracy theory. Whereas if you find out that no, 15 people are involved, but there are 15 different members, brothers and nephews of the same family,
00:21:50
Speaker
Yeah, maybe they're going to be better at keeping a secret because they're much more tightly connected. And I think that's a really nice point that they make in this paper. Yeah, so they go to look into this in some detail in the next section, which is monolithic and diverse conspiracies. So they start by comparing the Volkswagen emission scandal as an example of a monolithic conspiracy with the 9-11 truth conspiracy theories, the idea that the towers, twin towers were felled by a controlled demolition and so on.
00:22:20
Speaker
And so the argument there is that Volkswagen, it's confined within a single company. Everybody involved in it at least had the motivation of wanting their company to make more money. And there was always a lot of talk with the Volkswagen stuff about that earlier point about who actually knew what. Were these technicians just doing what they were told? Or did they actually know that they were really fudging the rules and that there was, you know,
00:22:46
Speaker
Was it all at the top, or was it at all levels of the company? But at any rate, it was all within a single company, whereas when you get to the 9-11 Truth conspiracy theories,
00:22:56
Speaker
That requires lots of groups working towards the same goal with no common governance, as they put it. This putative claim of conspiracy involves a set of diverse actors, diverse in the sense that, unless you believe in some hidden-hand government like the New World Order or the Illuminati, the various agents the conspiracy theory allegiance were responsible belong to groups with no shared governance, let alone any central mechanism of control.
00:23:22
Speaker
And so the idea there is that, yeah, in a situation like that, you could think that as it gets larger,
00:23:30
Speaker
it's much more likely for the conspiracy theory to be found out. But when you've got a monolithic case such as Volkswagen, adding more people to it doesn't necessarily make it more likely to be found out. It's all relative. The monolithic conspiracy theory is relatively easier to keep concealed. But then, of course, there is the point which that as a conspiracy gets larger, it becomes more likely to become more diverse, just more people
00:23:59
Speaker
gives you more options for diversity. I never thought of this before, but this is actually a point in favor of kind of David Ike's theories of the lizard people. I mean, what, what more lack of diversity could you have that it's an alien species of lizard people who have their own goal for, you know,
00:24:19
Speaker
conquering this planet of Earthlings, right? It's like they definitely have a, you know, a unity of purpose. And in a way that you know, they're the ultimate mafia family, right? They're the alien species from another planet. So
00:24:37
Speaker
Yeah, of course they're going to be able to keep a secret. They're not even human, and they see us as mere cattle to be taken care of, whereas they are the
00:24:52
Speaker
They're carrying out their secret plan that they set up well before they journeyed to this planet. Actually, other than dominating us, what exactly is this? David Eichstag? They're not stealing our water, are they? Sometimes they eat us or drink our blood or not have food. No, I was never quite clear on exactly what to do.
00:25:13
Speaker
I mean, it's always clear to me that David Ike is stealing this from Thomas Pynchon's V. I think in V they wanted our water or something like that. Or maybe I'm confusing that with the man who fell to earth, because that was definitely water-related. I think they both. Yeah, no, it's right. Like they say, believing in a sort of a new world order illuminati, alien shapeshifter thing.
00:25:37
Speaker
It kind of makes it, I don't know, almost stronger if you're saying that all these people that appear to be diverse are actually all part of the same. Actually, what it reminds me of is the John Wick movies, whereby by the time you get to the third one, it seems about half the population of the planet is employed by this shadowy criminal organization that nobody knows about.
00:25:58
Speaker
Everyone's in on it. Or Blade, you know, the comic book and movies where they're vampires, right? Again, they share this commonality and therefore are able to carry out a secret because they literally will die if the secret gets out and the conspiracy is revealed. Yeah. So at this point, they do actually mention the Grimes paper in this section, but point out that it doesn't distinguish between the size of conspiracy versus its organizational structure. Yes.
00:26:29
Speaker
But so that moves on to section five, which is a peculiar kind of secrecy, pointing out that a conspiratorial secret, to begin with, right ways they say, from the outset, it's an imperfect secret. Because the only way for a secret to be 100% secret is if it stays in your head and nowhere else. By definition, a conspiracy means the secret is being shared with more than one person. So it's not 100% secret.
00:26:59
Speaker
But then it becomes more complicated because as they say, now once at least two people have agreed to act in concert and have subsequently agreed to keep their arrangement a secret, several questions arise. One, from whom should the secret be kept? Two, then from whom should this secret not be kept? And three, finally, after the goal of the conspirators has been achieved, can the conspiracy be revealed or must some aspects remain secret? And that's something that's
00:27:26
Speaker
come up a bunch of times, certain conspiracies they want you to know about, you know, your various terrorist attacks and so on, they want to be able to claim responsibility for it afterwards, and yet other ones, maybe, you know, criminal ones in particular, they'd probably prefer that nobody ever finds out about it and they get away scot-free.
00:27:45
Speaker
And I think that was, I mean, when I think back to my own work, it's, you know, so when I define conspiracy theories, I did, I said that secrecy was one of those kind of features that often comes along with it, but it was not definitive that, you know, that, that
00:28:00
Speaker
You know, it's no surprise that conspiracies often are secret, but that isn't a necessary condition.
Historical Open Secrets
00:28:07
Speaker
But one of the reasons I thought secrecy was important was that secrecy was required exactly because the people that are carrying out the conspiracy is are not all powerful.
00:28:19
Speaker
That they need to keep it secret, because if the secret got out, then we would stop them. We being the good people, or maybe people even in league with the conspiracy theorists, is that part of what motivates the conspiracy theorists is because they think some good can come of revealing the secret and getting people to see that this conspiracy is underfoot.
00:28:44
Speaker
In particular, those were the kinds of conspiracies that I was interested in, or the ones that were the information to get out, were the secret to be revealed, then the conspiracy would be stopped, and then the goals of the conspiracy would fail to obtain. In the case of a conspiracy, for instance, to assassinate somebody,
00:29:05
Speaker
Well, once they're dead, then there's no taking it back, right? So that it gets out after the fact is, well, something bad could happen as a result of that. Maybe some other goal of the conspiracy, like my not going to jail might be violated. But if the goal of the conspiracy is that person be dead, OK, I've killed them. Now I don't need to talk about it anymore. Or I can talk about it because it's done. The deed is done.
00:29:32
Speaker
But for me, the interesting conspiracy theories, the ongoing conspiracies are the ones where you need to keep it secret because the very fact of it being revealed, once it was revealed and believed, then we are powerless to make the conspiracy. The thing that we wanted to do it conspiratorily becomes no longer problematic, which was interesting with respect to
00:29:57
Speaker
some of the stuff that we'll get into later about conspiracies that don't require secrecy. Conspiracies where we're going to do this to you and you're so powerless, we can actually tell you in advance that we're going to do it to you and we don't need to be secret about it at all. But we're a powerful enough group of conspirators that we don't need secrecy.
00:30:20
Speaker
The secrecy is often, I think, a sign of weakness, that the fact that you need a conspiracy to get your conspiracy theory to go is a function of the fact that it were to be public, we wouldn't be able to make it go. We lack that kind of power.
00:30:37
Speaker
There are a couple of interesting examples in this section. One was Ashley Madison, which was a blast from the past. I'd forgotten about that one. Ashley Madison, which if you recall, was a sort of a website, a service for people looking to cheat on their partners. It was very specifically like a dating network, but for people who were quite open about the fact that I'm involved with someone else and I want to cheat on them.
00:31:02
Speaker
As they say, life is short, have an affair. When that's your selling line, that's your brand motto, life is short, have an affair. You're saying the quiet part out loud, aren't you? It was interesting for the different levels of who is conspiring on whom and what was being kept from what other groups.
00:31:25
Speaker
Obviously, if you're talking about cheating on someone, there is an element of conspiracy there. You want to keep that secret from your partner. But then there was a whole lot of dodginess with the site itself. Weird, strangely enough, a site all about adultery turned out to be not entirely on the level. There was a bunch of stuff around how if you... First of all, it was kind of an open secret, and we'll get into open secrets in a minute, that there were a whole lot of fake female accounts on there designed to entice men onto this network.
00:31:54
Speaker
But then there was other stuff about how if you applied to have your account deleted, they weren't actually deleting it properly.
00:32:04
Speaker
And so there was sort of conspiracies by these would-be adulterers to commit adultery, but then there was conspiracy by the company to defraud its customers. And then the other case they talked about was the CIA's Operation Midnight Climax, which was part of MKUltra back when the CIA was basically just kind of slipping people's acid to see what would happen was the impression I got from it.
00:32:30
Speaker
the
00:32:49
Speaker
Maybe not quite as well. But again, you have these multiple levels of secrecy. So the idea was that the CIA was getting prostitutes to slip LSD to their Jones. So you've got the fact that you've got the conspiracy of solicitation of prostitution and possibly adultery again.
00:33:07
Speaker
And then at the same time, the prostitute is conspiring with the CIA, although she may not have even known that either. And the CIA is conspiring to test what happens when you give these mind altering drugs to people. So you can see that when you start actually looking about who is keeping what secret from whom, the notion that the simple idea that a conspiracy must be secret gets a lot more complicated.
Acknowledged vs Pretend Secrets
00:33:31
Speaker
There are secrets within the secrets. So we get to the section six, the cover up uncovered.
00:33:37
Speaker
which basically brings up a bunch of interesting sort of wrinkles. They address the claim that once a conspiracy has been uncovered and is thus no longer a secret, it's no longer a conspiracy, but that's something we've seen problems with that in the past.
00:33:56
Speaker
to say that just because it's found out, especially in cases where the people want it to be found out, to say that it's no longer a conspiracy doesn't make a lot of sense. But they talk about the things you were just mentioning before, the idea of open secrets, where everybody knows that something untoward is going on, maybe don't know the exact details. And they talk about the idea of Stalin's Russia or Cold War East Germany, where everybody knows that the state
00:34:26
Speaker
could be conspiring against them, but they don't know the details. Maybe not exactly. Maybe you don't know that the Secret Service is coming to knock on your door soon, but you know it could happen. Everybody knows, and yet this is still a kind of conspiracy of the state against its people.
00:34:47
Speaker
So they say, this kind of response deserves careful consideration precisely because it shows that when we talk about secrecy, we're talking about a multivariate property. Citizens of the USSR and the GDR knew what their respective governments were doing, at least to some extent. These activities were open secrets. However, they may not have known the actual detailed policy behind these activities or the motivations of those who implemented them. In that restricted aspect, the conspirators were holding back some of their hand.
00:35:14
Speaker
However, it's fair to say that these citizens knew enough to make broadly accurate claims about the conspiratorial nature of their societies. It turns out you can be conspired against and know something about it. Sometimes a conspiracy will be so big that everyone knows, yet no one seemingly can do anything about it, which I think is to the point that you brought up just before. Yeah, and I think this goes back to another thing that particularly I think M made a point of early in the paper,
00:35:42
Speaker
notes that we know there's a small but growing literature on the philosophy of conspiracy theories, but noted as part of the opening of this paper that there's been relatively little philosophical work on secrecy. I think this particular section really points to the oddness of that. We all are familiar with the concept of an open secret. The kinds of scenarios being described in this section, the thing which is secret but that everybody knows,
00:36:12
Speaker
That is just bizarre as a concept right in the idea that philosophers have never Really kind of tried to grapple with that of like that sounds like an oxymoron a an open secret yet It's clearly a thing to what extent I mean, I really wonder whether I mean in the Anglo-american
00:36:32
Speaker
tradition secrecy is not I mean I think Emma's right there hasn't been a lot of work there's a reference to Sissela Bach's work on secrets which is pretty much the only thing I can think of off the top of my head that I'm familiar with it's a philosophical work that deals with secrets but
00:36:49
Speaker
Now, I'm very curious to know whether like, you know, in the former Soviet Union, in the former Eastern European diaspora or the the area that was under the control of the Soviets during the Cold War, they were experiencing exactly these kind of open secrets in East Germany and so forth. Has there not been philosophical engagement with this idea of like what constitutes secrecy in that kind of a context? Because that is
00:37:18
Speaker
you know, very strange as an idea where you know quite a lot and you're justified in knowing quite a lot. But on the other hand, I mean, yeah, there's this distinction between secrecy, which is as something which is either known or not known.
00:37:35
Speaker
But then there's also this element of secrecy as something which is spoken about and not known. And the idea that part of being a secret is not just that it's not known, but it's also not talked about and confirmed. And I've heard similar things about
00:37:52
Speaker
What did the people of the German villages near to concentration camps in Poland and in Germany and other places, what did they know? Did they know the Jews were being killed and that the Holocaust was underway?
00:38:10
Speaker
Or was it that they simply knew that something bad was happening, something that would be deeply embarrassing to me as a political member of a particular political order? And in some sense, I don't want to know exactly because I think it's not going to, you know, there's motivated reasoning going on here of like, I don't really want to know the details.
00:38:34
Speaker
But again, there are these stories that suggest that it's kind of an open secret where maybe they didn't know the details. But in some sense, they knew that something bad was happening, something morally outrageous was happening. And exactly for that reason, they didn't want to know more because once you know more, then you feel like maybe I need to act upon this knowledge. So I would rather just continue to do my job and continue to live my life without knowing the bad things that are going on in my name.
00:39:04
Speaker
But yeah, the idea that philosophers are not engaged with these kind of aspects of what constitutes a secret and what are the boundaries of secrecy, yeah, it's kind of…
00:39:18
Speaker
It's just an interesting fact if it isn't in fact the case. And I have no reason to disagree with him and Marty about it because I can't point to them to any literature where somebody does talk about this stuff. Yeah. I mean, they also bring up the idea of the famed secret, the cases where something
00:39:36
Speaker
something that lots of people know, but they all pretend not to know, again, for that sort of thing. Because if they were shown to have known about this, then they'd be a lot more culpable. So they talk about the idea that the dossier that proved
00:39:52
Speaker
Saddam Hussein's regime was developing WNDs that pretty much everybody knew that this thing was not just suspicious but flat out doctored and yet everybody pretended like they didn't know this and that this was a big secret. I've heard in sociological anthropological stuff people talking about the idea of the polite fiction which kind of goes from the other angle of
00:40:17
Speaker
the idea, something that everybody knows isn't true, but is all willing to act as though it is true because that makes society function a bit better. And yeah, this has definitely echoes in at least the US political context now of the accusation on the part of those, you know, there are those who claim that the last election was stolen from, from who should have won the election.
00:40:46
Speaker
And the accusation there is that, well, there are people you know that it was a stolen election, but for their own reasons, they are keeping quiet about it and saying that Joe Biden actually did win the election. And the worry is that we're going to have the reverse scenario in the next election, where there are going to be plenty of people who are going to know that the election was in fact
00:41:08
Speaker
It wasn't stolen, but they feel, nope, nope, we're going to say it's stolen because if the end result is our guy getting elected or our guy at least ending up in power, whether or not they were elected, then we are going to be willing to feign that particular lie. It's not like it's on both sides. It's like as soon as you have these situations and notice that this all revolves around the fact that we have a secret ballot.
00:41:37
Speaker
There is this core of secrecy to the way in which elections are run in most of the developed Western world that they are done in secret, which is actually an interestingly new phenomenon. I mean, at least as my understanding of American history is that in the early days of the American
00:41:54
Speaker
political experience that election vote voting was not secret that you would literally have meetings and they would ask people you know how many people vote for George Washington raise your hand that people would declare publicly that they were voting one way or another which has the advantage of people
00:42:13
Speaker
you know, there being, you know, openness and transparency about it that you could see, you know, I was at the meeting and yes clearly a majority of people were in favor of this person getting the votes as opposed to another person.
Voting and Conspiracy Theories
00:42:27
Speaker
But we have secret ballots, and with secret ballots, then become all these questions of, well, now we have to trust the people who are doing the counting because, in fact, we don't know how individual people did vote. And then there are a lot of good reasons for maintaining a secret ballot.
00:42:46
Speaker
But it raises the possibilities for conspiracy theories and motivates conspiracy theories in a way that perhaps wouldn't be the case if we did not have a secret ballot. If all ballots were all balloting and all voting were public, you know, that would, you know, that would change the framework and the dynamics and the epistemology around elections if those things weren't secret the way that they are now. But not without not
00:43:14
Speaker
also introducing a bunch of other other issues as well. See it's a difficult, a difficult thing anyway. So this, this brings us to the final major section of the paper, which is, are we capturing the right things with our definition?
00:43:29
Speaker
So this sort of testing is the definition of a conspiracy that's implied by the preceding chapters actually an accurate definition. So they say we have elected to work with a definition that emphasizes agents working together towards some end with the idea that secrecy is a special condition, one which sometimes only comes into play once the conspiracy has commenced.
00:43:50
Speaker
As such, when agents collude and then decide, in order to be successful in their plotting, that they must keep selected activity secret from someone, you have a conspiracy. Such activity then runs the gamut from the organization of a surprise party having an affair, conspiracy to commit extortion to political conspiracies. Conspiracies under this view turn out to be common, which is something, an idea that we've seen come up time and time again in many papers.
00:44:14
Speaker
So they basically then there are a bunch of subsections to this section that go through a bunch of possible complications or objections. So this actually brings me to one of the things I find very confusing about this paper. It's one of the few things that I find like most of the paper, I get the point that they're making and I get the sides of the argument that they're dealing with. But maybe and maybe I'm just missing something.
00:44:40
Speaker
But they often come back to this idea that, of course, the question is, as they say in section 7.1, are cover-ups really conspiracies? As if cover-ups weren't conspiracies. I mean, I can't, I'm really having a hard time getting my head around the idea of something which is a genuine cover-up, but which is not a conspiracy.
00:45:02
Speaker
Because it just seemed to me that almost, maybe not by definition, but it's just like I'm just racking my brain to think about a case of something which is indeed a coverup, but is not a conspiracy in the sort of way that we're talking about in this paper. Because they keep coming back to this question like, oh, we need to answer this question.
Are Cover-Ups Conspiracies?
00:45:21
Speaker
Our coverups, conspiracies.
00:45:23
Speaker
And I'm just like, why would you think they're not? I didn't get it. I don't know. Maybe it's just because they want to deal with the surprise birthday party idea, the idea that some people might balk at the claim when you say, oh, yes, a surprise birthday planning a surprise party is a conspiracy. And some people will sort of go, what? I thought conspiracies are meant to be evil and nasty.
00:45:47
Speaker
But yeah, this section starts. Another objection to the kind of argument we've run here is the claim that cover-ups are not necessarily conspiracies, but yeah, it doesn't give any detail who's actually making that claim. They certainly say that cover-ups will make you suspicious, but suspicious doesn't have to mean sinister, i.e. surprise birthday parties.
00:46:07
Speaker
And they say that quote unquote petty conspiracies like a surprise party can still be useful to look at. They say that at the end of the section they say our interest in political conspiracies and their associated conspiracy theories simply tells us we are motivated by big challenging claims about the world.
00:46:25
Speaker
It does not show that smaller, less influential conspiratorial activity is the kind of things we should rule out of bounds. As such, we need not rule out talk of surprise parties as being conspiratorial, especially if it turns out that the analysis of such events ends up being useful in analyzing the general class of theories about conspiracies. So yeah, I don't know. Maybe it is just they're trying to head off people saying, well, under your definition, something as benign as a surprise birthday party would count as a conspiracy. And they just want to say, yes, no, we're
00:46:52
Speaker
OK with that. But yeah, it does a little bit. And maybe that's why I also have that same reaction. So maybe that's why I'm not seeing the force of this move, because, you know, you are, you know, the idea that a surprise birthday party doesn't involve lying, I think it quite clearly involves lying. It's like, that's that's that's the otherwise the whole thing wouldn't come together.
00:47:16
Speaker
I don't think I've ever told you the story on the podcast, but a group of friends actually during graduate school conspired to throw a surprise birthday party for me, which was very, very sweet. But apparently, because they were so successful, they had a hard time getting me to the party because they conspired first to have me come to a particular pub that I liked, and then they were supposed to get me from the pub to the actual party location.
00:47:44
Speaker
I was quite happy to stay at the pub. It's just like, this is a really good pub. I could stay here and drink all night. And they kept coming up with more and more elaborate stories to try to get me to move out of the pub and to go with them to the house where the party was going to happen. So apparently, yeah.
00:48:02
Speaker
I'm not a good subject for surprise birthday parties or at least you have to be very careful because I'm, I'm very lazy and I have inertia and I do not want to. Once I found a place where I'm enjoying drinking and enjoying myself I don't see the point of going to somebody else's house and drinking continue to drink there I don't know.
00:48:19
Speaker
It didn't work in my case, or it did eventually. But yes, they were, after the fact, they were complaining about how difficult it was to get me to leave the damn pub and to actually go to Chris's house and enjoy the party where everybody was waiting for. Yeah, so more complex example than you might first think.
00:48:39
Speaker
But Section 7.2 looks at the idea, is secrecy even necessary when conspiring?
Conspiracies Without Secrecy
00:48:47
Speaker
Is it possible? Can there be a conspiracy without secrecy? So they first point out that the legal definition of conspiracy
00:48:55
Speaker
doesn't require secrecy. If you fail, completely fail, to keep a conspiracy secret, that doesn't absolve you of the crime. I assume that's like cases where you try to hire a guy to shoot someone and the guy immediately calls the cops on you or something. You'd still committed a conspiracy, even though the secrecy went out the window almost instantly. And then there's also the idea of which comes first, the conspiracy or the secrecy.
00:49:18
Speaker
And so the idea that maybe even for a very, very small amount of time, you might conspire with someone and then realize, OK, we're going to have to keep the secret. But at least for that very first part of it, which may be a matter of minutes or maybe quite longer, you are conspiring and you're not actually explicitly keeping something secret.
00:49:42
Speaker
Yeah, I found that again, that was another thing that I found very useful about this paper was that, you know, as they point out, there is a legal definition of conspiracy. And strangely enough, very few philosophers have actually engaged with that of what, you know, how does what the legal definition of conspiracy, how does that match up with what philosophers have been talking about in terms of conspiracy theories and bringing up this idea that, you know, secrecy really has nothing
00:50:12
Speaker
essential to do with the legal definition of conspiracy uh... it could be a completely out there and open it as as they point out the various uh... uh... racketeering scams and so forth and protection rackets uh... they required that that it not be secret right they they need you to know at least that something bad you know you you've got a really nice business you've got here it'd really be a shame if there was a fire bomb in the middle of the night uh... you know job that would be a horrible thing uh...
00:50:42
Speaker
sure you haven't got 20 bucks to give us or a hundred bucks to give us a month, because that would be such a bad thing to happen. That requires that the person, that the communication really involve a lot of non secrecy.
00:50:59
Speaker
They have the case that the next section is, I guess you're about to talk about, is this coming up as the extortion example that they give? Yes. Just before that, they talk about the biscuits and the ghost. Biscuits, one of those lovely transatlantic terms that means different things in different places. But here, I think we're talking about biscuits in the New Zealand sense where it's cookies. The idea is they give the example where a parent finds the cookie jar empty,
00:51:27
Speaker
and finds one of their children covered in crumbs and says, you must have taken the cookies. The child blames a ghost for the disappearance of the cookies and the child's sibling says nothing to contradict her. And so they say, in this case, it seems that the siblings are engaged in a conspiracy without overtly agreeing to collude.
00:51:50
Speaker
And so they say, do conspiracies have to be overt, do you have to overtly talk about it with someone to agree that you've entered into this conspiracy together? Or can you all be part of a conspiracy without explicitly ever saying it? Everybody just sort of knows what's going on.
00:52:13
Speaker
There's an interesting real world example of this in the United States, at least famously, or I think it's famously, maybe an urban legend.
00:52:25
Speaker
There is a story that goes around about the two major manufacturers of sodas, Pepsi and Coke. These are the two major companies that make these sodas, but there are other competing companies. There's RC, Cola, and IBC. There's been things you've probably never heard of outside of the United States, but there are other competitors in the carbonated beverage market.
00:52:52
Speaker
but the market is dominated by two, Coke and Pepsi. The story has always been, do they conspire together, Coke and Pepsi, to keep third parties out, to make sure that other parties don't? The story has always been that they don't in fact conspire. They've never actually talked and conspired about these things, but they both simultaneously
00:53:18
Speaker
are happy that the world is split up into just two. So for example, one of the famous things that happens is in supermarkets, grocery stores, you have in caps and the in caps can be dominated by like, hey, I want all my Pepsi products on the in caps, or I want all Coca-Cola products on the in caps because they'll catch people's eyes and they'll more likely to grab them because they're right there in a nice location.
00:53:42
Speaker
It turns out that a lot of major grocery chains in the 1970s, particularly 60s and 70s, they would have in-cap licenses where they would give it to Coca-Cola. You get to have this in-cap. Both Coca-Cola and Pepsi asked for 26 weeks.
00:54:03
Speaker
and only 26 weeks for that end cap, which would leave another 26 weeks for their competitor to have it, but would also between the two of them make sure that no other company could squeeze in and have, you know, RC Cola have the end cap for a couple of weeks that they never conspired with one another, but they knew they could ask for up to 26.
00:54:24
Speaker
and not more than 26. And they know that their competitor would also ask for up to 26 and not more than 26 weeks. And therefore between the two of them, they would make sure that they would, you know, half the market, a half of a really good market is a really good thing to do. And it also doesn't get the anti competitive, uh, you know, trust busters that are interested in breaking monopolies. Like, no, no, we don't have a monopoly. There are two separate companies here that are competing on an even playing field. But it is one of these cases where it's like, okay, it's not,
00:54:54
Speaker
at least the accusation is there was never active conspiracy they never talk to each other about it at all but in a game theoretic sort of way they knew exactly how much they could ask for knowing that there's an opponent and knowing that there are third fourth fifth and six possible components yeah we're just gonna the two top ones are gonna
00:55:14
Speaker
and make it happen such that there aren't going to be any other competitors, even though there was never any literal conspiring in the sense that they ever talked to one another about this possibility. I mean, so game theory, I think, raises some kind of interesting possibilities of how you can get something that has the same effect as there being a conspiracy, but without the smoking gun of an actual conspiracy going on.
00:55:38
Speaker
Yeah, so they finished that section by saying, as it stands, if secrecy is a necessary condition for something being a conspiracy, then we need to understand that acting secretively is a behaviour realisable in multiple ways, and is often a kind of necessary afterthought once one starts to conspire. Now that we've hatched this plot, I guess we need to decide who we're going to keep this secret from, eh?
00:55:58
Speaker
And so yes, the last subsection, section 7.4, is a case of conspiracy to commit extortion. So they sort of look at the objection, surely all conspiracies are a secret in some sense.
00:56:12
Speaker
But they've already mentioned the idea of these open secrets that were talked about in the previous section. And then, yes, they get into this idea of a protection racket that obviously the criminals running the protection racket know about it. They're the victims, the people paying the protection money. They all have to know about it. And chances are law enforcement probably knows about it as well, but doesn't want to stir up the hornet's nest by disrupting it too much. So this is a
00:56:41
Speaker
A criminal conspiracy where it seems like everybody isn't actually a secret to anyone who's involved in it. And then they come up with this example of Alex Billy and Chris.
00:56:56
Speaker
So it goes, Alex and Billy conspire to extort Chris for money because they know that Chris engaged in some dodgy deal recently, which Alex and Billy assure Chris would not like to become publicly known. Alex and Billy suggest to Chris that they know about the deal, and also suggest to Chris that Chris give them some money without ever explicitly stating that they will tell anyone about Chris's dodgy deal.
00:57:18
Speaker
Chris simply infers that giving Alex and Billy money will make them go away. As such, Alex and Billy do not seem to be keeping a secret in an overt sense, even though Chris might think that paying them buys their science about what she has done. So yes, the idea of... Yeah, that was an interesting deal you were involved in.
00:57:37
Speaker
Just by the way, I could use a new car. My old one's getting a little bit... That's sort of the hinting and plying stuff without ever explicitly saying what you're doing, yet it's kind of understood amongst all parties.
00:57:51
Speaker
that that's what's going on. In fact, they further tweaked the story to say, so that afterwards, Alex and Billy tell on Chris, or that Alex and Billy tell people about Chris during the extortion, but Chris is clueless about Alex and Billy's duplicity and pays them anyway. It still looks conspiratorial in either case, but it trades upon the notion of secrecy in this instance, being very ambiguous indeed. Yeah, so somebody pays up the extortion without realizing that they were lying all along and told them straight away.
00:58:20
Speaker
So they say, even if this example either gets ruled in as being secret and conspiratorial, our general point remains that there are going to be examples of what really do seem like conspiracies in which secrecy was a secondary consideration. We contend that serious consideration should be made to think of these as actual conspiracies rather than something which is conspiracy-like or conspiracy-light.
00:58:44
Speaker
Nice, nice turn of phrase. And so then we come to section 8 in conclusion, where they basically
Complexity of Secrecy
00:58:51
Speaker
It seems to me coming up to bringing up that particularist viewpoint again, but particularism when it comes to secrecy, they say, we find it to be a complex property of conspiracies and not even a consistent requirement of all conspiracies. It appears as though each conspiracy will necessitate that different secrets be kept from different actors.
00:59:14
Speaker
Once the decision to conspire has been reached until more people are sufficiently confident in the others to proceed, passive secrecy or an active cover-up may be required, but it may not. As events unfold, additional active disinformation may be required, or it may not. Once the goal is reached, secrecy must be maintained in some cases, while in other cases the co-conspirators must reveal the plot either in whole or in part.
00:59:38
Speaker
And they round things out by saying, we recognize that there are in fact two conclusions to draw from this, one strong, the other weak. The weak conclusion is that the secrecy involved in conspiring is multifaceted, and strangely enough, this is not talked about in the academic literature on conspiracy theories. The strong conclusion is this, secrecy is not necessary for something to be considered a conspiracy. And finally, the whole paper ends, rounds out by saying,
01:00:05
Speaker
We would suggest that rejecting either conclusion is problematic. If we stipulate any unwarranted characteristic of conspiracy theory, for example secrecy, however understood, we have arbitrarily ruled out a multitude of actual conspiracies and a multitude of claims about them. Objections to these arguments are grounded in the a priori belief, which we have argued is unjustified, that there is something inherently wrong with the conspiracy theory.
01:00:27
Speaker
Unwilling to abandon that assumption, a move is made to court off some claims, those that are perhaps most likely to stand up to scrutiny as not really conspiracy theories. We believe this move is illogical and indefensible. We hope that these arguments will motivate more careful consideration of the nature of conspiracy and the role of secrecy therein. Scholars and citizens alike, we believe, must examine more critically the concept and its use and suppress what is usually an almost autonomic gag reflex.
01:00:52
Speaker
One final example of the complex relationship between conspiracy and secrecy, having ourselves engaged in the conspiracy of co-authoring this paper, which, although involving no active secrecy on our part, involved the open conspiracy of those who are by their own admission monitoring international email traffic, our goal has been realised. As our plot entailed this outcome from the beginning, we are ready to reveal our conspiracy, which we hope few will find too sinister. Bit of fun at the end there.
01:01:18
Speaker
There you go, yeah. But yeah, I mean, yeah, I think, like you said at the beginning, I don't find a lot to criticize with this paper so much. It's just an interesting look at something that's perhaps been taken for granted a bit and shown to be more complicated, perhaps than people have first assumed.
01:01:36
Speaker
Yeah, I actually forgot to do it, but I was going to look to see whether anybody has, because there's a sense in which this paper has raised a challenge of, hey, we need to be thinking more about conspiracy theories and their relationship to secrecy, but also we just need to think more about secrecy on its own, independent of any discussion of conspiracy theories, although they have this role to play in our analysis conspiracy theories.
01:02:02
Speaker
Not really sure. I feel like I should take a look and see whether anybody has risen to the challenge and try to spell things out a little bit more. Well. Because I think they make a good case for it. It's much more complex than it seems on the surface. Yes. Well, I think I should be able to for the bonus episode for this week. I'm good. Jack up another interview with Emdentith.
01:02:31
Speaker
Last time you talked to one of their papers, I was able to have a bit of a chat afterwards, so maybe...
01:02:35
Speaker
Maybe, for our loyal patrons who listened to the bonus episode this week, I should be able to get the word from the horse's mouth, as it were, if that's not unfair to him, as to whether or not they have had any sort of a response or pushback or criticism what have you to this paper. So that's something to look forward to for the patrons for our bonus episode. As it comes to the main episode for this week,
01:03:02
Speaker
uh i think we're pretty much at the end of it did you have any any final thoughts on the paper yeah this um this actually as we were sitting here i decided to look in the google scholar and it's been it's been cited 20 times so it's uh so some people have have read it um and then um but i haven't the page is still loading to see whether
01:03:28
Speaker
whether all those 20 citations are M and Marty citing themselves, which sometimes happens in academia. But it seems like at least some people have paid attention to the paper. And that's good to know. It's good. But yeah, I'd be curious to be a good thing to put into the bonus episode.
01:03:46
Speaker
and find out from him whether they think that there's been a sufficient uptake of the challenge that they've posed. Yes, I will. As far as I know, it is still in Zhuhai in China, so more wrestling with time zones will ensue, but I'm sure we'll be able to get something to say. But there is an important question here that we didn't answer, which is back in that section on the biscuits and the ghost.
01:04:14
Speaker
the the the grammar or not the grammar the nouns in that sentence were pretty interesting that it says for example imagine a scene in which a parent finds the cookie jar empty and charges a child covered in biscuit crumbs with the crime which is interesting because it uses both cookie and biscuit in the same sentence so in New Zealand is it called a cookie jar or is it called a biscuit
01:04:37
Speaker
It's interesting. Back in my university days when I was doing linguistics, I did some research into how British and American terms get used in New Zealand. Originally, being a British colony
01:04:53
Speaker
the sort of British English was the dominant. But then as America became sort of the cultural force, the pop cultural force, and we were getting so much more American television and movies and music and what have you, sort of American terms started to come in. But the interesting thing was that usually it's not that we would swap the British term for the American term, it would be that we'd use both of them, but sort of in a different way. So you get things like trousers and pants. In England, pants means underwear.
01:05:22
Speaker
Whereas in America, pants is trousers. In New Zealand, pants has sort of become the general term, but trousers has the implication of more formal, like, you know, business, business wear or formal wear. And so the same with biscuits and cookies. I think biscuits is still the general term, but cookies is very specifically like your chocolate chip cookie, like a biscuit could be anything at all that comes in a packet that, you know,
01:05:48
Speaker
whether it has fruit or chocolate on it or anything like that. Whereas a cookie is generally sort of a big round thing that's sort of dough with stuff in it, like chocolate chips. So it takes on levels of nuance. Anyway, that's my linguistics lecture for the day.
01:06:04
Speaker
Yeah, the years that I lived in Britain as well, because it's not only the biscuit versus cookie, but there's also the 10 versus jar because it's clearly a cookie jar.
01:06:18
Speaker
Yes, but then there's a biscuit in Britain. One is where it's stored and the other is what you bought it in. I think it has something more to do with the fact that in America we have lousy containers in the stores so that you buy it
01:06:36
Speaker
in plastic and you take it out of the plastic and you put it into a nice jar or you cook it and you put it into a nice jar. The idea that somebody would actually spend the money to create an actual tin, which is the thing that you bought it in, and then it could be used as an actual dispenser as well. That seems to be beyond what American capitalism is capable of producing. Yes, yes, I don't know. But yes, so that's
01:07:05
Speaker
That's transatlantic linguistics for you. No secret there. None whatsoever. So I think we've come to the end of an episode. I think I'll just do my usual wacky thing and just say goodbye. Yes. Well, totally pipped to you as well.