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When Inferring to a Conspiracy Theory might be the Best Explanation (Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre)
72 Plays3 years ago
Josh and Brian continue their series of "Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre," reviewing the 2016 paper "When Inferring to a Conspiracy Theory might be the Best Explanation" by M R. X. Dentith.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Guide to the Conspiracy'
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. I am Josh Addison in Auckland, New Zealand, and as always representing Northern Heavens Square, we have Professor Brian L. Keeley.
Weather Contrasts: Auckland vs. Gulf Coast
00:00:29
Speaker
How are things for you? Hey Josh, how's it going? Good to see you again. Yeah, it's a bit of a lousy day in Auckland, to be honest. It was turning into summer earlier this week, and now the sun's all gone away.
00:00:43
Speaker
That's okay. They'll be printing now, I'm sure. Similar here. I'm on the Gulf Coast, as you know, and this week it was starting to get cold. It almost got down to freezing, and then it got warm again. So we're having the opposite weather, as we'd expect from our different hemispheres. Yes, yes. What are we talking about this
Dr. Ian Denton's First Paper and Josh's Anecdote
00:01:02
Speaker
week? Well, it's another episode of conspiracy theory masterpiece theater.
00:01:08
Speaker
And we have the first paper, I think, from this person, Dr. Ian Denton. Yes, yes, yes. True story. I went to university.
00:01:17
Speaker
with the indentist way back in the late 90s. So these days, often, Zhuhai in China, I believe, a position over there, but they've been writing on conspiracy theories for quite some time now, and we're finally reaching their contributions. So I'll play a little chime, and then we can get straight into it.
Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories: The First PhD
00:01:41
Speaker
Yes, yes, so it's nice that you mentioned, this is I think actually an important point in the history of the conspiracy theory Masterpiece Theater Series. It's something that we haven't had to really address until now. And that's, you know, what we've been looking at up to this point have been published papers, you know, either journal articles or our chapters in books.
00:02:04
Speaker
And we've been doing that up to this point, but of course we kind of had to, because that was pretty much all there was out there was published papers in journals or in, you know, we saw the David Cody collection where he brought together both previously published papers as well as some new papers. But actually beginning with this paper, we're actually skipping over something that's important, which is before the publication of this paper, there was what I believe is probably the first
00:02:32
Speaker
PhD dissertation on the philosophy of conspiracy theories. And that PhD dissertation that was successfully defended back in 2012 was turned into a monograph, the first monograph that was dedicated to the study of philosophy of conspiracy theories. That's a book called The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories, which is that dissertation got turned into a book
00:03:00
Speaker
in 2014. And, and then, but we're not looking at the books, because if we start looking at the books, after this monograph, many other things are going to come along. And it's a lot, a lot more work to look at a book and, you know, to discuss it the way we've been doing in this in the podcast at this point, they will stick with papers.
Reflecting on the Paper's Content
00:03:19
Speaker
But it's nice to see this because this is the first paper by Dinteth, but it's based on or connected to this earlier work they've done that where we skipped over the work that was done prior, an actual dissertation and then a monograph, a nice long piece of work.
00:03:36
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, this one does seem more manageable. Although that said, I was sort of reading through this saying, okay, we can probably skip through a lot of this quite quickly because a lot of it's restating things you've done before. And then look back and see, I've written six pages of notes on it. So I don't know, I never know if I'm very good at writing notes or very bad at it. But either way, we've got plenty to talk about.
Questioning the Irrationality of Conspiracies
00:03:56
Speaker
So getting straight into it, it has an abstract, as good papers do.
00:04:00
Speaker
The abstract reads, conspiracy theories are typically thought to be examples of irrational beliefs and thus unlikely to be warranted. However, recent work in philosophy has challenged the claim that belief in conspiracy theories is irrational, showing that in a range of cases, belief in conspiracy theories is warranted. However, it's still often said that conspiracy theories are unlikely relative to non-conspiratorial explanations which account for the same phenomenon.
00:04:22
Speaker
However, such arguments turn out to rest upon how we define what gets counted both as a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory, and such arguments rest upon shaky assumptions. It turns out that it is not clear that conspiracy theories are prima facie unlikely, and so the claim that such theories do not typically appear in our accounts as the best explanations for particular kinds of events needs to be reevaluated.
00:04:43
Speaker
which sees what it means and means what it sees, I think. Yeah, I mean, one of the things I really like about this paper is, I mean, it's, you know, sometimes to call something short and sweet is an insult, but actually, I think it's a very, you know, it gets to the point. It doesn't spend a lot of time going off on tangents. We don't have
00:05:04
Speaker
you know, lots of extended examples and thought experiments and so forth. I mean, you know, they get right to the point and and lays out things in a very clear way.
Philosophers vs. Social Scientists on Conspiracies
00:05:15
Speaker
Yeah, although that said, I think the first introductory section is probably the one that we can skip over fairly quickly because it's a bit of a bit of a summary of what's come before. So it starts
00:05:26
Speaker
and stuff that we've been talking about in this podcast for quite a while now. Yes, indeed. Whilst philosophers have been late in coming to the analysis of conspiracy theories, it seems that as a discipline,
00:05:41
Speaker
many of us analyse them with much more sympathy than our peers in the social sciences. In a raft of papers and books, starting with Charles Pigdon's Popper Revisited or What is Wrong with Conspiracy Theories, philosophers like Brian Alkely, Yuhar Riker, Joel Bunting and Jason Taylor, Lee Basham, David Coady and myself have argued that as conspiracies occur, and that theories about conspiracies sometimes turn out to be warranted, conspiracy theories cannot automatically be dismissed just because they're called conspiracy theories, which is basically
00:06:09
Speaker
We've got summation of the themes that we've gone over many times before and just gives a little bit of a breakdown about how philosophers tend to not think that conspiracy theories are prima facie irrational but they do, or some philosophers and people in other disciplines express the view that while conspiracy theories, they may not be inherently irrational but they're still unlikely and this seems to come down to the fact that they think that conspiracies themselves are unlikely.
00:06:35
Speaker
And so then we get a quick survey of opinion. Section 1 is the introduction. Sections 1.1 and 1.2 are philosophers and the unlikeliness of conspiracy theories and non-philosophers and the unlikeliness of conspiracy theories. Yeah, before we get into that there, one other thing that I think is worth noting from the introduction is
00:06:55
Speaker
M talks about coining a new discipline. He calls it the philosophy of conspiracy theories, which I think is interesting because I believe it's in the book that M just cited. I think that's where the term conspiracy theory theory gets coined.
00:07:18
Speaker
M is the first person, I believe, to use that phrase, although he doesn't use it in this particular paper.
00:07:28
Speaker
So in the section of philosophers and the unlikeliness of conspiracy theories, we'll just get an overview of papers that we've looked at. I think just about all the ones that we've looked at before. Popper thinks conspiracy theories are
Skepticism from Philosophers and Social Scientists
00:07:42
Speaker
unlikely. Kassim Kassam thinks they're unlikely and that conspiracy theorists suffer from gullibility. Neil Levy thinks they're unlikely compared to official theories. Pete Nandick thinks they're at least no more unlikely than on conspiratorial theories.
00:07:55
Speaker
Steve Clark with his dispositional situational thing, we remember that one. And then he mentions Peter Lipton, who I don't think is someone who's familiar to me, but mentions the look inference to the best explanation, in which apparently there's a passing mention that conspiracy theories tend to only seem likely if you're already suffering from paranoia. That's not one I'm familiar with.
00:08:19
Speaker
Yeah, I think, you know, Lipton's more known as a philosopher of science and I'm familiar with his work from philosophy of science. And yeah, I think that was just, I mean, in many ways, in many ways, it kind of follows in the tradition, in the tradition of
00:08:37
Speaker
philosophers of science, writing a book about one thing, and then throwing in a negative mention of conspiracy theories as they're going along the way Popper does in the famous early piece by Popper, which is this really short passage in this much bigger book. And I think in many ways, Lipton is kind of, you know,
00:08:58
Speaker
doing the same thing just like hey I'm telling you a book about me I'm giving you a book about scientific explanation and what makes explanations great and what makes them bad and you know what makes them, you know, how do they work and then oh by the way let me throw in this little aside about conspiracy theories as an example of clearly bad theorizing.
00:09:16
Speaker
As we see in the paper, M is going to show us that if you want to handle it that quickly, you're probably going to mess up because you're going to be working at a very shallow level. And it turns out conspiracy theories are a little, little deeper than that.
Humanities vs. Social Sciences: Assumptions on Conspiracies
00:09:33
Speaker
You know, maybe they're maybe they're still wrong, but they're not so obviously wrong or long for such simple reasons. You got to you got to spell it out a little bit more.
00:09:42
Speaker
Yeah, so then M moves on to non-philosophism, what they think about conspiracy theories and their relative likeliness. So he mentions good old Sunstein and Vermeule, talked about them planting him, talked about people talking about them, their crippled epistemologies. He mentions Michael J. Broad and Karen M. Douglas, which is a paper that we looked at. I don't think we ever covered it in conspiracy theory masterpiece theater, but it is one we've looked at a very long time ago when we were talking about
00:10:12
Speaker
the conspiracy theories around Building 7, World Trade Center Building 7, because they wrote a paper that looked at those conspiracy theories as a case study. They characterise conspiracy theories as a kind of negative belief, one which calls into question another explanation and is indicative of a worldview in which most of what we are told is a lie. They could sign belief in such theories as something akin to paranoia.
00:10:39
Speaker
and goes through a bunch of other people from disciplines outside of philosophy who will basically take a similar lead-in view of conspiracy theories. And as M has it, all of these suspicions stem from some variety of the claim, look, conspiracies are unlikely, or even if they do occur, conspiracy theories are unlikely, right? But M would disagree that maybe they're not as unlikely as these people think they are.
00:11:05
Speaker
Now, at this point, I was a little bit suspicious of the paper at this point because it started to sound like papers we've seen in the past where a person will say, this is the thing. This is the thing which is wrong with all conspiracy theories. And now it's seem to be going the other way. This is the one thing that all people who take these views is characteristic of it, which
00:11:29
Speaker
Seems like kind of a generalist kind of a line to take in a paper that's defending particularism, but I don't know if my suspicions are unfounded or if it was just a thing that having read a bunch of these in the past, it just jumped out at me. Maybe we can see those thoughts. It's a good point. I mean, because I think one of the things that strikes me about this paper in terms of the litany of papers that we've been looking at in the Masterpiece Theater
00:11:55
Speaker
is this pointing to a kind of a schism within the study of conspiracy theories between those in philosophy or the humanities on one side and those in the social scientist on the other. And one of the things Em is putting their finger on here is this idea that the starting assumptions
00:12:16
Speaker
of at least social science. It's interesting because it turns out philosophers are a mixed bag according to him. Some of them have a knee-jerk suspicion of conspiracy theories, whereas others have a starting point of taking conspiracy theories more seriously. You might think of it as a healthy mix of attitudes within the humanities or at least within philosophy.
00:12:45
Speaker
But then this idea that well, but on the social science side of things, the standard view seems to be that there's something wrong with them, right? That we need to explain, you know, why people have these irrational beliefs, which kind of takes it for granted that they are irrational beliefs.
00:13:03
Speaker
And I think M is one of the first people in the literature to kind of really start to point to this distinction. But I think what you're pointing to is an interesting one is that you wonder whether M is generalizing about or overgeneralizing about those on the social science side of things, that kind of essentializing them in a way that
00:13:26
Speaker
M is arguing against essentializing conspiracy theorists, right? You know, it's bad to say all conspiracy theorists believe X, or all conspiracy theories have the following thing in common, which then becomes the basis of some generalist rejection or acceptance.
00:13:44
Speaker
But M seems quite happy to say all social scientists think X about conspiracy theories. And admittedly, the ones that are discussed here do seem to share that in common. But with you, I kind of worry a little bit of, you know, is are we being a little cherry picking a little bit here? I want to look
00:14:03
Speaker
deeper at the social science literature to see whether that's accurate. But nevertheless, if we take it as read that unlikely, or certainly unlikeliness definitely is the issue that Em looks at. So if we take it as read that that's the salient issue. Yeah, I think there's, I really liked the last line before, at the end of section one, where Em is talking about the importance of
00:14:30
Speaker
analyzing conspiracy theories, being a particularist. M says, this is particularly important because whilst many of us might reasonably think claims about conspiracies should be evaluated according to evidence, many theorists, as we have seen, argue that we can dismiss such claims out of hand merely because they are conspiracy theories. Making it really clear what's the claim, M is wanting to call into question here, which is,
00:14:58
Speaker
this idea that we don't want to fall into an ad hominin argument against conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists. We need to don't just name call them, but actually see what's right and wrong about what they say. Yeah, so that's definitely the aim. And if we take it that the relative likeliness or unlikeliness of conspiracies and conspiracy theories is at the base of it, that takes us to section two of the paper, which is titled unlikely compared to what?
Defining Conspiracies and Avoiding Bias
00:15:27
Speaker
which of course is a good point. Likeliness and unlikeliness is relative in any case and so when we're talking about are we saying they're unlikely compared to non-conspiratorial explanations or just in general or what. So another bit of a survey, some people say that conspiracy theories are unlikely because conspiracies are unlikely either because
00:15:52
Speaker
conspiracies are just plain rare, or they're really successful, or they're, what's the quote, based on unverified and relatively implausible claims of conspiracy. Now other people say that conspiracy theories are unlikely because given a choice between a conspiracy and a non-conspiracy theory, the non-conspiratorial explanation will be just more likely all things considered. But he said, well, this isn't clear because as other people have argued, as you have argued, conspiracy theories happen all the time. History is full of them.
00:16:21
Speaker
At this point, Ian refers to Catherine Olmsted's book, kind of a few lines come up a bit in the past, detailing American conspiracies, and Ian is much more of his own. And actually, at this point, I can point out my own personal connection to him, which is the first time I met him was at the conference in Miami. I believe it was
00:16:43
Speaker
Right around the time this paper came out, maybe a little bit before, maybe it was 2014, and this paper I believe came out in 2015, or no, maybe it's 2015, this one came out 2016. But I met him at this conference that Joe Yusinski put on.
00:17:00
Speaker
Jo Jusinski, friend of the show who we've interviewed before. That was interesting, I think, in part looking at this paper because that brought together a bunch of social scientists like Jo Jusinski and some of the people that are talked about here. Katherine Olmsted was there. Katherine gave a great talk on the history of conspiracy theories in American history that was based on or came out of her book that's cited here.
00:17:28
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting to read this paper knowing that M was at this conference where we had a bunch of really one of the first time when a bunch of philosophers actually wasn't a bunch of philosophers. It was basically me, Lee Basham and M, I think, were the only philosophers there. But there were several other people in humanities. Jack Bratich was there, does cultural studies and and others. And I think actually it was a nice mix of people, but it was the place where we started to notice
00:17:58
Speaker
some of these kind of differences in the ways in which social scientists were thinking about conspiracy theories, and the way that the people in humanities, there was people were starting to kind of fall into different camps there. And so interesting to see this paper, because in many ways, I think it's kind of documents a little bit about what, what M saw when M came to that conference. So it seems, it seems to me at the end of this that
00:18:22
Speaker
debating about how likely or unlikely conspiracies are, depends in part on how you define what counts as a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory. So the next two, the two subsections under section two are section 2.1, what counts as a conspiracy and section 2.2, what counts as a conspiracy theory. So definitions, now we're doing philosophy. Now I know it's a philosophy paper, we're getting into definitions.
00:18:46
Speaker
So it's a jointly and necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. Yes. So section 2.1, what counts as a conspiracy? It's the definition we all know and love, the good old, we have the three conditions, the conspirators condition, the secrecy condition and the gold condition.
00:19:03
Speaker
M says these conditions are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for some activity to be classified as conspiratorial and it's fair to say that some beliefs about the likeliness or unlikeliness of conspiracy theories hinge on finessing or questioning such a minimal definition of what counts as a conspiracy. And so then it looks back at some of the things that we've covered in the past. Pete Mandich's paper who suggests that conspiracy theories need to be kept secret
00:19:28
Speaker
But I think as we've seen when we've looked at his paper and other people have made similar claim that it doesn't really work out because for all the reasons we've seen in the past, sometimes the whole point is that conspirators want, after the conspiracy has been achieved, they want to take credit, they want you to know about it.
00:19:44
Speaker
And it also sort of, if you say conspiracies have to get secret forever, then that means by definition, nothing we know of as a conspiracy theory is actually a conspiracy theory. It doesn't really seem to work out. So M certainly wants to go for a maximal definition and basically says, you know, okay, yes, that rules in things like surprise birthday parties that we might not want to think of as conspiracy theories, but, you know, too bad. That's a bullet we can bite.
00:20:12
Speaker
A maximal definition avoids the problem that the likes of Andy and Papa have had in the past of how exactly how you account for these historical conspiracies that we know happened, that we have a documentary proof of occurring. And so he says that defining a way certain cases of known conspiracies as not conspiratorial enough
00:20:34
Speaker
moves the problem of assessing the likelihood of conspiracy theories away from talk about the evidence to something making it a definitional issue instead, which is basically what we want to avoid. And that then leads into the section on what counts as a conspiracy theory. So Ian says, no matter what we believe about the likeliness of conspiracies, surely we're justified in thinking that conspiracy theories are unlikely. After all, there are an awful lot of conspiracy theories and many, if not most of them, turn out to be unwarranted.
00:21:00
Speaker
This kind of argument is commonly put forward as one reason for being suspicious about conspiracy theories generally, but it too relies on us defining what gets ruled in and what's ruled out by the term conspiracy theory. And so let me get to the line of argument that we've seen lots of times in the past the idea that the official theories aren't conspiracy theories basically by definition.
00:21:20
Speaker
He quotes David Cote from Conspiracy Theories and Official Stories. He quotes Neil Levy from Replically Socialized Knowledge and Conspiracy Theories, but says, sometimes theories are official because they've been endorsed sincerely by field-relevant experts, and sometimes theories are official because someone has either insincerely endorsed them, or because they have no relevant expertise, and so their endorsement means nothing. And gets into the idea of the
00:21:44
Speaker
weapons of mass destruction that was supposedly in Iraq, which was the official theory. The official theory was that they were there and yet that was either being put forward by people who were, I don't know if we ever got to the bottom of whether it was people who were genuinely insincere or people who wanted to believe it was true but didn't have the expertise to actually
00:22:03
Speaker
to be able to speak about it truthfully. So the official theory ended up being not entirely true. And I guess we just had Colin Powell just passed away recently and seemed to at least regret his role in giving that speech to the UN and
00:22:21
Speaker
either feeling like, you know, at the very least he felt kind of used and had his reputation tarnished because he thought he was, at least he proposes that he went forward with a good faith. You know, I thought these things were true. I was led to believe they were true, that the evidence was good. But, you know, he admitted later that, you know, say what you want. The evidence that I presented was not accurate, unlike what I thought at the time. Yeah. So we go in to look at Steve Clark, who we've
00:22:51
Speaker
seen plenty of in the past and has
00:22:53
Speaker
business about dispositional explanations and situational explanations, and so he sort of kind of wants to say that conspiracy theories are the wrong kind of explanation, but again, M doesn't want to accept that, and at the end of it says that restricting the definition of what counts as a conspiracy theory ends up making conspiracy theories relatively unlikely, because the interesting cases of warranted conspiracy theories get defined away as not being proper conspiracy theories. However, if we keep to a general definition,
00:23:21
Speaker
then we can analyse conspiracy theories with respect to the evidence, which either warrants or does not warrant them, rather than dismissing conspiracy theories out of hand for just being conspiracy theories. And this is basically what Ian's been angling at the whole time, getting into a particularist. We'll see the word come up, I think.
00:23:38
Speaker
Yeah, and I think what's really what's interesting about the move that happens between particularly between that the section that you just were reading the I guess is 2.1 where we're talking about what makes a conspiracy a conspiracy now in the section the next section he talks about what makes a conspiracy theory a conspiracy theory and one of the nice things that I think comes up as that transition happens
00:24:00
Speaker
is the generalist view by saying that you can reject a conspiracy theory solely on the basis of it being conspiracy theory really means you only have to look at one thing. All there is is the conspiracy theory and then you can judge it to be rational or irrational or warranted or unwarranted, but you just have to look at the one thing.
00:24:23
Speaker
But when we get into the discussion of conspiracy theories and the importance of official stories and whatnot, notice that what that brings in is now that there has to be multiple theories on the table. Now, you can't just look at a single thing and say, oh, this good thing is a good theory or bad theory. Now what you're confronted with is multiple explanations of the same event, and now you have to choose between them. One of the things that happens in the move from a generalist account to a particularist account is in some sense, you got to do more work.
00:24:52
Speaker
Because in one, you only have to analyze the conspiracy theory or you have a theory, you analyze it and go, oh, it's a conspiracy theory, therefore reject it in the story. But if particularism is right, one of the kind of side effects of that is that end up having to do a comparison, which means you have to look at at least two different theories. And the whole idea of bringing up this inference to best explanation, it has as its background assumption that there are multiple explanations to choose from.
00:25:20
Speaker
and then you have to pick the best one. And that's one of the things that I think is useful to point out is the idea that, and also it points out, or M doesn't make it clear necessarily here, but there might be multiple conspiracy theories that are unofficial right there.
00:25:43
Speaker
If you think about the case of 911, right there's, there's you know there's theories where, you know, the, you know, the FBI or at least the United States government was behind it. There are others that have maybe George somewhere else was behind it. I mean there are multiple different kinds of theories about what happened.
00:26:01
Speaker
And now we've got, you know, and then there's the official explanation as well, that it was Al Qaeda. But now you're in a situation where there are multiple theories on the table. And then we need to, you know, if we want to explain the situation, well, we need to pick just one of them. How do you pick just one of them? Well, you got to figure out which one is the best explanation. And and one of the things I like about that move is it kind of makes the whole story. It's pointing out that like, yeah, the story is much more complicated.
00:26:27
Speaker
It's not a matter of just looking at one theory, rejecting it out of hand. Life is not so simple. So sections one and two are basically the setup for section three, which is a case for treating conspiracy theories on their individual merits. So here Ian starts actually arguing specifically in favor
00:26:48
Speaker
of a particularist outlook. So that introduces the terms, particularist and generous, crediting Joel Bunting and Jason Taylor, whose people looked at in the past, and says that this is what we're going for. We have a generalist idea or the particularist idea of particularism
00:27:06
Speaker
is what N is going to want to argue in favour of. So we then get another bit of a survey of the literature up until this point we've seen before. N cites Charles Pigdon, David Coady, Lee Basham defending the particularist view. And reiterating Pigdon, N says a general skepticism of these things called conspiracy theories makes it all the easier for conspirators to get away with their conspiracies.
00:27:29
Speaker
After all, it's easy enough for them to respond to any claim about their activity as being merely a conspiracy theory. Yet we need to remember that it's uncontroversial to say conspiracies occur, so why then is it controversial to say conspiracy theories are irrational to believe? As such, the preceding argument as to why we should treat conspiracy theories on the individual merits is designed to bolster the particularist case. Given many of the attempts to show that conspiracy theories are unlikely to come out of problematic generalising strategies,
00:27:53
Speaker
should we not assess particular conspiracy theories on their individual merits? Which is to say, if we accept that conspiracies are not unlikely, or at least not as unlikely as some conspiracy theory theorists have made out, surely they can, in a range of cases, feature in our best explanations. But I like that it does bring in this, there's the ethical dimension of it as well, that there is, you can make it easier for bad people to get away with doing bad things if you allow them to write off criticisms as just a conspiracy theory.
00:28:22
Speaker
Yes, I think that's right. So we move into section 3.1 showing that a conspiracy theory is likely. So if we're going to be particularists, then we'll need to evaluate conspiracy theories on the merits to see if they're good or the best explanation. So M asks, how do we work out whether some explanatory hypothesis which cites a conspiracy as a salient cause is the one we want to say is the best explanation of why some event occurred? And M brings up then the three kinds of probabilities.
00:28:49
Speaker
that we want to consider. You have the posterior probability, the extent to which the available evidence renders some hypothesis probable, the prior probability, the degree to which the hypothesis is independently likely, and the relative probability, the likelihood of the hypothesis relative to the other hypotheses being considered. And so Lipton comes back in at this point, sorry, you had
00:29:09
Speaker
No, it's like we're getting into the, you know, the Bayesian territory here, prior probabilities and posterior probabilities of, you know, like what is no longer about whether things are just simply true or false, but you know, how likely are they to be true or false and
00:29:26
Speaker
being able to make those comparisons. So he brings up Lipton again who had the idea of theories could be lovely, but conspiracy theories are usually lovely but unlikely, meaning that
00:29:40
Speaker
their posterior probability is low, even though the other two may not be. But as we've seen, the idea that conspiracies can't be independently likely is usually based on particular more restrictive definitions of what counts as a conspiracy or a conspiracy theory.
00:29:58
Speaker
And I think, so one of the things I thought this coming back to lift and it was something I wanted to this distinction that Lipton draws between the lovely but the unlikely, or the lovely and the likeliness of theories.
00:30:14
Speaker
One thing that's interesting to me here is that the title of the paper is, When Inferring to a Conspiracy Might Be the Best Explanation. Best explanation here is a technical term within the philosophy of science. There's this concept of the inference to best explanation or IBE, it's sometimes abbreviated as. The idea of IBE or inference to best explanation,
00:30:40
Speaker
actually comes out of a kind of general theory about how to reason to a conclusion. How do you get to a conclusion given some evidential starting point? And traditionally within philosophy, as you know, the famous two ways of getting there was one by deduction.
00:31:02
Speaker
Right, so you got good old fashioned, logically deductive arguments you know modus ponens and modus tunnels and all men are mortal Socrates is a man therefore Socrates is mortal. That's a deductive argument so you draw that conclusion, it deductively follows from those premises.
00:31:19
Speaker
Then that's deduction, but then not all arguments work like that. We also have more probabilistic arguments. If it hasn't rained today and it hasn't rained the day before and it hasn't rained the day before that, I might conclude that it's not going to rain tomorrow because it looks like we're in a dry batch right now, and that's an inductive argument.
00:31:43
Speaker
millennia, those were the two argument forms that people were familiar with within philosophy in the West. Arguments were either deductive in form or inductive in form, and people looked through all the different ways in which you can use those arguments in those ways. But at the end of the 19th century, people realized that there's another form of explanation that seems to be going on
00:32:06
Speaker
And it was the kind of explanation that seemed to be going on in the case of science, because science had elements of deduction in it had, you know, obviously people were doing deductive things when they were like predicting experiments and so forth. You know, if this theory is right, therefore this is the kind of result I should see in this test. And then you go out and test it. So there were deductive elements to it. And clearly probability had a lot to do with
00:32:31
Speaker
science as well, you've got to go out and collect a lot of data in order to do your inductive generalization. But something still seemed to be different going on. And one of the first people to talk about this was Charles Saunders Purse, an American philosopher of science. And he called it the he called it abduction.
00:32:51
Speaker
All right, so you have deduction, induction, and abduction. And abduction is this kind of scientific approach. That term really never caught on outside of philosophy. You don't hear very many people invoking abduction. Sometimes you'll hear people talk about the hypothetical deductive method.
00:33:10
Speaker
which is supposed to be this scientific method where you posit a hypothesis, i.e. a candidate explanation, you see what results are supposed to come from that hypothesis and then you go out and test them. By the way, this circles back to Popper. This is what Popper is famous for talking about, is this idea that good theories, you should be able to deduce from a theory what the consequences are and then go out and test them. If you have a theory that either you can't
00:33:36
Speaker
uh deduce any consequences from or that if you can deduce consequences but they're you know unaccessible in one way or another then like this is a bad scientific theory according to Popper that you know that yes it's supposed to be deductive but the point is you want to posit a hypothesis and then go out in the world and test it and that eventually becomes this uh inference to best explanation right and that's another phrase it gets thrown around when we're talking about
00:34:06
Speaker
this thing called abduction. You're confronted with multiple explanations and you have to pick between them. You've got all these different hypotheses of what happened. There are candidate explanations and you've got to figure out which one should I endorse. That then gives you the problem of like, okay, I'm supposed to pick the best explanation, but how do I pick the best? I mean, what makes an explanation better than another explanation?
00:34:31
Speaker
And the nice thing that I think Lipton does is he points out that there's at least two different ways of understanding what it means to be the best explanation or a better explanation. One is it just seems more likely. Yeah, that hypothesis seems like it's the sort of thing that we should expect to happen. That doesn't surprise me as an explanation. That seems like a pretty reasonable explanation for what's going on.
00:34:54
Speaker
But the second way to think about an explanation as being good or bad or whether they have certain kinds of what are called virtues, just like a person can be virtuous. We can say, hey, this saint is a better person than other people because they have these virtues. They're very charitable. They're very generous. They're very kind. Name your favorite virtues. And we say, yeah, this is a better person.
00:35:19
Speaker
because they have these virtues. Well, the idea is that theories have virtues too, virtues like simplicity. The better explanation, this is Occam's razor. If you have to choose between two theories, you pick the theory which is simpler. Why? Is it because the universe is simple? It's like, well, I don't know, but it's a virtuous thing for a theory to be simple. If you have to choose between two otherwise equal theories,
00:35:44
Speaker
Pick the simpler one, but other virtues that get discussed are things like unification, right? You know, instead of saying, you know, hey, if I have an explanation that tells me, hey, these two different phenomena that I thought were completely different actually have a common cause, right? That, you know, that you might think that.
00:36:01
Speaker
Fire burning and rusting seem like two completely different phenomena, but somebody comes along and goes, no, I think they're both oxidation. I'm going to explain both rusting and things catching on fire as at root being the same sort of thing. It's the taking on of oxygen. That's a virtue of a theory that takes two things and shows that they're just one.
00:36:22
Speaker
And there are other ones, there's things like fertility, like how many other ideas does this theory generate? Is it an intellectual dead end? Or does it raise all sorts of new questions for scientists to go out and study, coherence, consistency? There are all these other virtues that theories may or may not have. And what Lipton points to is this idea that, okay, well, the other one way of understanding
00:36:46
Speaker
theories as being the best explanation is that they are more likely. The other way is that they have all these virtues, right? They're, they're really, you know, they're simple and they're unifying and they're, you know, they're coherent both with other things, you know, they're consistent within themselves and they're coherent with other things that we think about the universe and they're very fertile. That's another way of understanding betterness or bestness. And that's what Lipton calls loveliness, like a theory that has all of those things.
00:37:14
Speaker
would be lovely. It's like, oh, wow, it's a beautiful story that ties a lot of things together and tells a nice simple story about things. That's one way to be a good explanation. I think it's really interesting or not, it's really nice that M brings this up in the case of conspiracy theories because as I've written, I think one of the things that's really attractive about conspiracy theories often is that they are lovely.
00:37:40
Speaker
in Lipton sense, right? They have these features that we want theories to have. We want our theories to be simple. We want them to be coherent. We want them to unify things. And conspiracy theories do that in spades. But the worry is that a good theory would want us not only lovely, but also as likely. Because if it's lovely,
00:38:03
Speaker
But it just seems really unlikely, then it might be a lovely thing but it's just, it's just still, it's not gonna be a best. It's not gonna be a, it's not gonna be best on multiple levels of best or multiple analyzing best.
00:38:19
Speaker
What M is putting his finger on here, as I think Lipton is right to point out, is like, yeah, there's a split in the way that we analyze theories, a schism between two different ways of thinking about what makes a theory a good theory. And a lot of conspiracy theories do really well in one category, or at least this is the analysis that some people want to give, is they do really well in some aspects, but they really don't do well in the other. But they're really good at being lovely, but they're really bad at being likely.
00:38:47
Speaker
And then M comes along and goes, I agree with you that they're lovely, but actually I think you're wrong to, you know, to besmirch them for not being likely. That a little bit of a little slight of hand is going on in the use of definitions and so forth to make them look less likely than perhaps we ought to consider them.
00:39:09
Speaker
I think that brings us into the next section of the paper, which is the independent likeliness of conspiracies. Our estimates as to how independently likely conspiracies are varies over time. Certainly post the revelations of the NSA's mass surveillance program by Edward Snowden in 2013, claims of large-scale political conspiracy have been treated much more sympathetically and considered more likely by ordinary reasoners.
00:39:33
Speaker
It appears people underestimated how independently likely it was that a major political conspiracy was happening here now, and then continues working out the true prior probability or independent likeliness of claims of conspiracy being in amongst the pool of credible explanatory hypotheses will be, of course, difficult. However, it's fair to say that people either underestimate or underplay both historical and contemporary accounts of events which cite conspiracies as salient causes.
00:39:58
Speaker
and goes on to use the death of Alexander Litvinenko as an example where basically all the evidence we have, he was poisoned by polonium which is not something you can get your hands on unless you have basically very high up connections to all the evidence we have of his death.
00:40:13
Speaker
is that a conspiracy was involved. And as he points out, there are multiple competing conspiracy theories. Either it was Putin or people loyal to him who orchestrated the death. Potentially, maybe it was anti-Putin people who poisoned Litvinenko just to make Putin look bad. Maybe Litvinenko himself consented to this, to be a martyr for the cause. We don't know. There are multiple explanations, but they're all conspiratorial.
00:40:39
Speaker
And everything we know about the case would lead us to believe that the conspiracy theory is the likely one yet. Yeah, it's unlikely that you accidentally got poisoned with plutonium-210.
00:40:50
Speaker
It's just not something that happens on a day-to-day basis. And it's also unlikely to be a cock up as well. It seems like this is the sort of thing that would have to have been done intentionally. And only certain parties would be able to carry it out, state actors for the most part.
00:41:11
Speaker
So, you know, either it's a state actor, in this case, the Russian Federation carrying it out, or somebody who, another state actor, who wants to make it look like it was the Russian Federation. So. So when you have a situation like this, where you've got multiple competing conspiracy theories, you're going to have to determine which of them is the best one. And doing so, as the MCs would show that the explanatory hypothesis is probable in the posterior sense, Lipton's likeliest explanation,
00:41:40
Speaker
as well as the prior and relative sense. Then we get a little side note about evidence in prior probabilities where M points out that the amount of evidence you need to show that a conspiracy theory or any any other hypothesis is relative. In some cases you might need more and in some cases you might need less. M doesn't go into it right here but it does seem to sort of tie into stuff we've seen in previous papers when we talk about the kind of societies that people live in and some certain societies
00:42:07
Speaker
you would be much more willing to believe that conspiracies will be occurring and would require much less evidence to be convinced of it and so on. And of course, conspiracy theories are independently likely, I think I've written that wrong, are not independent. I'm just reading my notes. I've missed out on not, and I was about to say exactly the wrong thing. But basically, conspiracy theories
00:42:31
Speaker
are not necessarily likely for any kind of event you might ever want to propose. There are certain kinds of events, such as the poisoning of someone who defected from Putin's government, where a conspiracy theory would be likely, but just any old happening is not necessarily the case. But there's a conspiracy behind it. I thought this was a good point where he's, where M is trying to make it clear that M doesn't want to be seen to be a generalist on behalf of conspiracy theories.
00:42:59
Speaker
Again, the argument here is in favor of particularism. It's not just, you know,
00:43:09
Speaker
just because there's a conspiracy doesn't mean that that's the more likely that it is necessarily the best explanation. That paragraph ends, it may make sense to consider a conspiracy as a salient cause, say in a political scandal, whilst also thinking that the extreme weather event in Otago last August is most likely explained by a change in the climate, rather than say covert US sponsored weather manipulation.
00:43:38
Speaker
After all, conspiracies might be more common than we think, but only relatively likely when it comes to explanations for certain kinds of events, say political scandals, and relatively unlikely in others, say why the courier always delivers packages when I am not home.
00:43:56
Speaker
Yeah, so very much wants to avoid going the other way and becoming, as you say, a generalist in favour of them and it's still about evaluating on their individual merits. So we get to section 3.3, which is kind of tying everything together. It's entitled Connecting Prior Posterior and Relative Probabilities.
00:44:16
Speaker
Same says when we consider any kind of conspiracy which is embedded in a conspiracy theory, to wit an explanation citing a conspiracy as a salient cause, we have to demonstrate that there is a link between the conspiracy and the event in question. And then later he continues demonstrating there is a connection between a conspiracy and the occurrence of some event, such that the conspiracy is the salient cause of that event, shows that the conspiracy is probable in the prior posterior and relative sense.
00:44:41
Speaker
And it again stresses that this is still particularism. M says none of this says that conspiracy theories are prima facie likely. That would be a generalist claim, which would be as problematic as the generalist skepticism typically associated with conspiracy theories. Rather, this is an argument in favour of particularism about conspiracy theories.
00:45:00
Speaker
When we hear some conspiracy theory, we should at the very least treat the claim of conspiracy seriously and look at the evidence. This is not an arduous burden. When inferring to any explanation, we have to look at the evidence before we can accept or dismiss it. Conspiracy theories are no different. But we still see a lot of people writing this subject want to say that conspiracy theories are special or different in some way, which makes them prima facie unlikely. We've seen that plenty of times in the paper. We've looked at it in the past.
00:45:26
Speaker
I think the point of the thing is if conspiracies are more independently likely than they are given credit for, then the burden of proof on a conspiracy theory might not be as great as some people think. So, Ian says that the world in which we admit not just the conspiracies occur, but there are more often than maybe we'd like to think,
00:45:43
Speaker
If someone claims there's a conspiracy in existence here and now, then should we not investigate said claim? That is, should we not just dismiss it? No. We should treat the allegations seriously enough to ask what is the evidence, and how well does that evidence stack up compared to other rival explanatory hypotheses? Could this particular conspiracy theory prove to be the best explanation of some of these?
00:46:04
Speaker
If the answer is no, then the conspiracy theory is unwarranted and we've learned that some other explanation will be yes. However, if the answer is yes, then we have on our hands a case where inferring to a conspiracy turned out to be the best explanation. And then, to point out that people like social psychologists seem to want to say that belief in conspiracy theories rather has negative social consequences.
00:46:30
Speaker
due to their unlikeliness, which they associate belief and expertise with health problems, decreased civic virtue, hostility and radicalisation. But in these cases, I'm not sure that I entirely got that, but at the end it just sort of seemed to be another thing that occurred that he wanted to make sure was covered before getting on to the rest of it.
00:46:52
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. I was a little puzzled by it because that's a, I don't know, maybe, I mean, maybe it's maybe he's gesturing at what again might we pointed earlier that that in points to this distinction between how humanities folks or philosophers on the one hand think about conspiracy theories versus how social scientists do. You know, at some point I was trying to feel like was this an attempt to kind of go back to that distinction and and point out that well,
00:47:18
Speaker
maybe social scientists are just simply being motivated by a different set of concerns, right, that they are concerned with things like, you know, public trust in our institutions and so forth, and they're more concerned about the political impact of
00:47:36
Speaker
of believing in conspiracy theories and that that might explain why they kind of start off on a different foot than the humanities folks do. But that, I mean, that was, but yeah, that was the best that I could make of why there's this kind of, to me, it feels like a move back to talking about social science again and trying to figure out, well,
00:47:57
Speaker
This is true. I just don't know necessarily why, why it's here at this point in the paper. Yeah, I mean, so having said that social scientists, psychologists will like to say there might be these negative consequences, I think that in the argument against that was that they're there, they should be not saying that these behaviors are bad because these people are evaluating conspiracy theories on their merits and coming up with these bad consequences. They're saying it's because individual psychological features of individuals are a problem.
00:48:27
Speaker
And he finishes by saying, if it turns out we're wrong about the supposed unlikeliness of conspiracies here and now, those negative social consequences, distrust and authority, empathy with respect to engaging in the political process in the light, might very well be appropriate responses to talk of conspiracy theories.
00:48:42
Speaker
It's then important to understand this issue of just how probable conspiracies really are and what this says about how we go about inferring that a conspiracy theory is the best explanation. This is of serious importance because it looks very much like we typically and artificially underestimate the prior probability of conspiracies. With that in mind, in our condemnation of conspiracy theories, those who believe conspiracy theorists, those who believe conspiracy theories,
00:49:07
Speaker
needs to be similarly examined, which brings us then to the conclusion. Which is one of those nice conclusions that's short enough that I can read the whole thing out in one go. It concludes, as we have seen, much of the reasoning behind thinking both conspiracies and conspiracy theories are unlikely comes out of defining them as such, rather than asking what prevents them from featuring in the set of best explanations.
00:49:30
Speaker
If we claim conspiracies are only conspiracies if they are kept perfectly secret, or that conspiracy theories which have been endorsed are no longer proper conspiracy theories, then we run the risk of defining away some truly interesting questions which are at the root of whether or not conspiracy theories really are irrational to believe, unwarranted and the like.
00:49:46
Speaker
It seems that by defining why conspiracies and conspiracy theories is prima facie unlikely, then we not only do the analysis of inferring what gets ruled in by our best references of disservice, but we unfairly shift the burden of proof onto those who might well have good reason to infer that a conspiracy theory really is occurring here and now. This matter is of import to the academic discussion of these things we call conspiracy theories because, once again as we've seen, there are a plethora of views both inside and outside of philosophy,
00:50:11
Speaker
which adopt question-begging definitions in order to come to the conclusion that such good theories are biased. And there we have it. So, I mean, yeah, a lot of it was a restatement of things we've seen clearly at times in the past, but I think a very nice, good sort of positive case for adopting the particularist viewpoint there. And I think doing so explicitly, perhaps it wasn't
00:50:37
Speaker
made in those tools and previous papers. Yeah, I think it's a very nice summary of a lot of the things that have, it's a nice one to do in the Masterpiece Theater because it kind of sums up a lot of the discussion until this point in the literature.
00:50:52
Speaker
but also I think interestingly kind of starts to lay out some of the ideas that are going to become much more important because in many ways, M's paper, this particular paper, but the book out of which this is taken, being the first monograph in the philosophy of conspiracy theories or conspiracy theory theory kind of sets the stage. People now start responding to M's book because there's this nice long and well thought out
00:51:22
Speaker
developed theory of what's going on in conspiracy theories. So I think it's a nice turning point in our in our discussion of the various masterpieces of conspiracy theory theory. Not a good paper to agree on. I enjoyed it. Yeah, I will. I do want to correct one, correct the record on one thing, which is in in the notes, it's actually about Pete Mandik's paper. So Pete Mandik has this paper called Shit Happens. Yep, looked at that one.
00:51:50
Speaker
We looked at it before in the footnote. M says shit happens is Mandik's playful term for what are commonly called coincidence theories or cock up theories. Such theories explain away the occurrence of an event as being the result of often unpredictable complex and interesting causes. While such theories might look conspiratorial, they are in fact better explained as the product of happenstance, which is right. The only thing I'd pointed out is because I was
00:52:17
Speaker
I'm personally, I take this as a personal front because Mandik actually got that for me. It's actually, it's a line, it's one of the two quotes that I have at the beginning of my conspiracy theory papers. And Pete actually was a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis when I was a postdoc. And that was when I was right after this paper, before this paper got
00:52:40
Speaker
the conspiracy theories paper got published, but I had already written it and sent it in. And I was quite happy to be the first person as far as I know to get the phrase shit happens into the Journal of Philosophy. That and also I have a paper with a Monty Python title as another paper.
00:53:04
Speaker
There are very few things in life where you can really feel proud and getting the phrase shit happens into the Journal of Philosophy or a Mighty Python title in a philosophy journal. Let me enjoy those few victories that I have as an academic philosopher. Yeah, so overall,
00:53:26
Speaker
a nice paper to have looked at and be interested to see what comes of it. M writes a number of papers after this so there will be more to come. So I think unless you have any final comments we can probably bring all of this to a close.
00:53:40
Speaker
I think it was a good contribution to the Masterpiece Theatre and got some new ideas out there and nice summation of some of the older ones. So until next week, I guess, oh, I suppose, of course, I do have to mention that we have bonus episodes and what have you. And if you're a patron, then you could get one. And if you're not a patron, then you could become one by going to thetrain.com and the podcast is going to the conspiracy and all that.
00:54:05
Speaker
Well, that's slightly vulgar business that we podcasters have to involve ourselves in. But with all of that out of the way, I think. You know, I'd like to say, I mean, you know, this, this M-dentist person, it's pretty good, some pretty good ideas. I think we ought to figure out a way of involving them in the podcast in some way. That would be. Get an interview, an interview maybe one day. Something like that. On China Time, that can't be too hard to work something out.
00:54:30
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Seems like they might have something to say that would be useful to the podcasting world of the philosophy conspiracy theories. That seems like a, it would be a move in the right direction, I think. You'd think so. You'd think so, yeah. We'll have to see what we can organize, I suppose. But until that day, until we get to the end of the show itself, I think we'll just have to leave you our audience members to go about your business and just say goodbye. And I'll say tiddly bonk.