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Neil Levy gets radical about conspiracy theories
28 Plays4 years ago
Josh and M review the 2007 paper “Radically Socialized Knowledge and Conspiracy Theories” by Neil Levy.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
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Transcript
Arrival and Initial Intrigue
00:00:16
Speaker
We arrived in Manchester on the last train from Alderthrop, and despite the hour being late, Morrissey insisted that no time be wasted. As such, he made me feel well at the station and said he would see me in the morning. Thus I returned to our chambers alone, and ate a solitary repast before appearing to bed. I woke then to the sound of clattering and stomping. Stopping only to affix my gown, I entered the living room to find Morrissey, several tomes, and the remains of a very eggy breakfast spread over the floor.
Revelations of a Conspiracy
00:00:40
Speaker
Pluttles, my good man, I have a solution. Very good, Morrissey. I stepped over a book, Tunstall's Dictionary of Wells and Gimlets, I believe, and sought refuge at the breakfast table. Well, are you not going to ask about the resolution of our recent escapade? Yes, of course. I swallowed a piece of toast.
00:00:57
Speaker
As you know, Archibald America, although I doubt those are their real names, lured us to order Throp in order to uncover the crypt. Thus we can safely say that our abductors are not part of the criminal conspiracy we uncovered. Or at least, not directly. I suspect they are connected to my former compatriot. Marcy had a tendency to pause somewhat when speaking his former companion's name. Stickle.
00:01:24
Speaker
The connection is still not clear, mostly because what I knew of him turned out to be largely his invention. However, it does suggest that information about the existence of this particular criminal conspiracy has slipped into the consciousness of other criminals.
Church of Orphans and Clue Removal
00:01:39
Speaker
Fascinating, RSE. I dipped a finger of toast into the remains of one of his lordship's eggs.
00:01:44
Speaker
And if this information is becoming common knowledge in the criminal fraternity, then that is bad news for the people in the conspiracy. Undoubtedly, they will need to regroup and find new identities. I suspect, Pludwalls, that a number of notable people are going to go missing in the next few months. But what of the Church of Orphans, Morrissey? Surely we can use the fake graves there to find these damn noble villains. His lordship glance to my vigorous language, there was a slight pause before he spoke again.
00:02:11
Speaker
I'm afraid that by the time the local magistrate and the constabulary reached the crypt, the coffins and whatever information that would identify the conspirators were gone.
Consequences of Conspiracy Exposure
00:02:22
Speaker
I am not sure what Archibald and Merikat wanted to find there, but all they have done is alert the conspirators to the extent to which their conspiracy has been revealed. How jolly irritating. Puddles, I do wish you would control your temper. This language is most unbecoming. Sorry, Marcy.
00:02:38
Speaker
But I agree. We have learnt much in our adventure in the North, but at the same time we now have little to do other than wait. But wait for what, Morrissey? For one of the pseudonymous criminals to break ranks and act hastily. Now we know they are out there, the veil of secrecy they once operated under will doubtlessly
Podcast Introduction from New Zealand
00:02:58
Speaker
drop. This is about the start of this adventure, Pluddles. There are several more acts to go before these rum doings at a close. Well.
00:03:08
Speaker
Well, well, well. And I meant it. The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. N. Denton.
Acknowledging Supporters
00:03:33
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison in Auckland, New Zealand. They are Dr. M. Denteth. And where is it now? Christchurch? Indeed. Christchurch, New Zealand. Just jetting all around the country at the moment. You're like a pinball of some kind. Yes, I am a pinball wizard.
00:03:51
Speaker
Now, before we get into it, we have a new patron. I understand. We do. In fact, actually, we have a new patron, and we have a patron who has increased their fidelity towards us. It's all very awkward. So we have a new patron who will remain nameless, for they have pledged under the threshold of secrecy.
00:04:14
Speaker
and we have a new patron, actually an old patron, but a patron at a new elevated level, which we'll deal with next week. Let's just say it's a bit of a rum doing this one.
00:04:29
Speaker
have nothing to do with our patronage and funds and what have you. I'm the 1950s housewife in this podcasting venture. Em looks after all of that business. How many patrons do we actually have if it's not a vulgar question
Introduction to Neil Levy's Work
00:04:44
Speaker
to ask? Somewhere in the vicinity of 30 now. Goodness. I find that quite foolish. Yes, it's 20 to 9 more patrons than I ever expected.
00:04:54
Speaker
There we go. Well, thank you one and all. We'll get to your bonuses at the end of this episode, but we're not at the end of the episode. We're at the start of the episode, and it's another edition of the podcaster's guide to the Masterpiece Theatre. That's not right. Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre.
Social Epistemology and Conspiracy Theories
00:05:14
Speaker
So we have a new person, I think. This is the first time this particular philosopher has appeared in our series that I recall. And it won't be the last time, but yes, this is Neil Levy's first appearance in the philosophical canon about conspiracy theory theory. We'll be having another new entrant coming up rather soon as well in the figure of Pete Mandich, who will
00:05:38
Speaker
into the cannon and then and then just basically leave explosively. But Neil, Neil hangs around and it's going to be interesting to compare his latter work with this particular paper by which he announced his entry. Now, well, should we get right into it then? I think we should. Let's play that chime.
00:06:04
Speaker
Indeed. So the paper we're looking at today is a radically socialized knowledge and conspiracy theories by Neil Levy from the issue of Episteme. Or Episteme. No one's entirely sure. No one, nobody knows. From 2007. That we are sure about.
00:06:21
Speaker
that we first looked at last time. So, yes, Neil Levy is a newcomer to me, at least. But another antipodean philosopher. So, Neil is over in Australia, as is David Coady. Of course, we've seen the work of Charles Pigdom,
00:06:40
Speaker
So that's three people in the canon at this point in time who are all in the antipodes. I will be joining them shortly. So that suddenly makes four. Pat Stokes, who comes in slightly later, that makes five. There's a really interesting question as to why so many philosophers down under are so interested in conspiracy theories when you consider that we live in relatively unconspired policies, or at least we would like to think.
00:07:10
Speaker
There's something interesting there. I think it's something in the water. So this paper takes another slightly different look at it, I suppose. We're getting into the idea of social epistemology and exactly what that means. We'll come into it fairly quickly.
Rational Rejection of Conspiracies
00:07:30
Speaker
How about you give us the abstract? I was just going to say, give us the abstract just as you started wetting your whistle, imbibing your fluids.
00:07:38
Speaker
I feel I should have made more of a meal from sound effects-wise, because the video that we'll come across is a great visual gag. But as audio, it's just a... It's just you complaining. Just a little bit of silence, unfortunately. But anyway, hit me with the abstract.
00:07:56
Speaker
The typical explanation of an event or process that attracts the label conspiracy theory is an explanation that conflicts with the account advanced by the relevant epistemic authorities. I argue that both for the layperson and for the intellectual, it is almost never rational to accept such a conspiracy theory.
00:08:16
Speaker
Knowledge is not merely shallowly social in the manner recognized by social epistemology, it is also constitutively social. Many kinds of knowledge only become accessible thanks to the agent embedding in an environment that includes other epistemic agents.
00:08:33
Speaker
Moreover, advances in knowledge typically require ongoing immersion in the social environment. But the intellectual who embraces a conspiracy theory risks cutting herself off from this environment and therefore epistemically disabling herself.
00:08:50
Speaker
Embracing a conspiracy theory therefore places at risk the ability to engage in genuine inquiry, including the inquiry needed properly to evaluate the conspiracy theory.
Social Epistemology's Depth
00:09:04
Speaker
So as we will see, this seems like a bit of a follow-on from the sort of stuff that Brian Elkely has talked about where
00:09:13
Speaker
the problem with hanging on to these bad conspiracy theories is that you lock yourself out of important parts of society. And so we're more decent society. But we're not quite there yet. So the introduction, first of all, he starts by talking about the whole sort of conspiracy versus cock up. If your choice is a conspiracy or cock up, you should probably go for cock up or the old Hanlon's razor, the what is it never attribute to malice, what can be put down to stupidity.
00:09:44
Speaker
But then immediately says, as a number of philosophers have now demonstrated, this general attitude is neither epistemically warranted, nor is it actually a head to in the epistemic practices of responsible intellectuals. Now that phrase, responsible intellectuals, is going to come up. We'll be coming back to that again and again and again and again. We'll be hearing that one a bit. So just remember that. That's the Chekhov's gun for this episode. Kind of giving away the ending then. If it's Chekhov's gun, it has to go off in the final act.
00:10:12
Speaker
Oh, it will. They'll be going off like crazy. Now, he says at the start an interesting thing. He says, in practice, it is not conspiracy theories towards which intellectually responsible people evince a reflex of suspicion. Instead, as Cody 2006 has suggested, it is conspiracy theories with conflict with the right kind of official stories that come under suspicion.
00:10:37
Speaker
which we've done. Cody 2006 is this paper, conspiracy theories and official stories. And I recall him saying that one of the aspects of the definition of a conspiracy theory is that it is opposed to conflict with the official version.
00:10:53
Speaker
Yeah. So under Cody's definition, all conspiracy theories conflict with an official story because by definition, if it's the official story, it's not a conspiracy theory. But Neil Levy obviously doesn't hold to this. He immediately goes on to talk about how the official version of 9-11 is clearly a conspiracy theory.
00:11:14
Speaker
I wonder there if perhaps we're seeing the same thing that we've seen coming up looking at Brian's works as well, when there's a bit of interplay going on between whether you're talking about a conspiracy theory or an unwarranted conspiracy theory. I think you're right. There is a certain amount of equivocation which is going on in this kind of account because, yes, if he's following on from Cody, he should simply say, look,
00:11:37
Speaker
If it's a conspiracy theory, it conflicts with, say, the epistemic practices of responsible intellectuals who endorse official stories or theories constituted in the right way. But as you also point out, he then says there are a whole bunch of conspiracy theories which turn out to be rational to believe. So he's even saying, look, sometimes responsible intellectuals will endorse a theory labeled as a conspiracy theory.
00:12:06
Speaker
And I think this equivocation is the Chekhov's gun which is going to go off at the end because this hanging things on the epidemic practices of responsible intellectuals turns out to be a very tricky beast to grapple with.
00:12:22
Speaker
So, before proceeding, he sets out the two main goals he wants to perform in this paper, saying, First, I shall explain why it is generally irrational to reject the account of an event or process offered by the relevant epistemic authorities. Because knowledge is deeply, constitutively social, I shall argue, the epistemic authorities, when properly constituted, are far better positioned to explain events than are isolated agents.
00:12:49
Speaker
Individuals who are not appropriately hooked up to the relevant social network of knowledge production are ill placed to take issue with official stories. The social distribution of knowledge production is not guaranteed to produce truths, but it is a powerfully truth-conducive mechanism of explanation production, such that when an explanation of an event or process conflicts with that produced by the socially distributed mechanism, we ought to reject it as unwarranted.
Role of Epistemic Authorities and Networks
00:13:12
Speaker
Second, I shall explain not only why we ought to accept the official story over alternatives, but also why many people overestimate their ability to detect flaws in the official story and therefore seek alternative explanations.
00:13:25
Speaker
So he is actually officially saying that you should believe the official story over conspiracy theories. Yes. And when the conspiracy theory conflicts with the official story and being the caveat there. I think that's an awkward position to take just from the history of conspiracy theories in the 20th century, because he's already mentioned Watergate. Oh, no, he's sorry. He has mentioned 9-11. Yeah, he's mentioned 9-11.
00:13:54
Speaker
once you bring Watergate in, in case of, well, that was called a conspiracy theory by what was taken to be several
00:14:04
Speaker
official sources that we might take to be well-placed, i.e. other journalists at the time who thought that Woodward and Bernstein were just deeply wrong in their claim, that there was something very suspicious about the way the Republicans were acting after the break-in to the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex. So this does not seem like a particularly productive path to go down, but let's see. Let's see
00:14:34
Speaker
whether in the explanation it makes more sense. So the introduction concluded we move into part one, radically socialized knowledge. That's the kind of stuff you get on the streets. Yes, it's not really radical in the late 90s, late 80s, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
00:14:55
Speaker
kind of way, but radical non- Have you seen the art- Sorry, I have to digress here. Have you seen the Twitter feed that is Wikipedia articles that can be sung to the theme of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? I have, yes. It is co- My personal favorite, post-traumatic stress disorder. Heroes in a heart, shall? Turtle power! Anyway, I had to get that out of me.
00:15:21
Speaker
So, Neil says, most social epistemologists seem to think that knowledge production must be a distributed enterprise in compensation for the epistemic limitations of human beings. Because we do not have the time to check every claim or to gain the expertise to allow us to even make a start, we must defer to experts. While this is undoubtedly true, knowledge is much more deeply social than it suggests, and so this whole thing is about us.
00:15:44
Speaker
I'm going to say that's only half right. And that it's true, social epistemologists like myself do think that because individuals do not have the time nor the ability to analyze every claim, we engage in a social practice to generate knowledge about the world. And it is good
00:16:05
Speaker
to take as a shortcut, appealing to experts whenever possible. But it doesn't mean we only appeal to experts. Sometimes we just engage in a large social endeavour to try to uncover the truth. So the idea that we must defer to experts
00:16:22
Speaker
That would be an ideal situation if we had a good story about expertise and what makes experts trustworthy and the like. But often for social epistemologists, what you're talking about is a social activity that may or may not include experts depending on the thing being investigated or explored.
00:16:43
Speaker
But here, Neil, I think he's saying this is what many social epistemologists think, but he then wants to go even further. So he starts with the idea, yeah, we've got this conception of social epistemology, which is that knowledge is arrived at by individuals
00:17:01
Speaker
And the social aspect comes in when these individuals communicate with one another by their own testimony. They basically transmit this knowledge. And so the production of a society's body of knowledge is a distributed effort.
Individual vs. Collective Knowledge
00:17:16
Speaker
No one person has to come up with all the knowledge. Everybody comes up with their own little bits and then they all stick them together.
00:17:23
Speaker
And here's where we start bringing in things that we've heard of before, because he says, it is this picture of the social distribution of knowledge production that motivates Keeley's worry that to ready a belief in conspiracy theories leads all too easily to skepticism. If we begin to distrust the network that transfers knowledge from agent to agent, we should be left unable to tap into the knowledge of others and thrown back upon our meager epistemic resources.
00:17:48
Speaker
What I find interesting at this point is then he talks about Steve Clark and David Cody's objections to what Brian had to say. It doesn't mention Lee Basham at all. As I recall from when we've talked about things, it was really Lee was the one who was most arguing against the social aspects of what Brian had to say. Is it just an antipodean thing?
00:18:12
Speaker
Would they have just had easier access to those two? I wonder, I mean, 2007, I would think not. I mean, if we go back to me in 2007, having just downloaded all of these articles legitimately through the University of Auckland,
00:18:30
Speaker
library site, and I've had access to all of the other literature which is available electronically online back at the time. There's no reason why Levy couldn't have been reading Basham. I mean, I'm assuming, because he's been either invited to contribute to this journal article or saw the core for paper,
00:18:53
Speaker
He did a cursory search of David Coady to see what Coady's written upon it, saw that Coady had written a reply to Keeley, and then read Keeley as well, but then didn't look any further. That's my suspicion. Possibly. I mean, on the other hand, of course, I suppose Lee's objections kind of came in a different direction. He was talking about specifically the nature of society, not so much social epistemology. But anyway, I think what Neil wants to say at this point is that
00:19:22
Speaker
that Brian said the problem with believing in unwarranted conspiracy theories is you become too skeptical, you become unable to rely on what other people say, and so therefore this whole social idea, which essentially relies on testimony when you come down to it, if you don't believe anyone's testimony then you can't take advantage of that. But Neil says,
00:19:46
Speaker
It is, I think, more serious than those who dismiss it recognize. The kind of social epistemology from which the Wary Stems is nevertheless only social in a shallow way. In fact, knowledge production is deeply social in a way that fewer epistemologists have recognized.
External Models and Social Interactions
00:20:01
Speaker
Basically, most of the rest of this section is talking about
00:20:06
Speaker
this conception of a deeply or radically social epistemology. Now, the problem here now goes back to the fact that Levy doesn't appear to have read his Basham, because one of the things that Lee gets to fairly early on in his writing is talking about the way that our priors kind of determine the way that we react to claims of conspiracy theories in particular situations.
00:20:33
Speaker
So you get the kind of examples where he says, look, if you grow up in a particular milieu, then you're more likely to say sea plotting if plotting is typical in the kind of milieu you live in versus if you live in a place where people don't plot at all, you're less likely to suspect that plotting is something that goes on. And this is the kind of thing that Levy wants to leverage.
00:20:57
Speaker
and yet having not read his Basham is going to be making the same kind of point but going off in a radically different direction. So he starts talking about basically just
00:21:14
Speaker
epistemological matters, saying things such as that each of us typically thinks he or she, in isolation from others, possesses a far richer model and a far more detailed explanatory scheme than we do. Individualism is intuitive, but it's wrong.
00:21:29
Speaker
and talks about various experiments have been done the sort of into things like change blindness you've I'm sure you've all heard of those experiments where they'll sort of stop a person on the street and ask them for directions and then halfway through talking to this person they'll get someone to carry a large object in between them at which point they swap the people out so now the the subject of the experiment is actually talking to a completely different person dressed the same as the first one and more often than not
00:21:58
Speaker
people didn't notice that this human being who they were holding a conversation with is a different person.
00:22:06
Speaker
And there are various things like that. But he follows up to this by saying that what these experiments are literally hundreds more on change blindness apparently demonstrate is that though we seem to have a detailed inner representations of the outer world, we do not. We do have detailed representations, but they are not inner representations. We represent the world to ourselves not by way of an internal image, but by using an external model, the world itself.
00:22:31
Speaker
Rather than take a snapshot of the scene and store it internally, we rely upon the actual stability of the world. We store our representation outside of us. And goes through a bunch of reasons why this is a rational and generally worthwhile thing to do. Which is basically the argument that it reduces the cognitive load if we assume a certain amount of stability to the things going on around us. We don't need to spend too much time looking to check
00:22:58
Speaker
that things are remaining stable. We assume stability, and it makes it much easier for us to go about our daily lives.
00:23:10
Speaker
foundational ones. One of the plot points is that you have characters who sort of act as a record, relate to everything that they see, but only rely on what exactly what they observe. So would not say, you know, if they saw the front of a house, they wouldn't be drawn on whether or not it was the actual house or a facade, you know, having not been able to see the rest of it, or if they saw a thing in one place, they at one time, they wouldn't
00:23:38
Speaker
be drawn on whether or not it was still there a moment after they looked away from it and so on. I know of what you speak, but I cannot remember the exact reference. The point is we're not like that. We assume that the world does kind of stay stable enough in our absence that we can just assume we can come back to it and it'll be there.
00:23:58
Speaker
So he goes on to say, when we store our representations externally, we use a publicly accessible medium. Our mental representations are shared.
Technology and Cognitive Task Offloading
00:24:05
Speaker
In this sense, they're far more deeply social than anything envisaged by traditional social epistemology. Basically going on that this just sort of becomes more and more that technology that we have these days means we can offload more and more of our cognitive load onto external sources. So I mean, I learned how to do long division
00:24:26
Speaker
with a pen and paper, but bugger if I can remember how, and I don't need to because my phone has a calculator. Although don't you recall your math teacher back at school saying, look, you're not going to have a calculator when you go to the supermarket. You've got to learn how to do this. And now we have calculators on our watches. Exactly. I mean, phone numbers, you used to have to remember or at least write down important phone numbers all the time. I know my number off by heart. I know my wife's number.
00:24:55
Speaker
I think I know my parents, but basically I have a phone that remembers all my numbers for me. I have a phone that tells me where to go if I don't know the way. We have all this stuff that we just offload things externally, so we don't need to load ourselves up with all this other stuff.
00:25:17
Speaker
I suppose this comes down to, and I think he gets into this a little bit later as well, there is trust that the people who made these technologies knew what they were doing and that we can therefore rely on them to, you know, the software running these calculators does actually do maths properly and the storage of our phone numbers is reliable and we'll recall them properly and so on. But I mean, this day and age, like,
00:25:45
Speaker
I've often thought, technology like computers and so on, is it even possible for a person to actually understand how, say, a laptop computer works in every detail, down to the knowledge of how silicon semiconductors work in every single bit of it? I don't know. Maybe if you're a real expert who devoted their lives to it, perhaps.
00:26:06
Speaker
And even then you might go, the engineers at Intel, when they're generating a new CPU package, individual engineers will know their particular section of the silicon really well. But they're probably trusting that the engineers who are working on the other bits of the silicon are obeying particular rules to make sure that the connections are correct. Because knowing all 16 million transistors on one chip
00:26:36
Speaker
probably is beyond the human brain at this point. I mean, I could be wrong. It could be someone who works at Intel listening to this podcast going, nope, I know exactly how every single bit in your laptop, well, not my laptop, because my laptop is one of these new fancy Apple M1 chips. But I know how everything works in your laptop, Josh. I know exactly how things work in your laptop.
Recognizing Cognitive Limitations
00:26:58
Speaker
And I know what you've been watching.
00:27:00
Speaker
I can say, yeah. Perfectly there. Actually, I do remember reading once that one of the biggest uses of artificial intelligence technology is actually in testing computer chips. Because, yeah, when you have millions of transistors with billions of possible connections, it's more than a personal team of people could ever actually properly test. It has to be automated. Anyway,
00:27:27
Speaker
Moving on. So, Neil goes on to say that there are two important points here. First, that our cognitive abilities are not just shallowly social, not merely dependent for their success upon cumulative repositories of knowledge and on the division of cognitive labour, but deeply social, and that they are actually constituted by their embedding in the social world.
00:27:48
Speaker
Second, that our reliance upon these external resources is so complete, so much a part of the background of our thought that is often entirely missed, and that individualism is intuitive, though it is deeply mistaken. And he goes on, it goes through a number of sort of illustrations of these points. He talks about experience people have done on chimps with the way they can be taught and things where they've talked about experiments where basically this sort of thing where people will say,
00:28:12
Speaker
We'll ask a person, do you know how your toaster works? Do you know how your television works? And people say, oh, I know exactly how it works. But then we ask to actually spell it out. Really, you got the basics of it. You put the bread in, and then this bit of it gets hot, and that toasts the bread. But exactly how the mechanisms work and everything, we actually probably know less than we do. I do remember it was one of Charlie Brooker's screen wipe things or something like that. One of Charlie Brooker's shows
00:28:42
Speaker
And he was interviewing people and said to go, you know, how much do you know? Just as a percentage of all there is to know, how much do you know? And he gets one and says, oh, maybe like 20%. Really? How many atoms are in this desk? What did everybody do in the world last Tuesday? And basically this guy goes, oh, actually, I know essentially nothing compared to the near infinite number of things.
00:29:07
Speaker
that could be known. Now going back to toasters, do you watch technology connections on YouTube? I do not, what is this? So he's a YouTuber who basically does deep dives into commonplace bits of technology. He did a video on how VHS decks work.
00:29:25
Speaker
but you also did a really interesting video on how your toaster is not as advanced as a toaster made in the 1950s and just goes in to talk about how in the 50s we had really really fancy toasters that guaranteed you good toast every time no burning you know if you wanted to be a particular shade of brown it would always be that shade of brown but it turned out that these toasters were incredible
00:29:53
Speaker
incredibly expensive to manufacture. And so cheapness means we now have really rubbish toasters instead. And so he does his deep dive into what makes a toaster good, you end up going, huh, toast could be good. Why is my toaster so bad? And the thing is, it's capitalism. Good old capitalism.
00:30:17
Speaker
Now, so he sort of spends a page or two talking about these experiences, just illustrating all these things. And I'd say he spends too much time on this stuff. Yeah, I found myself.
Trusting Epistemic Authorities
00:30:31
Speaker
But he finishes by saying, we now haven't handled all the ingredients to explain A, why it is usually irrational to disbelieve the official story,
00:30:38
Speaker
and B, why there is a strong temptation to disbelieve it. So part one was just as radically socialized knowledge leading into part two, official stories. And so now we actually start officially referring to conspiracy theories and so on. So he sort of kicks things off by saying,
00:31:00
Speaker
The official story is the story promulgated by the authorities. Cody, who introduced the phrase into the debate, did not distinguish between the different kinds of authorities that might promulgate an explanation of an event. Clearly it is often rational to heavily discount the official stories offered by some authorities. In totalitarian countries, people learn to read the official news media with a jaundiced eye, and the attitude is often warranted.
00:31:22
Speaker
Recent events in Anglophone western democracies demonstrate that this kind of attitude toward the official stories promulgated by governments and by their sick offense in the media is all too often warranted in non-totalitarian countries. But there are other kinds of authorities beside governmental authorities and other kinds of official stories. Though it's not epistemically irrational to reject official stories per se, there's a class of official stories that, other things being equal, we ought to accept.
00:31:47
Speaker
responsible believers ought to accept explanations offered by properly constituted epistemic authorities. Properly constituted epistemic authorities. There I'm quite surprised that Lee Basham doesn't get a mention because as you said earlier that what he's talking about there seemed to be very much up Lee's alley. So he says we don't
00:32:08
Speaker
There is a bit of talk, as we said, about whether we're talking about conspiracy theories or whether or not they're warranted or not, and so often he'll sort of talk about the use of conspiracy theory as a pejorative term, and so we will reject something as just a conspiracy theory in certain circumstances but not others. We will say that theories are just a conspiracy theory
00:32:37
Speaker
simply because they conflict with the government, and he brings up the example of climate change in the US at the time he was writing, and I'm pretty sure these days still, it was the official position of the United States government that climate change was not happening. That's more a Republican talking point these days. The Democrats seem to be quite
00:32:57
Speaker
quite content about that actually climate change is occurring and maybe we should do something about it as soon as we deal with Trump and COVID-19. But as I said in that case if we reject the official quote-unquote official version coming from the government and you could
00:33:17
Speaker
tell a decent story that this this is kind of a conspiracy theory if you sort of bring in the idea that sort of the fossil fuel companies and the like exerting pressure via lobbying on the government to play down the risks of climate change and so on but we don't say oh that's just a
00:33:34
Speaker
just a conspiracy theory we will release we don't reject it because it's quote unquote just a conspiracy theory we reject it because other authorities arguably properly constituted epistemic authorities are telling us that climate change is real and so or to bring in another example
00:33:54
Speaker
He says, it is not because the government tells us that the attacks of 9-11 were carried out by Al-Qaeda operatives that we dismiss rival explanations, according to which the government itself was behind the attacks, as just a conspiracy theory. It is because the relevant epistemic authorities, the distributed network of knowledge-claim gatherers and testers that include engineers and politics professors, security experts and journalists, have no doubts over the validity of the explanation that we accept it.
00:34:24
Speaker
He is, right away, when he says official theory, that doesn't necessarily mean official government theory. And so either there can be times when the government theory conflicts with the official theory and times when the government theory lines up with the official theory, but it's not necessarily because it comes from the government that makes it official. Which I don't know if that's flying in the face a little bit of what we usually understand by official theory.
00:34:51
Speaker
Well, a lot rests upon these responsible intellectuals and the relevant epistemic authorities here, in that Livy is going, an official theory is something put forward by a relevant authority as opposed to a political authority. Although I think there's a bit of fuzziness about this, we get towards the end, which makes it a little bit harder to discern exactly what he means by the target of relevant epistemic authorities.
00:35:21
Speaker
But he does want to say that when the government and the epistemic authorities disagree, responsible intellectuals, there they are again, will tend to side with the experts, whether it's conspiratorial or not conspiratorial. And I assume he would be thinking of examples such as we see in the current climate with the Trump administration versus all of science, essentially, when talking about COVID-19.
00:35:50
Speaker
And, you know, this was the point when I said, hang on, responsible intellectuals, he said that a bunch of times, but it does seem a little bit vague. But then reading further down, possibly we might actually get a bit more detail on exactly what a responsible intellectual is a little bit later. But at this point, having talked about
00:36:11
Speaker
the idea that you should go with the official story where the official story is what comes from properly constituted epistemic authorities, the question he has to answer is what actually is a properly constituted epistemic authority? And it's a good question because an awful lot rests upon your definition of
00:36:31
Speaker
Epistemic authority, or as many people would say, simply expertise. So when you typically appeal to experts, there are a whole bunch of factors you want to take into mind. You want to know, first of all, are the experts acting sincerely? Because sometimes experts lie.
00:36:49
Speaker
You also want to see whether the experts say agree with other experts in their field because finding the rogue Galileo in your field is not particularly useful if Galileo turns out to be wrong in this particular instance. And you also want to know whether they're testifying towards some claim or putting forward an argument because if they're testifying to some claim,
00:37:14
Speaker
then that testimony rests upon their qualification as an expert. If they're arguing towards some claim, then actually it doesn't really matter what their expertise is.
Intellectuals and Conspiracy Risks
00:37:25
Speaker
You can still look at the argument and go, yeah, I mean, you might be an expert on this field, but that's just a bad argument.
00:37:33
Speaker
And I can kind of show that without having to say anything about your expertise. I can look, doesn't matter what kind of expertise you have, you've just tried to prove the existence of unicorns and it just doesn't fly. But nevertheless, he wants to be able to say,
00:37:49
Speaker
that what makes a properly constituted epistemic authority is the structure of it. They need to be set up in the right way so as to, if not guarantee, then have a very good chance of arriving at the truth. As he admits himself, to actually describe that properly
00:38:11
Speaker
is too much than could be put in one paper and possibly more than could actually be properly articulated by anyone ever. Nevertheless, he says, "...epistemic authorities are properly constituted to the extent to which they consist in a distributed network of agents trained in assessing knowledge claims who make the evidence and processes available to scrutiny within and beyond the network." And the example he wants to give is basically science, capital S science.
00:38:40
Speaker
as the sort of thing where you have, you know, processes of peer review and it's not like things were in Isaac Newton's time when people would write in code so that they could keep their discoveries to themselves and so on.
00:38:52
Speaker
He wants to say it's an open network with feedback mechanisms. And the whole thing, of course, is deeply, deeply social. Now, the problem here is if you do any philosophy of science and you know your Imre Lakotash or you know your Thomas Kuhn, you end up going, I mean, that's a nice way to describe epistemic authorities. But if you think that paradigms or research programs are a thing,
00:39:21
Speaker
and people are doing science within those paradigms or research programs, then they can be right within their paradigm or program and still be fundamentally wrong if you have a shift in that paradigm or program from one to a new one.
00:39:43
Speaker
So, yes, it's true that properly constituted epistemic authorities can be right in a certain sense, but they're still going to be constrained by the limitations of the kind of social activities they're engaging in. So, yeah, I mean, it's a cute way to put it, but it's kind of ignorant of the history of science itself to use that as the model as to how things should be.
00:40:09
Speaker
At this point, he now starts pulling all his threads together to come towards his main point, saying, since these distributed networks are a necessary means to certain kinds of knowledge, cutting ourselves off from the networks and means of knowledge production is not merely cutting ourselves off from testimony, and it does not merely breed skepticism and distrust. It is far more radically cutting ourselves off
00:40:33
Speaker
off from our own best epistemic techniques and resources. As he said at the start, he's wanting to say it's worse than just, as Brian Alkely talks about, the idea of engendering too much skepticism. You're losing even more when you turn against these sorts of things.
00:40:55
Speaker
So he starts to line things up. I am now in a position to sketch why we ought generally to accept official stories where the relevant authorities are the epistemic authorities. By we, I mean those of us who aim to be epistemically responsible and who do not possess expertise directly relevant to assessing the official story. We non-experts, and we're all non-experts with regard to most official stories, ought simply to defer to properly constituted epistemic authority.
00:41:21
Speaker
And I think my feeling here is that the we that he's referring to there, we, are these responsible intellectuals that have been talked about throughout the paper. Yes, I think that is correct. All right. So finally, what we're saying is that these responsible intellectuals are people who
00:41:42
Speaker
basically defer to the properly constituted epistemic authorities. On the other hand, what are people who don't do this? And so now we start talking about the kinds of people who the likes of Brian Elkely and Steve Clark have been concerned with right from the start, the people who hold to these theories that are in opposition to the epistemic authorities. What do we say about them? Well, what Neil says about them is
00:42:08
Speaker
The intellectuals who embrace explanations of the kind that we typically and pejoratively label conspiracy theories are almost never in possession of the directly relevant expertise. They may be experts in something, but really do they belong to the class of inquiries with the authority to issue official stories regarding the event to be explained?
00:42:26
Speaker
it is this class of intellectuals for whom the consequences of embracing conspiracy theories are the most serious. And I believe in a footnote refers to the likes of sort of the 9-11 truth folks who are mostly, who are all experts in one area or another, but not
00:42:43
Speaker
in the relevant ones. Yeah, scholars for the 9-11 truth, he says there are philosophers, attorneys, professors of English and French cultural studies and politics, but few engineers are no structural engineers. And similarly, prominent Holocaust revisionists include specialists in 20th century French literature or professors of electrical engineering, but not actual actual historians.
00:43:08
Speaker
Now, there's a bit of fudging here, because he will go of the kind we typically and pejoratively label conspiracy theories are almost never in possession of the directly relevant expertise. So this kind of allows him to go, oh, I mean, yes, it is true that people pejoratively label the work of Woodward and Bernstein as a conspiracy theory, but eventually it turned out they were right.
00:43:34
Speaker
But there is a kind of open question here as to whether it really is the case. It's almost never. I mean, that is an empirical question there. I mean, what would what did he make of people who initially disagreed with the what appeared to be the relevant epistemic authorities about the weapons of mass destruction?
00:43:59
Speaker
in Iraq back in 2003 and that we took we did take it that at least for a time relevant expertise belonged to the CIA and MI5 and it was only when another group UN weapon inspectors went yeah we uh we don't think that they're
00:44:19
Speaker
They're being honest about this that we then started questioning that.
Importance of Trusting Authorities
00:44:24
Speaker
I mean, it seems like there's a lot of wriggle room here. Yes, but I think you're right. We're reaching the end of the paper now where he starts to make his sort of final, final arguments. So we return to talk of Brian Alkely's arguments.
00:44:39
Speaker
By saying, since there is a holism of knowledge claims and the official story enters into relations of mutual support with other knowledge claims, doubting the official story tears a hole in the web of distributed knowledge. It places at risk not nearly the social relations of testimony and trust, as Keeley has argued, but also the very techniques and resources of knowledge acquisition.
00:44:59
Speaker
It leaves the conspiracy theorist unable to rely upon a growing body of research and tools, not only the studies that support the views she rejects, but also the studies upon which it relies, and the studies it supports in turn. It leaves her doubtful of the techniques those studies employed, it throws her back upon her own cognitive resources, and no matter how clever she is, no matter how educated, those resources are meagre.
00:45:21
Speaker
And I mean, I can sort of see when you look at the things like the diehard Trump supporters at the moment who it seems are willing to reject absolutely anything, including in the case of, say, Fox News, people whose word they would have taken without question not too long ago and are willing to throw that all to the wind and get their knowledge from possibly a single source and maybe the insides of their own heads.
00:45:52
Speaker
But the next part he talks about, as he had said before, he wanted to talk about why it can nevertheless be attractive to believe in such conspiracy theories, but saying,
00:46:04
Speaker
The radically socialized view of knowledge sketched here provides an explanation for why it is irrational to reject the official story. Moreover, it also helps to explain why conspiracy theories are tempting. Recall the illusion of explanatory depth. We consistently underestimate the extent to which our knowledge depends upon our location and the socially distributed network of epistemic authorities.
00:46:23
Speaker
We take ourselves to be able to understand more, far more, by ourselves than we are really capable of. Hence we take ourselves to be able to detect flaws in the official stories, flaws that the Epistemic authorities have either inexplicably overlooked or from which they have deliberately turned. We take the conflict between our intuitions and the explanations offered by the Epistemic authorities as evidence that the latter are stupid or base, rather than recognising that the conflict is the predictable consequence of our lack of access to the relevant cognitive tools. I think...
00:46:52
Speaker
That's getting at the thing I always go on about of everybody thinking that they're Sherlock Bloody Holmes and that while there are decades of work being done by experts in the field, they're half-baked reckons and a few minutes of Googling override that.
00:47:14
Speaker
I mean, it is true. There are people out there who will go on Wikipedia, read one art article, and thus feel they are now an expert on X or Y. I've had several people try to explain to me why I'm wrong about something because they read a Wikipedia entry, as opposed to did any particular research on the topic. I don't know that that's
00:47:41
Speaker
the most common stratagem you get when it comes to people putting forward conspiracy theories. Sometimes, and I would say actually often, when people put forward a conspiracy theory, they're going, look, I think there's something wrong with the official theory. I am exploring options here.
00:48:03
Speaker
I'm not saying that my option is correct and I know more than the experts. I just think there's some hole in the narrative, and it seems that that hole is suggestive of some kind of cover-up or some malfeasance happening behind the scenes, and I'm trying to get to the root of it. I think part of the problem here is that even though Lévières going, look, sometimes conspiracy theories are true,
00:48:30
Speaker
He's actually mostly using the term conspiracy theory here as being defined as an unwarranted explanation of an event citing a conspiracy as a salient cause. And so we come to the conclusion, which reads, there are no simple formulas that can be applied to yield an overwhelming preponderance of significant truths over falsehoods. Nevertheless, the following maxim will, I suggest, guide us far better than most.
00:48:57
Speaker
Adjust one's degree of belief in the explanation of an event or process to the degree to which the epistemic authorities accept that explanation. Sometimes, of course, the epistemic authorities will be wrong. Nevertheless, since they will usually be best positioned to discover the truth, and because the alternative is cutting oneself off to a greater or lesser extent from the very resources one needs to correct one's beliefs, accepting the official story is almost always rational.
Future Topics and Contributions
00:49:22
Speaker
Implementing the strategy is not a trivial task for two reasons. It requires first that one be able to discover the degree to which the irrelevant explanation is accepted by the Epistemic authorities, which requires in turn that one can identify those authorities or identify those who can, and that's not always easy.
00:49:38
Speaker
Second, it requires a measure of epistemic humility that is far greater than we're accustomed to or accustomed to counting as a virtue. When it comes to knowledge, we each do best by cultivating only our own garden, that relatively small sphere in which we can claim some expertise, the big picture we ought to leave to take care of itself. And I mean, reading through this, I think it sort of made sense to me. I think I was sort of nodding in agreement most of the time, but yeah, I think a lot of the time
00:50:06
Speaker
And we saw this with the last paper we looked at as well, the conspiracy theories and the internet. Steve Clark's paper. There seem to be a lot of cases that what it said is true, but it's kind of presented as being generally true when in a lot of the cases it's true of a specific scenario, but maybe doesn't actually cover the general case. That was my sort of feeling.
00:50:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's very much focused in on a specific problem of belief in certain kinds of conspiracy theory, where people are isolating themselves from expertise and going, look, I don't care what the experts say.
00:50:51
Speaker
I'm convinced that my gut feels on this are correct, although that might be an unfair characterisation the way that people talk about these things. But the case where people ostracise themselves from the correct experts and go down these rabbit holes, Livy is talking about why that's the wrong move to make.
00:51:13
Speaker
But the worry here is he's generalizing about conspiracy theories as a class when really he's talking about a very specific type of problem unique to certain conspiracy theorists.
00:51:27
Speaker
Yes, I don't know that much. I would specifically object to any of the stuff here as being, well, this is just flat out false or wrong. But yes, I don't know that it applies as widely as perhaps it is portrayed.
00:51:43
Speaker
But I've got to read now in the lesson, so we're going to be hearing more of Mr. Levy, Dr. Levy, Professor Levy. Professor Levy. Professor Levy. Professor Levy. Not for a while. So his next contribution is quite a way off.
Episode Conclusion and Listener Appreciation
00:51:56
Speaker
But yes, there'll be some more Neil Levy in the future. He has a series of articles published in the Social Opus Modi Review and Reply Collective, which are
00:52:07
Speaker
a debate about how we talk about conspiracy theorists between Neil Levy and some social psychologists over in the UK. And it's quite interesting because it's very definitely a discussion about definitions
00:52:28
Speaker
And Levi's going, look, I'm just trying to talk about how we define things. And the social psychology going, no, no, there's one definition. There's one definition. And Levi's going,
00:52:39
Speaker
That kind of isn't. So as I said, it'll be interesting to see what you think of Levy 2.0 when we get to Levy the next generation. Indeed. But for now, this episode of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre comes to a close. But for our numerous patrons, we are then going to go off and record a bonus episode.
00:53:05
Speaker
What are we going to talk about? We're going to talk about monoliths. Monoliths, as far as I can see. There's a lot of monolith talk coming up. I have to say, I wasn't expecting last week's discussion of a monolith to have so dramatic a sequel as this week. I think this actually might be a case of a sequel, which is more than an equal. I think you're right, yes. Then we're going to talk about the Kraken. The Kraken.
00:53:32
Speaker
Where did that name come from? I think it actually came from Sydney Powell, but we'll get onto that. Sydney Powell's Kraken. Very soon. And then we'll have a few final thoughts on Series 3 of the Lovecraft Investigations and the adaptation of The Shadow Over Inn's Mouth.
00:53:55
Speaker
So, if you're a patron and you'd like to listen to that, then just stick around and it'll be delivered to your ear holes directly. If you're not a patron and that sounds like something you'd like to get in on, then you can become one. Join our swelling ranks of patrons at patreon.com and search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy.
00:54:16
Speaker
Um, and if you're happy, happy in your non-patron existence, just listening to this podcast as it's delivered to you in this form, well that's fine too, and thanks for listening. Yes. Thank you for being you. Hmm. But, but, but to you all, I think now, uh, the only thing that remains to do is for me to say goodbye one and all. And for me to say I'm trapped down in Christchurch in student dorms, will someone please come and save me? Hmm. Compelling.
00:54:47
Speaker
you
00:54:53
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:55:54
Speaker
And remember, they're coming to get you, Barbara.