Transcript
Speaker: So Josh, we enter dangerous waters. How so? Well, we're getting closer and closer to the present day with these episodes of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre. And so, I'm not entirely sure the pieces we're going to be looking at now can be qualified as masterpieces simply given their youth.
Speaker: Really, it's a good thing we haven't been reviewing any of my pieces, because that would be embarrassing. Sorry, are you tucking your collar? Just trying to temper my humours. But yes, now I have been thinking that we can't really call these newer pieces masterpieces. They're more like... hot takes. And this week really is a hot take. Not a fair one. Well, we'll get into that. But I guess we're going to have to retire the sting.
Speaker: What, never! No, I refuse to count on it. He's just an alien in New York, planning the ultimate heist. I meant retire the theme music, not sting the musician. The actor, the legend. Or get rid of that poor Newman film. Yeah, it's no Ocean's Eleven. Might be an Ocean's Twelve, though. Anyway, I might have to come up with a new sting. Or... Or... You'll see.
Speaker: The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Addison and Em Dentuth. Hello and welcome to the podcast's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison in Auckland, New Zealand and in Zhuhai, China, we have associate professor of philosophy and all -consuming amorphous mass. It's Dr. Em R. X. Dentuth. Hello there.
Speaker: We've kind of given the game away a bit with the intro, I suppose. It is indeed a conspiracy theory masterpiece episode. Or is it?
Speaker: Or is it? Or is it? Is it? Sort of. I don't know. That is, you know, it's an interesting issue. Like, because the series started as, you know, looking at the foundational papers, the very first writings people did in the modern era. But now we're just, we've kind of got through all that. And we're looking at just stuff as it comes.
Speaker: What we've seen is that there was a flurry of work, basically, between 1995 and then 2003, and then not a flurry of work between, say, 2003, all the way up to about 2014. And now we're going to get a flurry of new work. And so we've gone from, period, we're looking at classic papers in the genre, the foundational texts,
Speaker: And now, due to this kind of absence of work that goes on for about 10 years, we're suddenly really hitting up against the modern day. So we're looking at a paper now from 2018. And 2018, it's just before the pandemic crash. It's not that long ago. No, no. Just before the pandemic. But just after the Trump election, though, so.
Speaker: I'm assuming that's what kicked off that particular wave of it, being the leader. I think so. I mean, obviously, within the social science literature, that does seem to have been one of the big motivating factors which brought people into writing and opining on conspiracy theory theory, is the realisation that suddenly, tinpot dictators are no longer just an Eastern European fascination.
Speaker: No, Viktor Orban's can be found in America with Donald Trump, and then, after the British laughed at Donald Trump for long enough, could be found in the UK with the Boris Johnsons, Yaldiz Trushers, and, I mean, at the time of recording, Rishi Sunak is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, but for how long? Who knows? We do not know. There's literally no way of knowing.
Speaker: No, no, in fact, I mean, there could be a coup going on right now. Right now. In fact, I'm just going to assume there is. Right, well, I mean, we're already talking about the paper, so maybe we should just play that sting and get into it for real. Welcome to Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre. Or is it?
Speaker: Yes, so now, this is an interesting one. This is, we're a week -late recording emergency at the front. Due to my endless meeting, my endless meeting. So last Thursday I had a staff meeting which I was told would only be two hours long.
Speaker: And at the third hour, I was sending messages to Josh going, I might be late. And then at the three and a half hour mark, I was going, there's no way I'm going to get back in time. The meeting did end after three and three quarter hours, but I was promised a two hour meeting and it was almost double that.
Speaker: So yes, we weren't able to schedule a recording time last week. So this one's so I've had like two weeks of anticipation to get into this one, because I mean, I guess I guess right up the front, let's let's say the basic the basic details. The paper is called what's epistemically wrong with conspiracy theorizing. It was written by Keith Harris. It is published in the Royal Institute of Philosophy in 2018. But one of the interesting things about this is that this is the
Speaker: Ah, is it the first paper? It's the first paper I can think of that explicitly argues against you. That actually, we've seen you referred to in the past and maybe lumped in with a bunch of other philosophers who study conspiracy theories when those things are being argued against. But I think this is the first time anyone has specifically said, here is this indented person, and I disagree with what they're saying for the following reasons. Now, I'm going to go out on a limb.
Speaker: and assume you don't agree with this paper so much given that I don't recall you completely revising your position in 2018 as you may have in response to this if you found it had completely undermined everything you'd ever written and caused you to reevaluate your life entirely. Let's just say that we're going to be looking at other papers by Keith Harris in this series and I don't agree with any of them.
Speaker: right okay well i guess this will give you all a taste of things to come then all right you know let me revise that i think i think there's something really interesting about his most recent paper
Speaker: but he has to get there by engaging in some goalpost shifting. But we'll get to that paper, I about say soon enough, but actually, because we've got a flurry of work from 2018 onwards, you probably actually won't get to his next paper, or at least the paper I'm talking about, for another year and a bit. But there's something really interesting in his most recently published paper, but he has to do a bit of a goalpost shift to get there, and I just think it's a little bit suspicious, but we'll get there. We'll get there.
Speaker: No, so let's let's begin at the beginning. First paper by Keith Harris. Begin at the beginning? Yes. How? How? How to guard. I'll take it. Yes. How trite and trivial, but in the same time, logical. Well, I'm just going to read the abstract just just for that. The abstract to this paper says
Speaker: Belief in conspiracy theories is often taken to be a paradigm of epistemic irrationality, yet, as I argue in the first half of this paper, standard criticisms of conspiracy theorising fail to demonstrate that the practice is invariably irrational. Perhaps for this reason many scholars have taken a relatively charitable attitude toward conspiracy theorists and conspiracy theorising in recent years. Still, it would be a mistake to conclude from the defence of conspiracy theorising offered here that belief in conspiracy theories is on an epistemic par with belief in other theories.
Speaker: I argue that a range of epistemic errors are pervasive among conspiracy theorists. First, the refusal of conspiracy theorists to accept the official account of some target event often seems to be due to the exercise of a probabilistic and fallacious extension of modus tollens. Additionally, conspiracy theorists tend to be inconsistent in their intellectual attention insofar as the effort they expend on uncovering the truth excludes attention to their own capacities for biased or otherwise erroneous reasoning.
Speaker: Finally, the scepticism with which conspiracy theorists tend to view common sources of information leaves little room for conspiracy theorists to attain positive warrant for their preferred explanations of target events. Modus tollens, eh? Duh, that's a phrase I've not heard in a long time. That's stage one, stage one logic, reason and argumentation right there. So Joshua, in the same way we've had a debate, are you an East Coast or a West Coast rapper? Are you a modus tollens or a modus ponens kind of guy?
Speaker: I'd prefer my ponens, I have to say. I like keeping things positive, you know. None of this, none of the negativity that your Tollens tend to introduce.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm with you there. When I'm down with the kids, I'm down with the modus ponens. Exactly, as well, you should be. But well, actually, it remains to be seen with Mr Harris, Professor Harris, Dr Harris, I don't know. Dr Harris. Dr Harris. Dr Harris is down with the modus ponens, but he's very definitely against the probabilistic modus tollens. And if you don't know what we're talking about, you will in a little while.
Speaker: But first, of course, it's time for the first section, which again, in the slightly unimaginative mode, is just an introduction. Obviously, this is not your fault. It's not my fault that it's called the introduction. In the paper itself, the introduction is called the introduction, which admittedly, I've called the introduction. It makes a certain sense. I'll give you that.
Speaker: I mean, I've been tempted, you know, sometimes called the introduction the conclusion, but that kind of avant -garde restructuring of the way articles work, I don't think the world is ready for it yet. No, no, probably not. I think you're right. So, I mean, the introduction basically goes over what was expanse upon what we just heard in the abstract.
Speaker: It begins, conspiracy theorizing is often regarded as a paradigm of epistemically irrational behavior, yet it is strikingly difficult to identify the epistemic errors of any characteristic of conspiracy theorizing. And basically says that, points out a lot of things that we've seen before, and this will be referring to a bunch of papers we've seen in the past. He says that many of the supposed faults with conspiracy theories, they're not really faults at all. Or if they are, they're not things that are specific to conspiracy theories. And that's what the first half of the paper is basically about.
Speaker: He says now, possibly because of this, quote, many scholars have taken a relatively charitable attitude toward the practice in recent years, which I don't know, many philosophers, perhaps the philosophical attitude that we've seen seems to be fairly charitable. But is that true of wider scholarship?
Speaker: I mean, it's certainly not true of the general scholarship around conspiracy theory theory. It probably is true of the general scholarship around conspiracy theory theory in philosophy.
Speaker: You could take issue with the charitable attitude. So there's one thing to say that many philosophers engaging in conspiracy theory theory don't take a dismissive attitude towards conspiracy theories. So we don't accept that the labeling of the theory as being a conspiracy theory marks it out as being a mad, bad or dangerous theory.
Speaker: But that's not the same thing as saying we're being charitable towards conspiracy theories. Particularists still have issue with particular conspiracy theories. We just don't think that you can smear all conspiracy theories with the derogative or pejorative label. So charitable here might be too charitable a characterization.
Speaker: Just because particulars reject the sui generis rejection of conspiracy theories doesn't mean that we then have a automatically charitable attitude towards conspiracy theories. In fact, one of the things which is interesting about talking with particular philosophers is that most particularists don't seem to believe that many conspiracy theories.
Speaker: What we do is we go, if we hear a conspiracy theory, we don't just automatically dismiss it as being unlikely. We go, well, there needs to be some investigation. It may well turn out on investigation the theory is bad, but we're not going to assume it's bad just because it's called a conspiracy theory.
Speaker: But nevertheless, I think the reason why that sort of thing comes up is because the next thing is that he says there are still things wrong. So there are a bunch of things that people have said are wrong with conspiracy theories. Those don't really apply, as we'll see. This has possibly caused people to be charitable towards them or not. But there are still some things wrong with conspiracy theorizing. And so that, according to the introduction, is what the second half of the paper will be about.
Speaker: So that leads us straight into section one, conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorizing. And of course, you've got to start with the definition. Now, this definition is a bit different. Well, actually, I was going to say a bit different to the definitions we've seen before. It's not, but it's a bit different to the definition we are most used to anyway. Dr. Harris says, as I will use this term, a conspiracy theory one posits an explanation for a target event or set of target events that is the alternative to the official account of the events.
Speaker: 2. Claims that the events was or were brought about by one or more conspirators. 3. Posits that the architects of the event are involved in promoting the official account. 4. Has greater explanatory power than the official account.
Speaker: Now I'm just going to interject here and go, sorry, one or more conspirators? What? So does this definition say that you can have a conspiracy theory where the conspiracy involves only one person? Because that's not a conspiracy. As it's normally, yeah, I mean...
Speaker: I think I could be wrong. I think that's the only time where he puts it one or more conspirators. I think all the rest of the way through the paper, it's assumed conspirators, plural. And we haven't discussed the whole group criteria in the past, whether or not it really does need to be more than one person. But we can probably forgive him that one, given that I don't think it comes up again. But yes, it does stick out, given that the
Speaker: the need for multiple conspirators tends to be one of the foundational, one of the most basic criteria for a conspiracy theory. Yeah, but conspiracy is group secrecy. It's not individual secrecy. It's people breathing together and thus plodding together to bring about some desired end. That said though, that number one
Speaker: The very first criteria is that he has a conspiracy theory as being an alternative to the official account of events. We've seen people who put this condition in previous papers.
Speaker: Hagen runs a version of this as well. They're both philosophers and both particularists who go, look, a conspiracy theory is kind of by definition in opposition to an official theory or an event. But they also both go, the official theory of the event isn't necessarily true. It's just the official theory of the event.
Speaker: Now at this point he refers to one Dr. M .R .X .Dentiff and talking about the philosophy of conspiracy theories and basically argues against the definition that you give in there, the definition that we all know and love, the definition which is much more general than his one and in particular does not include
Speaker: the condition that a conspiracy theory has to be an alternative to the official account. Now he says that you are seemingly concerned that the condition that conspiracy theories always run counter to official theories stacks the deck against the rationality of belief in conspiracy theories.
Speaker: and says that the proper definition of a conspiracy theory would extend to all theories that explain events for reference by reference to conspiracies. Now he says he finds your case for the broadening of the definition unconvincing. He doesn't really state your case apart from, he says that all you show is that
Speaker: the officialness of a given theory doesn't necessarily indicate that it's well supported by evidence. But that's really as far as he goes there. And he does have a problem, as we've seen other people have a problem, with the fact that giving this broader definition of conspiracy is, in his words, a departure from the common usage of the term. So he says, you know, for instance, on your proposal, the claim that Al Qaeda conspired to bring down the World Trade Center buildings would be considered a conspiracy theory.
Speaker: And he counts that as a point against it. He says that the implication is, well, that means there's obviously something wrong with the definition.
Speaker: And what strikes me about this is, so this is in reference to my 2014, the philosophy of conspiracy theories. And in my 2014, I do state that I am aware that my usage of conspiracy theory departs from common usage. But I also state the reason why I'm using this definition.
Speaker: is it's a more theoretically fruitful definition if we actually want to get to grips with what is wrong or right with conspiracy theorising. So I recognise when I talk about conspiracy theories in this general sense, it doesn't match common usage.
Speaker: And so I accept that yes, this is a departure from common usage. But I also point out in my 2014, one of the benefits of departing from common usage is that the common usage of conspiracy theory is inconsistent. Because an official theory, which mentions a conspiracy,
Speaker: be a conspiracy theory in one society and an official theory in another society, or will be a conspiracy theory at one time and then an official theory at another time. And that just means you end up having this really messy conversation about what counts as a conspiracy theory at time t or place x. It's much better to go look,
Speaker: will deviate from common usage and will stipulate what we mean by conspiracy theory for the process of our analyses, and then we can do the important epistemic work of going, well, look, is belief in these things called conspiracy theories rational or irrational and under what conditions? Now, what I found really interesting was that he admits that as well.
Speaker: It is interesting to see you both identify problems with your respective definitions and are both willing to bite your own bullets while refusing to countenance the others, because he points out that his definition, first of all, he says it excludes things like flat earth theory, which
Speaker: I seem to be a bit of a misunderstanding of why things are conspiracy theories in some cases. As he says, the claim that the earth is flat is not centered on an explanation of evidence. But I think, yes, technically, flatter theory itself is not a conspiracy theory, but it tends to come with conspiracy theories, because why don't we all believe that? Oh, because the government's covering up the truth about something. It's what Chelsea
Speaker: what Charles Pickton calls an auxiliary hypothesis conspiracy theory. And I don't think he's ever put this down in print. This comes from conversation with Charles, the notion that there are certain things like the Flat Earth theory, which comes with an auxiliary hypothesis, which is the attached conspiracy theory, which is, look, the Flat Earth theory itself is just a statement, the youth is flat.
Speaker: But the conspiracy theory implication is the reason why you don't know the earth is flat is that someone is keeping the flatness of the earth from you with a disinformation or cover -up campaign. They're lying to you, Josh. When they tell you the earth is an oblate spheroid, they're trying to pull the wall over your eyes, you stupid little sheeple or something of that extent.
Speaker: Yeah, but now actually, yes, so this is the bit that I found particularly interesting because he goes on to say exactly what you just said, that the officially accepted explanation can vary over time and can vary from place to place, and he seems fine with that. And yet, he appears to be not at all fine with the idea, the definition
Speaker: might go against the common use of the more common definition. Although, he then says that he gives the Flat Earth theory as an example of something that is often called conspiracy theories and says that his definition doesn't follow that. So in that case,
Speaker: He is happy to go against common usage of the term conspiracy theory, but then not in others. So yeah, I don't see that he puts his case for that criteria number one for particularly convincingly at all.
Speaker: And I would say, in fact, I do say in a piece which is coming to print, either later this month or early next month, a piece called Some Conspiracy Theories. It's the final article in the special issue of social epistemology I'm the editor of on conspiracy theory theory. And in that piece, I argue that one of the issues with Harris's work here
Speaker: is he doesn't really explain what particulars say. So there's the occasional handwave he mentioned towards particulars theories, but there's no actual diving into what it is we claim, why we claim it, and then rebutting that claim one by one. It's more along as, well, these definitions are implausibly broad or overly broad or go against common usage, and that's taken as being a reason for dismissing those claims.
Speaker: as opposed to going, why are the particulars working with these, in his words, implausibly broad definitions, and explaining why this mismatch is, in fact, important? So, he goes, there are a couple more points related to his definition. He says,
Speaker: Additionally, one, that being the criteria that they're an alternative to the official account, makes it likely that the processes whereby one comes to believe a conspiracy theory will differ from the processes whereby one comes to believe the official accounts are some event. One will generally not believe a conspiracy theory, for instance, based on official testimony. This is crucial for present purposes as our ultimate focus will be on evaluating the intellectual traits and reasoning processes that lead individuals to believe conspiracy theories rather than evaluating the theories themselves.
Speaker: foreshadowing. And then he also talks about conditions three and four, one that the architects behind the events are involved in promoting the official account and the condition that the conspiracy theory has greater explanatory power by saying
Speaker: It's worth explaining why these two, three and four, are included in the definition above. From the perspective of the conspiracy theorists, it is natural to expect that the true conspirators behind the event to be explained will have a strong incentive to disguise their involvement. One means of doing this is to disseminate or at least allow the dissemination of a false explanation of that event, this being the official account.
Speaker: Hence, part of the explanatory power of a conspiracy theory consists in its ability to explain the prominence of the official account. Official accounts, in contrast, tend not to explain attendant conspiracy theories. Moreover, as we'll see, much of the supposed justification for accepting conspiracy theories is derived from the seeming ability of such theories to explain data left mysterious by the official account.
Speaker: That sounds a little bit like a bit of the old Brian Alkely, and also a little bit of the old Buting and Taylor. Yes. So this brings us to section two, the evaluation of conspiracy theorizing. So we spent a bit of time on section one, and given that it was
Speaker: There were interesting things to be said about the definition. The next couple of sections we can probably rattle through fairly quickly because it's another case of a person going over the material that's gone before, material that we've already covered in previous episodes. So he begins section two by saying, I wish to emphasize here that the aim of the definition provided above is not to pick out a class of theories that by their nature one cannot rationally believe. As others have noted, in particular Brian,
Speaker: Some previous work on conspiracy theories has attempted to find a blanket argument that, analogously to David Hume's attack on the rationality of belief in miracles, shows belief in conspiracy theories to be invariably irrational. For reasons I discuss below, I believe that any such attempt is doomed to failure.
Speaker: He does seem to be suggesting that Brian is characterising all conspiracy theories as unwarranted, as opposed to what Brian's actually doing, between, look, there's a particular kind of conspiracy theory, the mature conspiracy theory, and those theories are suspicious such that we probably will think they're unwarranted due to the lack of evidence advanced in support of them over time.
Speaker: which I was going to give the game away a little bit and talk about where we end up later on, but I won't. We'll get there in its own time because next he brings up Binting and Taylor and generalism versus particularism. Giving a quick overview of the two terms, he says, neither view aligns well with the position taken here, nor I suspect with the best existing critiques of conspiracy theorizing. A generalist view, according to which conspiracy theorizing is invariably rational, is plainly unfounded. So he's no generalist.
Speaker: Well, except that he kind of is. So he's going, look, the existing attempts by a generalist to show that generalism is true fail. And thus he goes, it turns out generalism versus particularism, there must be some kind of middle ground. But he's going to conclude that actually, generally, whatever conspiracy theorists say is irrational. So he's putting forward a generalist who he just doesn't want to admit to being a generalist.
Speaker: Well, yes, because having said that he thinks the generalist view is plainly unfounded, he then goes on shortly afterwards to say, yet the alternative position, according to which whether conspiracy theorizing is irrational must strictly be evaluated on a case by case basis, fails to recognize the extent to which conspiracy theorizing may involve problematic reasoning patterns.
Speaker: If there are problematic traits or reasoning strategies characteristic of conspiracy theorizing, then there may be prima facie grounds for skepticism about the epistemic merits of conspiracy theorizing, even if certain instances of conspiracy theorizing are epistemically unimpeachable. There is good reason to think that there are traits or reasoning strategies characteristic of conspiracy theorizing. Belief in a given conspiracy theory strongly predicts belief in other conspiracy theories, even in cases where the conspiracy theories are incompatible.
Speaker: And here he refers to the Ted Gertzel paper and the Douglas and Wood paper that did in life beliefs and contradictory conspiracy theories, those ones that, who was it? Steve Clark took to task yet too long ago.
Speaker: Yeah, and both the Goetzel case, which is the more monological belief systems hypothesis that basically belief in conspiracy theories in some sense epistemically insulated and that conspiracy theorists only believe other conspiracy theories. That is a view that even in the social sciences seems to be on the way now. So we're not up to the point where we're looking at those papers, but there are some recent papers, including some recent papers by political scientists
Speaker: and social psychologists going, yeah, the Goetzel stuff doesn't actually work. It doesn't really make sense of the phenomena that we're looking at. And there's been substantial critique of the dead and alive paper by going, well, look, they're just, Wood and Douglas are getting it wrong there. It's not that people are believing mutually contradictory theories. They're going, look,
Speaker: Because I reject the official theory of the vent, that suddenly puts a range of options on the table, of which there are degrees of belief or credences I assign. So it's the example I think Lee Basham makes in a paper. If you've lost your keys,
Speaker: and you know they're not where they're usually located, then you might entertain two hypotheses for either I left them in the front door when I came into the house or I left them beside the fridge. Now, those are contradictory if it is the case you left them in the front door or you left them beside the fridge.
Speaker: But if your theory is simply, well, they're not in the usual place I left them, so there are two options left there, you're not believing two mutually incompatible or contradictory theses. You're going, look, I know they're not in place X, so they're either in place Y or Z. And now I'm going to investigate, is it Y or is it Z? It could be either. Let's find out.
Speaker: So these papers were referred to in the context of things that are characteristic of conspiracy theorizing. And so this seems to be the thing. He says he wants to consider whether there are negative
Speaker: Epistemic traits and processes characteristic of conspiracy theorizing and this I think characteristic is something that's going to come up a bit But straight away we move on to section three conspiracy theorizing and epistemic vice So again, this is stuff we've looked at before in particular the the kasim kasam stuff. So so he interted so and again remember we're still in the section of the paper where he's basically saying why the arguments are
Speaker: against conspiracy theories or sort of why the arguments for a generalist prediction of conspiracy theories don't apply. So he says one possibility is that conspiracy theorising is a manifestation of epistemic vice, and gives a quick overview of virtue epistemology and epistemic vice, but then says it seems prima facie plausible that conspiracy theorising typically involves the manifestation of epistemic vice, understood thusly.
Speaker: Hence, thusly referring to his previous discussion of it, hence it is worth considering in greater detail whether conspiracy theorists exhibit intellectual vices in such a way as to be worthy of epistemic criticism that does not apply equally to their counterparts. To some extent, any answer to this question must await empirical study, and so the answer given here will be speculative. Nonetheless, strong considerations militate against the idea that conspiracy theorists exhibit familiar epistemically vicious character traits to a greater degree than their counterparts. Anne refers to Steve Clark,
Speaker: talking about the stuff that we've seen before where he mentions how some conspiracy theorists will put an enormous amount of effort into uncovering the quote unquote truth and indeed maybe a lot more knowledgeable about the events that they're interested in than people who don't believe the conspiracy theories around it. So there are definitely some of the epistemic vices that people will claim
Speaker: conspiracy theorists exhibit don't actually apply, but then he's interested. Well, do they exhibit different epistemic vices though? And that's what he's going to be getting at later on in the paper.
Speaker: Yeah, I once made the mistake of having an argument with someone who was very strongly of the opinion that JFK was assassinated by the American government. And so we were chatting over drinks about the reasons why I think that actually
Speaker: The basic explanation is that Lee Harvey Oswald was responsible for the death of President Kennedy. And we went through the usual arguments about, you know, the grassy knoll, the book depository, the gunshots, the video evidence, and then he started talking about deathbed confessions of people I'd never heard of. How do you explain
Speaker: You know, X on his deathbed said that, you know, he was involved in the conspiracy to kill the president. And I was going, I've never even heard of this person. And you say that you've got good reason to think that Kennedy wasn't killed. You don't even know any of the basic facts. And he knew a lot more about the assassination of JFK.
Speaker: Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that additional information meant that I was wrong, although conversely, not knowing that information means I also can't say that I can conclusively show this person was wrong in saying this evidence mitigates against my thesis. But he did know a lot more and did a lot more research into the ancillary details of the death of President Kennedy. So yeah, no, he's quite right here that, as is Steve Clark,
Speaker: Many conspiracy theorists know an awful lot about the topics that they talk about, to the point that actually engaging in debates with people can be quite difficult.
Speaker: So this brings us then to section four, conspiracy theories and the evidence, which begins a striking feature of beliefs and conspiracy theories is that such beliefs are difficult to shake. And these such beliefs are arguably too difficult to shake. A criticism of conspiracy theorizing can be developed on this basis along the following lines. And then goes on to talk about it. It's the falsifiability stuff.
Speaker: He says that people can criticise conspiracy theories for being unfalsifiable, and then refers to Brian's response to this claim, which we've seen before. So he develops this by giving the example of a person called Sam, who thinks that the mayor of the town where he lives and his associates carried out an assassination,
Speaker: And then, as other people produce evidence against this, he just comes to believe that they're all in on it as well. So, you know, the idea, Sam thinks the mayor is responsible for an assassination. The police say, no, he's not. He thinks, ah, well, then the police must be on it. And then the press do the investigative reporters have a look and say, no, no, the mayor wasn't in exile. Well, that just shows the press is in on it as well.
Speaker: Now, what Harris has to say about this is that, in short, he adjusts his belief to accommodate new evidence. Sam's behavior is therefore consistent with another requirement of rationality. Sam's mistake, if he makes one, is that he updates his beliefs in an inappropriate way. Rather than abandoning his conspiracy theory, he instead alters his beliefs to make that theory fit his observations. So, again, so if
Speaker: you want to claim that conspiracy theorists are dogmatic, then it's like, well, in this particular characterization, they're willing to change their beliefs, but possibly only in a certain direction. Maybe that's an issue. Maybe not. We'll see later. But he then goes on, though, the thing that stuck out to me was that he says, Sam's case, contrived though it is, illustrates epistemic behavior characteristic of conspiracy theorizing. And there's that word again.
Speaker: And I think this was one of the problems I have with the paper, that most of the way through the paper, he will say, these things are characteristic of conspiracy theorizing. And aside from referring to those two papers at the start that claim to be talking about characteristics of conspiracy theorizing, which, as we've seen, don't actually hold a lot of water, he really argues for anything, for what the actual characteristics of conspiracy theorists or conspiracy theorizing are.
Speaker: And it makes you wonder that maybe he's being vague in a way to kind of avoid the direct comparison with actually how people might be theorizing in other domains, because the idea of not abandoning your conclusion and changing your auxiliary beliefs to continue to support your research process
Speaker: program turned out to be characteristic of another kind of theorizing, scientific theorizing. It's also characteristic of some work in psychology of psychological theorizing, where you go, look, I'm fairly sure
Speaker: my conclusions correct. And yeah, the evidence we've got now means I need to manipulate some of the auxiliary hypotheses in order to maintain my core thesis. But this is something which, if it's characteristic of conspiracy theorising, it's only characteristic of conspiracy theorising because it's characteristic of theorising more generally.
Speaker: So I will happily bite the bullet, but yeah, some conspiracy theorists do this, because a lot of theorists, conspiracy or otherwise, do this as well. And yes, so this sort of leads into what comes next. He says the apparent problem with many conspiracy theories is that there can be no evidence against them, and indeed conspiracy theories seem to illicitly derive support from what appear to be conflicting observations.
Speaker: Again, without any detail behind to back that up. But he says resilience to falsification is hardly unique to conspiracy theories. And here we get the whole like, is it Lakatos or Lakatos? I've always said Lakatos.
Speaker: like a tosh, that'll do. But that being said, there are many philosophers whose names are routinely mangled by other philosophers because people have only ever seen them without them. Well, yes, exactly. So that's a man you'll remember if we've talked about, Steve Clark talked about him in the past, and that's where you get your whole degenerative, what is it, degenerative
Speaker: Research programs. Research programs. So, and so this is where he starts to bring in that sort of stuff. He says, perhaps there is a related problem with conspiracy theories, or at least a subset of them. Scientific theories generally not subject to straightforward falsification, but then nonetheless comes a time at which adherence to a scientific theory becomes unreasonable. This occurs when a scientific theory is embedded. Ah, here we go. I should have just read through a here modes in a research program in a persistent state of degeneration.
Speaker: Pat, some conspiracy theorists are, as Steve Clark suggests, comparable to scientists who cling too long to degenerating research programs. To assess this criticism, it is necessary to answer two questions. First, what distinguishes a healthy research program from one in a state of degeneration? Second, do conspiracy theories in conjunction with the world we've surrounded them exhibit the features of degenerating research programs? And so he goes through the sorts of stuff that we've seen Steve Clark talk about in the past.
Speaker: And again doesn't find this particular criticism of conspiracy theories particularly convincing. He says the criticism that conspiracy theorizing is analogous to clinging to a degenerating research program struggles on two scores. First, it's not clear that conspiracy theories like degenerating research programs are incapable of predicting novel facts.
Speaker: Second, it's not clear that the ability to predict novel facts is a reasonable criterion of goodness for a conspiracy theory. If there's a reason to criticise conspiracy theories theorising on epistemic grounds, it must be located elsewhere. And this is the point where I go, he's making the sound as if he's saying something unique in Reaction to Clark.
Speaker: But this is not unique. People like Charles Pictom and Lee Basham, and I think even David Cody, have gone, yeah, there's a problem with the Lakatoshin Research Program analogy with conspiracy theories, and we need to talk about it. So he's not saying anything particularly unique here, but he's also not citing the people who have said the things before him.
Speaker: But nevertheless, he says if there's a reason to criticise conspiracy theorising on epistemic grounds, it must be located elsewhere, and that's what he sets out to find. So section five, now we're into that second half of the paper that he talked about before, which is where he starts to set out what he thinks are actually wrong.
Speaker: with conspiracy theorising in a section 5 entitled, What's Epistemically Wrong with Conspiracy Theorising? Yeah, the point where he becomes a generalist. Yeah, we'll get to that.
Speaker: So section five has a bunch of subsections where he lays out his problems he thinks there are with conspiracy theorizing, but it starts, standard criticisms of conspiracy theorizing are misguided. It is perhaps in virtue of the failure of such criticisms that many scholars have taken a relatively charitable attitude towards conspiracy theorizing in recent years. This turn is, I now argue, premature.
Speaker: An implication of my account of conspiracy theories is that belief in a conspiracy theory involves two distinct theoretical stances. First, adherence to a conspiracy theory involves the rejection of some official account of an event. Second, adherence to a conspiracy theory involves acceptance of an alternative explanation. I now argue that both theoretical stances involved in conspiracy theorizing typically involve epistemic errors.
Speaker: You know, Josh, you could replace the word, you could replace the word typically there with generally, couldn't you? Generally and typically. Pretty much the same word. They do pretty much mean a very similar thing, yeah. Which means you could say the last sentence, I now argue that both theoretical stances involved in conspiracy theorising generally involve epistemic errors. Generally involve epistemic errors. Generally.
Speaker: Generalist. Yes. He's never, like right at the start he said, I wonder if it's just him, the way he looks at generalism. He seems to think generalism is
Speaker: all conspiracy theories are wrong, or all conspiracy theories are irrational. And he doesn't seem to want to say that, but he does want to say all conspiracy theories have something wrong with them, which is what we start to see now. And a lot of this hinges upon the definition he uses. So a lot of this hinges on the notion that conspiracy theories must be contra -official. Yes. So if you buy that, and as we discussed earlier, he doesn't really explain why we have to buy that, just that
Speaker: the usage by particularists who don't put the official theory criteria in makes it seem overly broad. If you buy that, then you get some of what he's trying to sell. But if you end up going in, but I haven't bought the official theory thing, then that's not... it's a non -starter.
Speaker: But start it does. With section 5 .1, probabilistic modus tollens. Now I have to confess, this section lost me a little bit. It gets a bit technical and I had some trouble following it. But basically it starts, it's talking about some of Brian's earliest work when you talked about errant data and how conspiracy theories claim to
Speaker: account for errant data that official theories might not. So he talks about Brian's distinction between contradictory data, so he'll say some conspiracy theories deal with data that flat out contradicts the official account, and then you also get conspiracy theories dealing with unaccounted -for data, so stuff that the official account doesn't mention, but which the conspiracy theory feels it needs to account for.
Speaker: So on the distinction between contradictory and unaccountable data, Harris says, an initial concern for Keeley's distinction of errant data is that it is unclear that data ever contradict official accounts. Official accounts of events like scientific theories assert little about the state of the world in the absence of background hypotheses, thus it's difficult to conceive of data that literally contradict an official account.
Speaker: More generally, it's implausible that conspiracy theorists typically rely on contradictory data, as there may well be no such data even when the official account is false. Thus, to the extent that conspiracy theorists rely on errant data, they must rely on unaccounted -for data. Um, what?
Speaker: That straight away, he's lost me there if he's trying to say there's no such thing as contradictory data. I mean, you could say, you know, 9 -11, the whole jet fuel doesn't melt steel beams thing.
Speaker: Supposedly, we have data that, if we were to believe those arguments, we have data on the temperature at which burning jet fuel would have burned within the Twin Towers and their argument goes.
Speaker: flatly contradicts the idea that it was the burning jet fuel and the fire that caused the towers to collapse because jet fuel doesn't mount steel beams. Now obviously there are reactions to that, but I mean that's contradictory data. That's how it goes. So right from the start, I don't quite see how he's justifying saying that contradictory data doesn't exist.
Speaker: yeah there's actually there's a there's a more striking thing here and i have to now defer to my colleague and one of the authors in the special issue of social epistemology nicky fifer because also harris claims that look modus pollens
Speaker: Modus ponens is valid and so this probabilistic modus ponens becomes, look there's no such thing as a probabilistic notion of modus ponens.
Speaker: And as Nicky Pfeiffer points out in footnote 5 of his article in the special issue, which is forthcoming, toward the conceptual framework for conspiracy theories, actually there is a probabilistic modus tollans that is valid. So Harris is just wrong there. He's saying, look, there's no probabilistic version of modus tollans. In fact, there is.
Speaker: Now, if you don't know what we're talking about, modus ponens is the name for the classic argument form that basically goes, if A, it's an argument that starts with the premise, if A then B, then the premise A, and so the conclusion is B. So if A is true, then B is true, A is true, therefore B is true. Modus Tollens turns this the other way around, which says, if A is true, then B is true, B is false, therefore A must be false.
Speaker: so making that probabilistic then becomes the argument that the modus ponens form becomes if a is true then it is probable that b is true a is true therefore it is probable that b is true and that's fine but what he wants to say isn't valid
Speaker: So as he puts it, probabilistic modus tollens goes, if A is true, then it is improbable that B, it is probable that B, therefore it is not probable that A, which straight away loses me a little bit because he starts by saying A is true rather than then finishes it's A is not probable.
Speaker: And yes, if you're feeling lost, I sympathise. He basically seems to be saying that's what conspiracy theorists do when they use errant data to say that the official theory is wrong. They're saying that they're going from the fact that a supposedly improbable thing actually is probable, therefore the initial thing
Speaker: the A, in this case, the official theory, must be improbable. And he says that's right. All of this would fall apart if the data was flat out contradictory, then that would work, everything would work fine. You'd say if the official theory were true, then this would be the case. This is not the case. Therefore, the official theory can't be true. But sticking the probabilistic stuff in there gets things a bit weird. Now,
Speaker: Yeah, so I mean, basically, I think the problem here is, as you say, the way he states the first premise of the probabilistic modus tollens is if A equal true, then it is improbable that B equal true. Well, actually, it should be if A is probably true,
Speaker: then it is improbable that B is true. So as Nikki points out, like modus ponens, modus tollens has a probabilistic counterpart. The premise probabilities of modus tollens constrain its conclusion probability. So his argument in his paper, and this is I say in footnote five, is he actually thinks that Harris is confusing modus tollens in a probabilistic sense with contraposition.
Speaker: and contra -position, he'd be correct. But with respect to modus tollund, there is in fact a valid form of that in a probabilistic logical calculus. So yeah, I mean, I was a bit lost. I thought, okay, hang on, I might be on studio ground here, because then he gives an example of what he's talking about. But his example is that that idea that
Speaker: that we may recall from talk of September 11 and building number seven, there was the claim that the BBC reported that building seven had fallen before building seven actually fell. I'm pretty sure that is true, isn't it? But
Speaker: Yeah, they did. As far as the BBC is concerned, so their official statement is they just, they got the building numbers wrong when they were reporting. And so it's just a coincidence that they reported the falling of Building 7 before Building 7 ever did fall. But they did actually announce it. They just, their claim is they were confused in the moment.
Speaker: But at any rate, so he gives this example and then says, sort of relating that to this form of argument, he says, given that the official account of the September 11 attacks is true, it is highly improbable that the mistaken report would occur. And that's an example of a thing, but then they say that the mistaken report did occur.
Speaker: Therefore, the official account must not be true. But straight away, that example is wrong. If the official account were true, it would be highly improbable for these mistaken reports to occur. Well, there's nothing improbable there at all, as we've talked about this numerous times. In chaotic situations like this, in the early minutes and hours when stuff's still happening and nobody quite knows what's going on, it's entirely probable for mistaken reports to go out. That's the thing that we see happen all the damn time.
Speaker: The systemic issues we get with mass shooting events is that because witnesses describe single shooters in different ways, law enforcement and the media put out bulletins going, there may be one or more people involved in this event.
Speaker: And then 24 hours later, a police psychologist will go, actually, it's the same person that's been described in slightly different ways. So actually, there's only one shooter there. But people will point to the initial report that make it look as if there's another person involved and go, look, there's something weird going on here. They've made one of the culprits disappear.
Speaker: So yeah, I don't fully get the point, but what I do get does not make sense to me anyway. But so maybe we should then just move along to section 5 .2, the risks and rewards of conspiracy theorizing. So in this section, he says, if the arguments developed in the previous section is correct, then conspiracy theorizing is often irrational insofar as it involves a misuse of error and data.
Speaker: But belief in conspiracy and a conspiracy theory does not consist merely in the rejection of the official account. Conspiracy theories also assert the truth of some alternative explanation of the target event. I now argue that the second theoretical stance is likewise the fraud. So he does say conspiracy theorists can be close -minded and they can exhibit confirmation bias, but so can everyone else. Those sorts of problems are not in any way specific to conspiracy theories.
Speaker: But he does say, although vulnerability to confirmation bias and intellectual closed -mindedness are apparently not sufficient to ground epistemic criticisms of conspiracy theorists that do not apply equally to non -conspiracy theorists, such traits may figure into a more nuanced criticism that applies primarily to conspiracy theorists. The reason for this disparity, in my view, is precisely the fact that conspiracy theorizing typically, there's that word again,
Speaker: involves a greater degree of intellectual activity than that involved an acceptance of an official account. Conspiracy theorists put considerable effort into developing and motivating their theories while downplaying the possibility that their conclusions are due in large part to the exhibition of intellectual vice and reliance on unreliable sources of information. In short, the fact that conspiracy theorists' enthusiasm for the pursuit of truth is not matched by a correspondingly heightened sensitivity to their own cognitive biases and potential for error exposes conspiracy theorists to unique epistemic criticism.
Speaker: And yeah, again, he's saying conspiracy theories or conspiracy theorists are like this, but not backing that up with anything. That it's characteristic of them. Yeah, once again, we've been general claims about the typical action of conspiracy theorists are being made. And really, as you pointed out earlier,
Speaker: The only supporting evidence for this is the Gertzor piece and the Wood and Douglas piece, both of which are pieces which have been subject to sustained criticism. And neither of which really apply to what he's talking about in that case.
Speaker: No. And so then finally we get section 5 .3, his last count against conspiracy theorising. He says, there's a final criticism of conspiracy theorising worth making here. As I have emphasised, the behaviour constitutive of conspiracy theorising does not simply consist in rejection of the official account. It also involves acceptance of some alternative account. It is difficult to understand, however, how the conspiracy theorist might motivate this latter theoretical stance.
Speaker: So basically he's, and I think of all of the three points he makes, this one seems to be the most fair, that he's basically saying conspiracy theorists are skeptical of the official account and skeptical of mainstream information sources, but they tend not to have an equivalent level of skepticism for alternative accounts.
Speaker: and alternative information sources. He says, it is often not the conspiracy theorist skepticism that appears epistemically objectionable. Rather, what is objectionable about conspiracy theories theorizing is that such skepticism is often attended by and even motivated in part by a dogmatic acceptance of certain sources of information as reliable. Now, again, he's
Speaker: characterizing. He's making these characterizations of conspiracy theorists as though it's just understood that this is something typical of conspiracy theorists or conspiracy theorizing. We have seen this in the past. We have seen that some conspiracy theorists
Speaker: And we all know that just like the COVID stuff, most recently people will reject anything the mainstream media says, anything the so -called experts say, but they'll believe randoms on Facebook and YouTube. But that's not, you still haven't established that this is a thing that's characteristic of conspiracy theorizing in and of itself.
Speaker: Yeah, we've just pointed out that there are some conspiracy theorists who produce conspiracy theories of this kind. But whether it's characteristic of conspiracy theories in a general sense, not clear. Not clear at all. And another point that I also thought was actually quite interesting, one that I haven't seen brought up before, is that there's also usually a variety of alternatives to the official theory.
Speaker: that could account for the event or events in question and could account for any errant data. So he says, thus, even if one grants that the conspiracy theorist is rational to reject the official account, there often remains no motivation for the conspiracy theorist to adopt the second theoretical stance constitutive of conspiracy theorizing, because any number of conspiratorial explanations can be constructed, all of which account for the data equally well. The conspiracy theorist often lacks sufficient warrant for belief in any particular conspiratorial explanation. Which was an interesting point.
Speaker: I mean, it's an interesting point, but because he lies entirely on that definition that it's opposed to the official theory. And the thing is.
Speaker: If you've got proof positive that the official theory is, say, inconsistent with the available evidence, you actually might have sufficient evidence to go, look, there is really only one more likely explanatory position we can have here. So sure, if you're talking about conspiracy theories in the abstract, then when you reject the official theory and you start going for conspiratorial explanations for events,
Speaker: Then, yeah, there's going to be a lot of explanations you can put for which are compatible with a range of evidence. But conspiracy theorists typically, I'm going to use this characteristic term now, when they're putting forward their conspiracy theories, look, we are relying on evidential points 1, 2, 3, A, B and C.
Speaker: And those points both show the official theory, doesn't look like it's correct, and that there's a particular conspiracy theory which seems more likely given the evidence. So he only gets to this conclusion by being vague. Yes, exactly.
Speaker: And then that brings us to section six, concluding remarks. Actually, I was I was giving him crap at the start for calling his introduction introduction, but calling his conclusion concluding remarks is actually a slight break from the norm. So points there.
Speaker: The conclusion right section is very short. It reads in full, conspiracy theorists have often been subjected to a rather dismissive attitude on the part of academics and those in the public realm. This attitude might be justified if conspiracy theorists were generally delusional or otherwise guilty of extraordinary epistemic fault. We've seen that the error is typically made by conspiracy theorists, a subtler than one might expect. But contrary recent trends toward a more charitable attitude towards conspiracy theorizing, there are epistemic errors heavily implicated in conspiracy theorizing.
Speaker: I do not mean to suggest that all conspiracy theorists commit the sort of errors described in the preceding sections, however, they are epistemic grounds on which to criticise those that do." Now this conclusion, I think, slides from the stronger claims in the paper. So in the paper he's going typically, characteristically, as we joked, generally. But he concludes with, oh we know, if you commit the errors I've described,
Speaker: then your belief is irrational. And that seems to be a weaker claim than he's committed to in the paper itself. Yeah, yes, he's gone from saying conspiracy theorists typically do this and that's bad to simply conspiracy theorists who do these things are bad without committing to any idea of how common those things might be.
Speaker: is how characteristic or typical these views might be. So he's trying to, in the conclusion, avoid being labeled as a generalist. Like, oh, it's only a problem if you commit these errors. That's all I'm saying. But in the body of the paper, he's going, typically, conspiracy theorists commit these errors, and that's ground for characteristically characterizing them as characteristically irrational characteristic conspiracy theories characters.
Speaker: So when I thought that this was an interesting paper, I enjoyed reading through it, but yeah, I thought, I mean, it's basically rests entirely on a definition of conspiracy theory that he doesn't really argue for particularly in any particular detail, and it really rests on a characterization of conspiracy theorists that he doesn't really argue for at all. It's all just claims that this stuff is characteristic of conspiracy theories, but doesn't back it up at all.
Speaker: And it is interesting that there are a lot of fictional conspiracy theories used to motivate the analysis rather than actual examples of conspiracy theories. So for example, the Sam Mir thing. Why not just use an actual example? Why make one up? Because he does have to do the, you know, I realise this isn't a real example, but I think it's characteristic.
Speaker: That was the criticism everyone had about Cassum's piece, about his fictional Oliver conspiracy theorists, where Cassum invents a conspiracy theorist, ladens that conspiracy theorist with epistemic vices, and goes, well look, conspiracy theorists are just like my made up example.
Speaker: Are they though? Yes. Are they? At the end of the day, especially if you take him at his word just in that concluding remarks section, it really seems to be another, it's either a bit of a throwback really, just to papers that we haven't seen many of in more recent times, where it's people trying to identify
Speaker: those conspiracy theories that we are justified in rejecting without investigation. The good old eyebrow waggling those ones, you know the conspiracies, we mean those ones. Not the sensible ones, sure, conspiracies really exist. But when we talk about conspiracy theories that are irrational, you know what we mean, you know the ones, it's these ones. And yeah, he seems to be, at the end at least, he seems to be saying, you know, this is his attempt at
Speaker: at marking out those ones, the ones that make these epistemic errors. But throughout the rest of the paper, he doesn't really seem to be saying that. And so, you know, at best, I think, in the most generous reading of it, it still seems to be that sort of thing that we've seen just never work out in the past. Yep.
Speaker: So there we go. So certainly it was a bit of a breath of fresh air, to be honest, to see someone arguing against a lot of the stuff, despite spending half the paper arguing, rehashing arguments we've already seen for the particularist position. So yeah, I mean, I didn't agree with most of it, but I did enjoy reading it.
Speaker: Well, I'll have an additional special tidbit to talk about this paper in the bonus episode, so I'll leave my residual commentary, as I like to call it, for the patrons. They'll get to hear something
Speaker: maybe a little bit juicy about the paper. But that's not all because we've got some news to talk about. And because it's our notes from the paper when we were going to record it last week, it's all news. It's about a week out of date, but that's OK. We'll talk about it anyway. There's some interesting stuff there. There's some some a podcast recommendation. There's some Trumpy stuff. There's a bit of Satanism. Got a got a lot of Satanism. And we have to talk about the wakiness that went down in Germany a week or so ago. And due to VPN related issues,
Speaker: I have really not seen anything outside the Great Firewall for about a week. So some of this actually might be information, oh really? So you're saying hungry doesn't exist anymore? I hadn't heard that.
Speaker: Well, we'll just have to see. And you will see if you're a patron, because you'll get the bonus episode, as all patrons do. If you want to be a patron, you can just go to Betrayan .com and search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy and sign yourself up. And if you don't want to be a patron, then that's fine too. Just listen to these episodes, because that's what podcasts are for.
Speaker: So I believe we're done for another episode. So I think we've got one more in us for the year, which I think will have to be the traditional year and review type episode. So we should be able to get that recorded next week. So we'll see you next week for what will almost certainly be our last podcast of the year. And then who knows what 2023 will bring? Could be literally anything.
Speaker: There could be a distinctive new sound to the podcast in 2023. It's a possibility. I'll say no more. Distinctive new sound. I'll say no more except, of course, for goodbye. Lessitude. Lessitude. The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy stars Josh Addison and myself, Associate Professor M. Artnick Stentors.
Speaker: Our show's cons... sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail .com and please do consider joining our Patreon. And remember, keep watching the skis.
