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Charles Pigden's "Complots of Mischief"
27 Plays4 years ago
Josh and M review Charles Pigden's "Complots of Mischief", another chapter from "Conspiracy Theories: The Philosophical Debate" (Ashgate, 2006).
—
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
Victorian Adventures and University Days
00:00:00
Speaker
So, I guess it's a trip back to the cod Victorian Holmesian pastiche of the adventures of Lord Morrissey Morrissey this week. Let's take a look at the script. I met Josh back in university. We were... younger then. Filled with them... and vigour. I'm sorry? That was before I met Ethel, of course. Then again, everything feels like that was before I met Ethel.
Ethel's Symbolism of Oranges
00:00:25
Speaker
Are you... are you going old Harold Pinter now?
00:00:28
Speaker
Ethel would have just joined the Buffaloes. Like many a newly minted worker, she joined for the income insurance. I remember that she liked oranges. Okay. They reminded her of her grandfather, but that is perhaps a story for another time.
00:00:48
Speaker
Is this meant to be going somewhere? I knew the eight oranges. Not in those days, at least. An orange was too reminiscent of the event of my fourth and sixth birthday. But to Ethel, the orange was the other fruit. Um, can I have a word outside the podcast?
00:01:12
Speaker
Okay, what are you doing? Well, this week gets a bit Shakespearean, and well, it turns out that A, I can't write like Shakespeare, and B, when I do, it's just a list of Shakespearean fart jokes. Okay. Blue wins and crack my cheeks!
00:01:26
Speaker
Yeah, a man may break a word with you sir and words are but when die and break it in your face So he break it not behind But anyway, why why pinter? Well, it's easier to pass these than stop art true Do you have a way to skip to the end? Yes. Okay. Well, let's get back to it.
Introduction to Conspiracy Discussions
00:01:51
Speaker
But to Ethel, the orange symbolized freedom from her parents. My! But who was that knocking? I said, who is that knocking? Oh, right, yes. My! It's our good friend Godot! That's the wrong playwright, but it's still good enough to me. Quick to the theme before we hear more about those oranges.
00:01:55
Speaker
Oh
00:02:23
Speaker
The Podcastor's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denteth. Hello and welcome to The Podcastor's Guide to the Conspiracy. I am Josh Addison in Auckland, New Zealand. They are Dr. M. Denteth in Hamilton, Kyrie Kyrieur in New Zealand. It's a balmy spring evening. Are we both in short sleeves? I am.
00:02:50
Speaker
I mean, I'm kind of wearing a shortish... I don't know, it's almost like... There are short sleeves beneath my other short-sleeved garment. Very well. It's not as warm down here in Kirikiri Ra as it is in Tamaki Makaurau. No, but it's almost starting to not feel like winter, which is a
Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre Preview
00:03:07
Speaker
plus.
00:03:07
Speaker
Now, we have another episode of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre for you this week. Delayed by a week? Why was it delayed by a week, Joshua? It was delayed by a week because there's a lot going on in this one. And early last week, I thought, okay, let's have a flip through this paper and see what it's got to say for itself and realized I'd bitten off a little more than I could chew and needed the extra week to really
00:03:30
Speaker
get to grips with what was going on there. So fortunately, there was an interview with Brian up our collective sleeves, up your sleeves more than mine, I suppose, and we were able to hear that instead. An adequate summation of what happened last week. Congratulations. Have a prize. Indeed. So before we get into it, is there any admin? I'm not aware of any myself.
00:03:54
Speaker
No, in fact the only admin is actually going to occur in the Patreon episode, in that there's an interesting thing I was asked to almost do an expert review on this week, which we'll be talking about in the Patreon bonus episode, which means basically there's a mystery of something we could be talking about, but aren't talking about.
00:04:16
Speaker
And if you want to find out what that is, well, a dollar a month will get you access to the secrets from beyond the stars. Well, I know I'm intrigued, but let's put that to one side. Well, we are. I mean, that's entirely the point of what I just said. We are putting that to one side. There's no let's put it to one side at all. It's being put to one side. It's sitting on the side. It's not coming into the main podcast. It's totally out of my peripheral vision, even.
Pigdon's Philosophical Debates on Conspiracies
00:04:45
Speaker
So now I guess there's nothing to do but, um, leap straight into the episode where we look at Charles Pigdon's com-plots of mischief. Poor Tom's are cold. No. So.
00:05:03
Speaker
Charles Pigdon, been a while since we heard from him. But and yet when we did hear from him, he was the guy who started it all off. It was his his popper revisited that kind of got this whole ball rolling. And now we're looking at his contribution to conspiracy theories, the philosophical debate, Ashgate 2006, which is what we've been looking at for the last two is at three conspiracy theory masterpiece theatres. And
00:05:30
Speaker
Essentially what this is, is Charles Pigdon is reacting to Brian Elkely and Steve Clark's reactions to Papa Revisited. And he has a bit of fun while he's doing it. He uses the Shakespearean tragedy Corleianus as sort of an illustration. Sorry, Coloree what?
00:05:51
Speaker
Coriolanus. Sorry, I'm not quite hearing that last part of the word. Corrally... Well, there are schools of thought as to the pronunciation. Some will say Coriolanus and some will say Coriolanus. Now, fortunately, we are both mature adults who can say Coriolanus
00:06:17
Speaker
and think nothing of it. See this reminds me of that of that Futurama joke as of yes we knew we knew that you people back in the 21st century used to snigger at the name of Uranus so we changed it to Eurekdom. Yes classic humour but yes I think Coriolanus sounds more Latin-y but who knows it could indeed be Coriolanus and there's nothing wrong with that just out of interest have you um
00:06:44
Speaker
You met my friend... Bigus... Dickus? He has a wife, you know? Would you like to know her name? It's incontinentia.
00:06:58
Speaker
incontinenteobutics. Anyway, enough monty references. Because indeed the actual play Coriol- Oh, no, sorry. But before I start this, when I first started trying to get into this and do it, I actually had to do like a bit of extra research beyond just reading the thing because I have no idea what the play Coriolanus is about. So I popped on to Wikipedia to get myself a good summary and just the general gist of it. And what do I see at the very bottom of the actual Wikipedia page on Coriolanus? Sorry, at the Coriolanus of the page?
00:07:26
Speaker
Mmm. There's a section on parody which lists a couple of things and finishes with, based on Corleianus and written in blank verse, Complots of Mischief is a satirical critique of those who dismiss conspiracy theories written by philosopher Charles Pigdon. It was published in Conspiracy Theories, The Philosophical Debate. So how about that? It's actually got a mention on the official Corleianus Wikipedia page.
00:07:46
Speaker
Now, do you want to give listeners a quick precy of the play? That might be useful, yes. I mean, it's a historical tragedy. It's about a Roman general called Caius Marcius, who then earns the Cognumen, the official nickname Corleianus after a big battle at Corioli, and then is persuaded to go into politics, become a senator, I think. But senators Brutus and Sesinius conspire against him.
00:08:14
Speaker
and Carlianus, who having expressed a fairly dim view of the common folk in the past, apparently they turned the commoners against him, inciting a riot, knowing that this will provoke him being a fairly hot-tempered fellow to shoot his mouth off in public and make himself look dumb, which he does, and he ends up getting banished for his troubles, and then he goes off to his former enemies and
Coriolanus and Conspiracy in Literature
00:08:42
Speaker
comes back with them to extract revenge and there's all all your Shakespearean vengeance and betrayal and death and so on and and it's all very um very very tragic fittingly enough. Now people who are listening attentively will go oh Brutus Brutus where have I heard the name Brutus before in a Shakespearean tragedy? So what's really interesting about this play is it almost acts as a counterpoint or sibling to the play Julius Caesar.
00:09:09
Speaker
in which there's also a conspiracy against the titular character led by someone called Brutus. But in the case of Coriolanus, Coriolanus is a reactionary or conservative politician who is conspired against by
00:09:25
Speaker
populist senators, whilst Julius Caesar of course is a case of the reactionary Brutus conspiring against the populist in the shape of Julius Caesar. So they end up being mirrors of each other with respect to the conspiracy and the person being conspired against.
00:09:44
Speaker
Actually, one more point about the name. For the longest time, I had the I in the wrong place. I kept saying Coriolanus. I had to reprogram myself to say Coriolanus. The way I ended up doing it was when I realised I was saying Coriolanus.
00:10:02
Speaker
Coriolanus, like I would say Alanis in Alanis Morissette, and I ended up, to myself, going on a whole Ed Byrne kick saying, how big is your sink Coriolanus? But anyway, Coriolanus. And I say, I'm doing it too. I knew I shouldn't have done it. I knew I shouldn't have said how I used to pronounce it, because that would infect my brain with the bad thing again. Doesn't matter. Anyway, to the paper, to Charles Pigdon's Complots of Mischief. So it's in two parts.
00:10:29
Speaker
Part one is all based around Coriolanus, and then part two sort of breaks out of that mob, but we'll get to that. So he has a quick word about the Brutus and Sesinius' actions and establishes that very definitely counts as a conspiracy what they're doing. They're plotting together in secret to achieve a particular end. And Charles Pigdon sort of sets things up by saying,
00:10:59
Speaker
Coriolanus is indeed such a hothead that even if he knew though plotting to provoke him, he might not be able to resist being provoked. However, he does not know it, which means that the subsequent unforgivable outburst which brings about his downfall is likewise the result of a secret plan. The provocative actions are public, but the provocative purpose is not, though it is pretty clear that the other senators, who desperately try to shush the irrepressible Coriolanus, have wised up to what Brutus and Sosineus are about.
00:11:25
Speaker
Coriolanus himself, though not the most intellectually well endowed of Shakespeare's heroes, is well aware that he's the victim of a conspiracy, and a conspiracy moreover which is part of a larger plan to curb the will of the nobility.
00:11:37
Speaker
So he gives a summary of what happened in Shakespeare, and then starts relating this to his own arguments against Keeley and Clark by saying, politics, even democratic politics, is often a rather conspiratorial business, and those who believe it to be so, that is, conspiracy theorists, would appear on the face of it to be perfectly rational. However, this is not the opinion of Keeley and Clark. How would they respond to the rather dim-witted and choleric conspiracy theorist, Caius, Marcius, Coriol,
00:12:05
Speaker
anus. And so then you get for, I didn't actually count the number of pages, but for many pages. It is about half of the article. It is indeed. At length, we get this faux Shakespearean dialogue, where Pigdon imagines a talk between Coriolanus, Keeley and Clark, sort of, I guess, in the style of the old, your Plato's Socratic dialogues and stuff like that, where basically
00:12:35
Speaker
Kaeli and Clarke will try to persuade Coriolanus not to believe that there is a conspiracy against him, and Coriolanus disagrees. And I assume there Coriolanus is basically speaking for Pigdon himself. It's actually interesting comparing the Coriolanus of the play.
00:12:57
Speaker
who is not aware that there's a conspiracy against him. This is the way that Picton writes him in his dialogue, where Keely and Clark are trying to dissuade Coriolanus do not believe in conspiracies against you.
00:13:14
Speaker
and Coriolanus is going, but you falls. I am aware that people lie. I am aware that politicians conspire. What kind of vile cold money are you trying to do here to make me not believe the evidence of my own senses?
00:13:30
Speaker
And so to be fair, it's a little bit dense and at times hard to follow what with the Shakespearean English. It might be the only philosophical work that's written in faux Shakespeare.
00:13:47
Speaker
But then there are fairly extensive footnotes to the section as well, though, where Charles actually gives a bit of detail on precisely what his arguments are with what Keely and Clark have to say. So we'll get to what he has to say in a minute, but it should say that after that part two, which is no longer written as a Shakespearean dialogue, it's just a standard sort of essay format,
00:14:13
Speaker
He ditches the Shakespearean reference acknowledging that allusions to Coriolanus will only take you so far and eventually you can't stretch the metaphor to really cover the events of more modern history.
Moral Perspectives on Conspiracies
00:14:28
Speaker
But basically he wants to argue that, and I quote, the idea that there is something intellectually suspect about conspiracy theories as such, which is presupposed by the use of conspiracy theory and conspiracy theorists as generalised terms of intellectual abuse, is simply a superstition, indeed one of the most idiotic and dangerous superstitions of the present age. Which sounds like basically a restatement of his original argument in Papa Revisited.
00:14:53
Speaker
Yes, and indeed it is a restatement he makes in all of his papers, in part because, as we'll get to at the end of the discussion of this particular chapter, Charles is not just responding to Keeley and Clark here. Charles is basically admonishing the philosophers who do not think that we should take conspiracy theories seriously by going
00:15:19
Speaker
Look, we know conspiracies occur. We know conspiracies are everywhere. If you claim to be a literate person, either with respect to history or modern media coverage, you are a conspiracy theorist. There's no two bones about it. So why this general suspicion
00:15:40
Speaker
of conspiracy theories, surely that seems a little bit superstitious. And he does, I mean, at times comes across as being a little worked up at this really, a little he sort of feels he set out originally this idea that, you know,
00:15:59
Speaker
there is nothing inherently suspect about conspiracy theories and using them to, as he says, a term of intellectual abuse, to use the terms pejoratively, just reflects the silly superstition that there's something wrong with them, and yet here, to his eyes, a whole lot of people are still running around perpetuating the superstition that he wants to get rid of.
00:16:26
Speaker
So how does he define a conspiracy theory? That's probably an important place to start. Well, that's a good point because a lot of the philosophical work on conspiracy theory actually goes into exactly what we take to be the operating definition of what counts as a conspiracy theory. And Charles defines a conspiracy as a secret plan on the part of some group to influence events by partly covert action.
00:16:54
Speaker
I will add the proviso that either the plan or the action must be morally suspect, at least to some people. And he then continues with the claim that, look, nobody halfway saying, supposes that the event of 9-11, because we're talking about 9-11 now, we're not due to some conspiracy or other.
00:17:15
Speaker
Yes, I thought that was an interesting little point to put in there, which because Lee's paper from the same book that we looked at not too long ago was also, we are now, first of all, mentioning 9-11, and yes, acknowledging that no matter what you think about it, it's a conspiracy theory one way or another. The proviso that there must be something morally suspect about it, at least to some people,
00:17:40
Speaker
is questionable. Certainly it seems like something we would question. I mean, at least he says it must be morally suspect, at least to some people. So obviously while you get, you know, say the likes of Al Qaeda planning a terrorist attack may believe that they are righteous, they would at least know that other people would think what they're doing is morally suspect. So he doesn't need to say that, you know, everybody will find it. But nevertheless, it's
00:18:06
Speaker
It does kind of discount the possibility of a benign conspiracy theory, which is something we've always wanted to acknowledge, isn't it? Yes, so I would say it is true that when you suspect a conspiracy is going on, you are right to think that is suspicious, because people acting secretly behind your back really is a kind of suspicious activity. But nothing about the fact that an activity is suspicious tells you it's morally suspicious.
00:18:34
Speaker
because even though, as you point out, Charles is not wedded to the idea that morally suspicious means morally sinister, it's also not the case that just because something is suspicious it must be morally suspicious. Sometimes people do things behind people's backs for all sorts of reasons that are in no way immoral at all, and we're aware that people are engaging in activities behind our backs which have no moral weight in any way, shape, or form.
00:19:03
Speaker
So I don't think you need to put the qualifier morally. You just need to say, look, conspiracies are suspicious. Some of those suspicious activities will be morally suspect, but not everything which is suspicious means that someone is up to doing no good.
00:19:20
Speaker
And then in part two, he goes to some lengths to talk about the amount of conspiracy in the historical record. I would say that's the majority of the second half of the paper is simply a listening of here's a conspiracy. Here's another conspiracy. You want more conspiracies? Here's another conspiracy. You want historical conspiracies? Here's some. You want current day conspiracies? Here's some. Conspiracy, conspiracy, conspiracy.
00:19:49
Speaker
He, in fact, just takes the writings of David Hume and goes through that with a fine-toothed comb, pointing out every single time the word conspiracy shows up just in the writings of Hume, and there's a lot of them, and then sort of, you know, extrapolates from that to the rest of history. And then, yes, moves into the present day, talking about the amount of conspiracy that's gone on in the present day, the political conspiracies, you know, leading up to 9-11, the Iraq War that followed, and so on and so on and so forth.
00:20:20
Speaker
And finishes up with this litany of conspiracy theories throughout all of human existence by saying, conspiracy in short is endemic in political life, a fact that should be fairly obvious to anyone who bothers to read the newspapers or watch the nightly news. Hence most politically literate people are conspiracy theorists on a grand scale since they believe in a large number of conspiracy theories, though many of them, so it seems, are unaware of it.
00:20:47
Speaker
And it does certainly seem that sort of reading through the whole paper, it's kind of just aimed squarely at anyone who thinks conspiracy theories are inherently suspect. But Kelly and Clark do seem to be at the brunt of his displeasure. Now, admittedly, that is because it is 2006 and the number of philosophers who have written on conspiracy theory at this point
00:21:17
Speaker
if you discount Charles since he's writing this particular paper, is Lee Basham, Steve Clark, David Cody, and Brian Alkely. Cody is in agreement with Picton, as is Basham,
00:21:34
Speaker
Keeley and Clark on the other hand are at least at this point in the literature being put forward as the people who defend a skepticism of conspiracy theories generally. Now as we've noted in these reappraisals of these early papers in conspiracy theory theory and philosophy,
00:21:54
Speaker
That seems to be unfair, particularly with respect to Brian's work, as we've discussed in numerous episodes. However, it is consistent with the tone of the literature at the time, and will continue to be the tone of the literature for quite some time to come.
00:22:12
Speaker
that people do take Clark and Keeley as being skeptics of conspiracy theories in a general sense. Now, that may well be based upon an uncharitable reading, but it is the reading that was the common view at the time.
00:22:29
Speaker
Yes. Possibly when I read this paper, I was a little uncharitable to Charles because I read through it reading what he says about Keeley and Clark and most of the time thinking, but that's not what they said. Maybe that's because I have been part of this reevaluation of their papers and are not getting the feel of what it was at the times.
00:22:51
Speaker
I mean, he does seem to be saying that Keeley and Clark were saying that all conspiracy theories should be disbelieved. That's what it came across. But even if you just look literally, without worry about sort of critical reappraisal and reevaluation and so on,
00:23:13
Speaker
At the conclusion of conspiracy theories, Brian Alkely says specifically, for Hugh, miracles are by definition explanations that were never warranted in believing. If my analysis here is correct, however, we cannot say the same thing about conspiracy theories. They are not, by definition, unwarranted, which seems quite, you know, quite cut and dry, isn't saying. Quite categorical.
00:23:36
Speaker
quite categorical. And yet, reading through complots of mischief, it doesn't seem like that was that that's the view that Pigdon is ascribing to Keeley. But then again, that's also the view that Basham is describing to Keeley in slightly different terms as well. It's also the view that I will, once we start looking at my early work, be ascribing to Keeley. We're all ascribing this view to Keeley.
00:24:03
Speaker
because in part we're building off each other's work and also in part as we discussed when we talked about of conspiracy theories there is an issue between the second half and the first half I don't know why did they say second half first and the first half last there's an issue between the two halves of that paper where Brian might be just a little
00:24:28
Speaker
lacks in tracking whether he's talking about conspiracy theories generally, or mature conspiracy theories in the discussion in the second half. And maybe that's what's causing this issue. Now, it's still an uncharitable reading which doesn't actually fit in with the text as we have seen, but it is, as I said, the reading that is common at this time.
00:24:52
Speaker
So, Pygden says of Brian L. Keeley that he subscribes to the weaker thesis that although conspiracies sometimes occur, it is usually like he does acknowledge that both Keeley and Clark acknowledge that there have been conspiracies, that they don't deny their existence entirely.
00:25:14
Speaker
that although conspiracies sometimes occur, it is usually not rational to believe in them, especially if the corresponding theory displays some of the following features. One, it runs counter to some received official or obvious account. Two, it postulates nefarious intentions on the part of the plotters. Three, it ties together seemingly unrelated events, a heinous, heinous crime, this. And or four, the truths behind the events explained are well-guarded secrets, even though the perpetrators may be well-known public figures. And I read that and thought, that
00:25:42
Speaker
doesn't sound familiar to me at all. Those aren't criteria that I recall coming up in any of Brian's works. Where did those come from?
00:25:53
Speaker
That's a very good question. So I looked at that section as well with your question of actually where do these conditions come from? I think condition one, which is the runs counter to some received official or obvious account, seems more like Cody's reading of Keeley here, given that Cody talks about official theories and official stories. Something we'll be coming back to when we look at his paper specifically on that particular criteria.
00:26:22
Speaker
in a few weeks' time. Two, the idea postulates nefarious intentions on the part of the plotters. There's a little bit of that in Keeley's work, most of the early work on conspiracy theory, does really focus on conspiracy as being a bad thing. But also it seems a lot like Charles's
00:26:43
Speaker
approach towards discussing conspiracy in the early part of this paper. So it seems that he's ascribing a slightly stronger version of his own view to Keely here.
00:26:57
Speaker
Three, as you pointed out in the notes for the show, which is the talk about seemingly unrelated events being tied together, this does seem like it's a reference to Brian's talk of errant data. So that seems to be something which we can tie to Brian, although it's put forward in a way which doesn't seem to be quite what Brian is talking about here. Brian is talking about a very sophisticated move in epistemology with respect to
00:27:24
Speaker
How do we actually work out what data goes with which particular explanation? And the fact that sometimes data which goes with one explanation will not be explained by another or vice versa. And four basically is a kind of weird claim, which I suppose is plausible to a certain extent, that the kind of conspiracies we're interested in are going to be political ones.
00:27:52
Speaker
because the claim is the perpetrators may be well-known public figures. So we go, look, when we're talking about conspiracy theories and the ones we tend to disbelieve, they tend to be political conspiracies because they're the ones that we don't think, and I say we don't think here in scare quotes, we don't think happen in the kind of societies in which we live. And of course, Charles spends an awful lot of time in the second part of this paper going, but look,
00:28:21
Speaker
They do occur in the societies in which we live, so how do you explain that?
00:28:27
Speaker
So yes, I mean, that whole section struck me as a little bit odd. It first shows up in the footnotes to part one, where, as I said, that's where he actually gives the nitty gritty of some of his arguments. And then it's stated again, though those four points show up again in the body of part two. I don't know how much of this is the problem that we've seen show up quite a few times now, and that Brian himself
00:28:55
Speaker
is a little unclear sometimes about whether he's talking about conspiracy theories in general or just those good old unwarranted mature ones. And once again I will say this was the tenor of criticism at the time, which is not to say it was justified, it has happened to be this is how people are talking about that particular work.
00:29:15
Speaker
He does make an interesting move though, which I thought was remarkable, that he turns one of Brian's arguments against him. You recall that one of
00:29:30
Speaker
So the problem that Brian has with conspiracy theories, the thing that he says can make them bad is when they lead to that, and indeed this is something you guys talked about in the interview just last week, the sort of skepticism that they can engender, the amount of stuff that you have to discard as untrue or unreliable if you really buy into some of these conspiracy theories.
00:29:57
Speaker
And Charles basically says, well, if you're going to say that conspiracy theories are suspect, then you are going to have to throw out most of history, because as I've just shown, history is full of them. How does he say it specifically? Indeed, it seems to me that we can employ a variety of Keighley's chief argument against the superstition that he indirectly supports.
00:30:18
Speaker
If conspiracy theories are systematically suspect, then what we think we know about the past is systematically suspect. The memoirs, the annals, and the testimonies on which we rely, and in many cases the confessions and correspondence of the conspirators, would have to be regarded with suspicion. But if we adopted that attitude, our knowledge of the past would dissolve into conjecture we would, in effect, be committing epistemic suicide, at least with respect to large chunks of the past.
00:30:41
Speaker
which is an interesting point, although again it really does rest on the idea that people are saying all conspiracy theories are suspect per se, which these days, I think it keeps coming back to this thing, these days we don't think
00:31:01
Speaker
Brian was saying that, and it's what we want to say, but yes, I guess back then, that is what people thought. Yes, and in many respects, Charles' target may not be Brian per se here. Charles' target is philosophers who go, well, you know, we shouldn't treat conspiracy theories seriously.
Critique of Philosophical Skepticism
00:31:20
Speaker
I mean, they're not the kind of thing that happens to occur. That gives us a good reason to go that conspiracies aren't important. And Charles is going, look, if you think along those lines,
00:31:31
Speaker
a line which I have put on Keeley, then look, here's the rejoinder. You now have to reject a large amount of history if you want to maintain that line, which means actually you know nothing about the past, which means in a weird logical conundrum, you are going, well, conspiracies don't occur. What's my information for that? No information whatsoever. I know nothing about the past. I've just rejected all of history, at which point you have a superstition.
00:32:00
Speaker
Yes, and that is the impression I get that Charles is kind of addressing a much more general audience, just anyone who thinks that conspiracy theories are inherently unwarranted, but he's focusing specifically on the arguments of Q.E. and Clark.
00:32:20
Speaker
And he does indeed turn to Clark after he's had a look at Brian's views. He says that Clark argues that conspiracy theories are intellectually suspect for two reasons. One, they typically constitute the cause of degenerating research programs, and two, they typically attribute too much causal influence to human dispositions and not enough to the social situation. Hence, they commit the fundamental attribution error. Now, I want to point out at this point, Charles is probably not red.
00:32:47
Speaker
Clark's reply to his own paper was appealing to the fundamental attribution error a mistake. So of course he's only replying to Clark's first paper and not the chapter in this volume where Clark slightly retracts that view. And it seemed again it
00:33:08
Speaker
I wouldn't call it a misreading of Steve Clark's paper, but it did seem to sort of twist the emphasis a little bit where Clark seemed mostly, you know, he wanted to say what was wrong with conspiracy theories by looking at the psychology of conspiracy theorists. So it wasn't so much he was saying that conspiracy theories
00:33:31
Speaker
result in the fundamental attribution era themselves, but conspiracy theorists, especially the ones who stick to these degenerating research programs, are committing that era. And he does, and again, I mean, Clark said, if you remember way back to, what was Clark's one? Of conspiracy theories? No, that was Brian's one.
00:33:54
Speaker
That's a good question. I can now only think of the conspiracy theories. No, I was actually about to name his next paper, conspiracy theories and controlled demolition. No, it's conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorizing. You are quite correct.
00:34:12
Speaker
which I mean near the end he says, Steve Clark says, giving a thousand conspiracy theories some consideration is a small price for us to pay to have one actual nefarious conspiracy such as the Watergate conspiracy uncovered sooner rather than later. So, I mean, even back then, he A, acknowledged that real conspiracies occur and B, said that although these things appear to be suspect, it pays to look into them because every now and then a real one pops up.
00:34:41
Speaker
Charles Pickens, of course, is wanting to say, no, it's not just that every now and then a real conspiracy pops up. They're all over the damn place. They're everywhere. So I can still see that he would possibly have issue with that. At one point, he does say, talking about the few times when Keeley and Clark
00:35:04
Speaker
mention actual conspiracies that really have happened, and which therefore theories about would be valid. He says the only conspiracy theories that Clark himself appears to believe in are the Iran-Contra and Watergate conspiracies. From this we conclude that reading history is not his chief evocation. And it's not often that I read a philosophy paper and say out loud, ooh, you bitch! But, um... It's a very cutting remark, is it not? It is fairly cutting.
00:35:30
Speaker
So, yeah, he's not in any way sympathetic, I would say, towards what Cleary and Clark have to say.
00:35:41
Speaker
As Lee Basham's papers that we've looked at showed, at least initially there, Keeley and Clark both seem to be trying to identify at least one kind of conspiracy theories that are prima facie unwarranted. They both seem to start the earlier papers from the position that, well, okay,
00:36:01
Speaker
conspiracy theories, we have this intuition that there's something wrong with them. Now, we know conspiracies do occur, so that means some conspiracy theories have to be good. But how can we justify for a class of conspiracy theories, at least, being inherently suspect of them? And so you get Brian's mature, unwarranted conspiracy theories and Clark's degenerating research programs. And then Lee comes along and says, ah, but really the problem with that is that you're
00:36:31
Speaker
um trying to come up with a class of conspiracy that's that's inherently suspect but you end up just sort of saying that the suspect ones a suspect that bad conspiracies are bad and the real question is not what's the class of of bad conspiracy theories rather just simply how do you tell individual particular if you will conspiracy theories are the good ones from the bad ones um
00:36:59
Speaker
So I think Lee sort of identifies the problem with your approach, but it doesn't seem to be the problem.
00:37:05
Speaker
that Pigdon's addressing in this paper, certainly the idea that the thing that really seemed in both Keeley and Clark's papers to be the thing that concerned them was the fact these people who stick to their mature unwarranted conspiracy theory stick to their degenerating research programs well past the point when they should give up on them, although it's not entirely clear
00:37:31
Speaker
when that point is. Yes, as we've seen with the discussion both of maturity and degeneration with respect to Keeley and then to Clark. It's one thing to say, look, you shouldn't believe in mature conspiracy theories, conspiracy theories which persist sans evidence over a long period of time.
00:37:51
Speaker
or conspiracy theories which constitute the core of a degenerating research program when no progress has been made for a long time and a lot of effort has been put into it to try and scaffold the theory against criticism. It seems that
00:38:06
Speaker
Once you get to that end point, that's a good point to go, well actually, maybe we should give up belief in these conspiracy theories. The problem is, we don't know when a conspiracy theory becomes mature, or when a conspiracy theory is an example of a degenerating research program, particularly since, as Keeley points out, if conspirators are good at their jobs,
00:38:31
Speaker
They will be hiding this stuff from us. But then again, Keeley's concern isn't with truth. His concern is with warrant, qua, plausibility. It's not the case that we give up on the conspiracy theory because it's false. We give up on the conspiracy theory by saying, look, I've got no good reasons to entertain it at this point in time. Come back to me when you've got new evidence.
Modern-Day Conspiracies and Biases
00:38:58
Speaker
So, as he goes through this stuff, as we said, Charles goes through the historical record, pointing out conspiracy theories as far as the eye can see, and looks to more modern day examples, in particular looking at the Iraq War II, the post-9-11 war in Iraq.
00:39:19
Speaker
and the various dodgy goings on there, and pointing out the inconsistency, or hypocrisy is probably a fair word, of various politicians and journalists who would write off any time someone would say, a Western government is doing something bad, say the dodgy dossier,
00:39:39
Speaker
conspiring to falsify the case for a war in Iraq, those sorts of theories would just be written off as although those are conspiracy theories and therefore inherently crazy. And yet, any time someone would bring up what is obviously a conspiracy theory about someone else, say, you know, what Al-Qaeda is scheming to get up to and so on.
00:40:01
Speaker
They don't find anything suspect about those and are quite happy to countenance those theories. He basically says, when these people say conspiracy theories, they really mean conspiracy theories about a Western government.
00:40:18
Speaker
and says that's a real problem and I would say he's entirely right to. This is right near the end of the paper and I sort of read that bit and kind of thought this really sounds like the people who you're really aiming this at and it doesn't really seem to be a good portrayal of perhaps Keeley and Clark's views but certainly there are and as he points out there are plenty examples of
00:40:44
Speaker
people who indulge in this superstition, as you'd have it, that conspiracy theories are just inherently suspect and do so to let powers that be in some cases get away with stuff they shouldn't be getting away with. All of which seems like an entirely fair point.
00:41:03
Speaker
So he finishes things off by saying, but there is no need to belabor the point. I would say that remark comes possibly four or five pages too late. But anyway, Western governments and government agencies have engaged in morally dodgy conspiracies, hence theories which say they do are not obviously faulty or foolish.
00:41:20
Speaker
So what is the upshot? The idea that conspiracy theories are, as such, a somehow intellectually suspect is a superstitious or irrational belief, since there is no reason whatsoever to think it's true. It is an idiotic superstition, since a modicum of critical reflection reveals that it is false. And it is a dangerous superstition, since it invests the lies, evasions and self-deceptions of torturers and warmongers with a spurious era of methodological sophistication.
00:41:44
Speaker
So, if somebody poo-poos a conspiracy theory of yours simply because it is a conspiracy theory, then you know that they are either a nave or a fool, or quite likely an unlovely combination of the two. And yes, while I sort of found myself reading through a lot of this paper kind of disagreeing with a lot of it, by the time he gets to the end, I think that's an entirely in agreement with his final conclusion.
00:42:09
Speaker
Yes, so I should point out you're disagreeing with his portrayals of Keeley and Clark, rather than disagreeing with his ultimate conclusions about how we should treat conspiracy theory. And indeed, as you say, I have the benefit of 14 years worth of work on the field filtered through you into my brain meats. So I can see things perhaps with a bit more nuance than was available to anyone writing in 2006.
00:42:36
Speaker
Indeed. I mean a lot more work is about to appear but at this stage we are dealing with a small cohort of writers and thus there is going to be a little bit of cannibalism.
00:42:49
Speaker
So I do, though, have to say that one of the things, one of the high points of Charles' original paper was, of course, the reference to Robocop 2 and its conclusion. So I've gone from referencing Robocop 2 to actually making me read Shakespeare for the first time since I was like 17 years old in high school. I don't see that as any sort of an advance, quite frankly.
00:43:17
Speaker
I thought you were going to describe him as a true Renaissance man. Well, I mean, I suppose, yes, you could make that argument as well. But frankly, if I wanted to read Shakespeare, I would invent a time machine, swap bodies with my 17-year-old self somehow, and pay a bit more attention when we were talking about King Lear in seventh form English. Didn't we watch Titus and Dronachos together? No, I've never seen the Anthony Hopkins one. Yeah, it's brilliant. It's really, really good. No, I've never watched that one. What have I seen?
00:43:47
Speaker
I've seen the Mel Gibson Hamlet. That might be it. Whenever I think of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, I do think of the last action hero to be, or not to be, not to be one of the greatest scenes in American cinematic history.
00:44:07
Speaker
Yeah, I've heard a lot of people singing the praises of The Last Action Hero and how it was the first post-modern action film. So I remember at the time it wasn't well received, and I remember watching it and going, yeah, but maybe my teenage mind or early 20s mind, whenever the hell it came out, just wasn't sophisticated enough to cope with it.
00:44:29
Speaker
It is one of those films that I think has aged particularly well in the same way that Hudson Hawk, a film that was not well received at the time, has also aged well. So it played at the movie marathon two years ago now, and watching it on the big screen with a receptive audience truly was wonderful. And seeing a young child's dance even better.
00:44:55
Speaker
Everything's good with the Young Child's Dance. The Golden Child. That's something I have rewatched more recently. The old Eddie Murphy one. And yeah, not the best example of Eddie Murphy's work, but Young Child's Dance. Oh my. Oh yes. Oh yes. Now, talking about things we can go oh my to, we should probably talk about the bonus content that patrons can go oh my to after the break.
00:45:23
Speaker
Yes. So another update on Alexei Navalny. It's almost probably time to stop talking about him, but there's still an update to go. Apparently Jesus has been arrested in Russia. About time to. If you want to know more about that, tune in.
00:45:41
Speaker
There was another one of those interesting surveys that appears to show an enormous groundswell of belief in COVID-19 conspiracy theories. We'll look into that. Apparently, Action Zelandia had Kerry Bolton on again. Again, again. Again, again.
00:46:04
Speaker
And some interesting, interesting ideas in the lead up to the general election here in Aotearoa, New Zealand, which is what, three weeks away, two and a bit? Yeah, very soon. I mean, advanced voting will be open by this time next week, I believe. And there have been some interesting, a bit of interesting commentary coming up around that that we could perhaps look into. So,
00:46:30
Speaker
If you would like to hear more about that and you're a patron, good news, you're about to. If you'd like to hear about that and you're not a patron, good news, you can become one. If you would like to hear about that and you're not a patron, good news, that's all going to work out for you anyway. And no matter what your particular view on the patron bonus content is, you very definitely listen to the end of this episode and thank you for that, basically.
00:47:00
Speaker
So, given that we've had another installment of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre, we've gone through a paper, we've bottomed out in pop culture references, I think all that remains is to say goodbye to the nice people listening to us. How would you like to do that this week?
00:47:18
Speaker
I do think that maybe, maybe when we think of goodbyes, I'm reminded of when Ethel first came home from the clinic. You see, Ethel had ideas. You know, I have no idea anything that Harold Pinter's ever done. Who's the singing detective guy? That's not Harold Pinter. No, no. Oh god, no, I've completely forgotten the name who did...
00:47:48
Speaker
Oh, I've actually now forgotten everything. And lipstick on your colour. Yeah. And pushkin. Pushkin. Which is a reference to one of the last ones he wrote. And it's completely gone out of my head. That's going to really annoy me. The point is... I mean, it's a shame we don't have any devices which allow us to actually check these things. The point is I'm culturally illiterate, so I'm just going to say goodbye. Fair enough. Ethel says goodbye as well.
00:48:17
Speaker
Oh.
00:48:23
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast'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.
00:49:25
Speaker
And remember, remember, oh December was a night.