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Conspiracy Theory: Truth or Language Game? (Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre)
69 Plays2 years ago
Josh and M review 20 "Conspiracy Theory: Truth or Language Game?" by Ole Bjerg and Thomas Presskorn-Thygesen (as published in Theory, Culture & Society 2017, Vol. 34(1) pp. 137–159).
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
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Transcript
Songful Banter and New Patron
00:00:00
Speaker
Ali, Ali, Ali, Alexander. Oh, you're very songful today. Well, we have a new patron, and I'm fairly sure it's one of the people indicted for that January 6th insurrection thing last year.
Sponsorship Irony and Conspiracies
00:00:15
Speaker
Last year?
00:00:16
Speaker
Ah, how time flies. But still, if we're being patronised by insurrectionists, then actually hang on, I've been meaning to talk to you about this. We always use the spiel when we get a new patron to say, ha ha, we've uncovered you in your dust to be rolled in the conspiracy. But they're the ones paying us. Aren't we the ones being uncovered by them? Josh, Josh, Josh, Josh, Josh.
00:00:39
Speaker
Josh. No, you obviously have not been reading your Ike or your Brown. Don't you realise that people like Ali want us to know about their conspiratorial activities? They're paying us in order to push their activity in our faces. But that means… Yes.
00:00:59
Speaker
That means that not only is Ellie in on the conspiracy, but our patrons think we're stupid. Not just stupid, Josh. Deeply, deeply dumb. Well, they're not wrong. And we're said too much. Conspiracy knives like conspiracy plays. More often than not, they're plotter than complots in nefarious ways.
Podcast Introduction
00:01:32
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:01:41
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison in Auckland, New Zealand and in Zhuhai, China, we have associate professor of philosophy into the one who knows what you did. It's Dr. M.R.X.Tentis. And I know what you did last summer.
00:01:56
Speaker
And also, given the sequel next summer, or was it the summer before?
Sequel Movie Critique
00:02:02
Speaker
I know what you did last summer. I still know what you did last summer. That sequel was... I mean, it had Jeffrey Coombs in it, so I should love it, but it's... I mean, first of all, the first film wasn't very good, but the sequel was particularly bad.
00:02:16
Speaker
Not even sure I saw it, and if I did, I've forgotten it. No, no, we saw it at the cinema. Ah, well there you go. That shows you what an impacted hit on me. But no, it's, uh... It's about a TV series. Based on... Or they made a TV series. Or was it the screen one?
00:02:34
Speaker
No, no, no. They've made a TV series out of Scream. Scream? Yeah. Scream. They've also made a TV series. You're right, it's already played. I don't know whether it's getting a sequel. And of course, there is the new Scream film. Yes. Yes, that is a film that exists. And that's all I wish to say about it. Fair enough. Let's move on from our pop culture. Yes, no. Our Dawson's Creed.
00:02:56
Speaker
a barmy night in Auckland after suffering a mild case of heat stroke after recording last week's episode. I also believe you you've managed to hurt your toe recently.
Personal Chaos and Dislocated Toe
00:03:10
Speaker
Oh okay so last the last Friday the night after we recorded this a guy came speeding down our street and slammed into my wife's car which was empty but parked on the side of the road so that was our excitement
00:03:23
Speaker
last Friday night, to quote Katy Perry, the Friday night before that, I was about to go to bed, I stepped into the living room to say goodnight to my wife, and tripped over the edge of the fireplace with such force that I dislocated the top two joints of my middle toe.
00:03:43
Speaker
I stumbled over this thing, swore a look down, expecting to see a stubbed toe or a bruise or something, and instead saw one of my toes sticking at an angle that toes should not stick at, and called in their own... Is that an HP Lovecraft story? The angle that toes should not be. Oh god, bloody god. No, I basically, I took one look at it, and then was like, right, I cannot see that.
00:04:07
Speaker
and spent the rest of the time waiting for an ambulance to arrive. Well, first with my eyes averted and then my wife thoughtfully supplied a bag of frozen peas to stick on top of it to keep it numb. So we sort of spent some time talking to people on the phone who referred us to a nurse to sort of triage to see if we needed an ambulance a lot and basically said, oh, yeah, someone better look at that. And I was like, do you think? But because I couldn't drive, obviously,
00:04:35
Speaker
And it was Friday night, my wife had had a beer, and also we had children at home. But neither of us could drive me to hospital. So we got ambulance people to come out who basically stuck a bit of anesthetic into me, popped it back in joint, and that was it. Got an x-ray the next morning, which showed no broken bones. But now I have just a sore toe, and also a phobia of walking around my house without wearing feet now, without wearing shoes on my feet.
00:05:01
Speaker
The more interesting thing is you don't wear feet around the house.
Auckland Weather and Cyclone Aftermath
00:05:05
Speaker
So how did your toe get stubbed if you weren't wearing the feet? Anyway, so my last two Friday nights have been quite eventful. I'm a little bit worried about what might happen tomorrow.
00:05:17
Speaker
That's another problem. But yes, as I say, the tropical cyclone that was pushing stifling muggy air over Auckland for the last week and a bit has gone over. And while it did cause a bit of flooding and property damage, it did also get rid of all that air. So it's actually bearable to live in the city now. And it is bearable for me to sit in this room with all the windows shut so as not to make too much noise in the recording.
00:05:42
Speaker
Um, but I think that's, I
Paper Review Introduction
00:05:44
Speaker
think that's enough. I think that's enough about, about the weather and about movies that weren't very good. Um, it's a Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre. We can, so we have a paper to review, and what a paper it is. It is a paper. There's no, I don't think you could make a case for denying that. Uh, shall we get straight into it? We shall. I shall play a chime about here. Welcome to Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre.
00:06:15
Speaker
Very well, so today we are here to talk to you about a paper called Conspiracy Theory, Truth Claim or Language Game. It's from the 2017 issue of Theory, Culture and Society, and it's by Ole Bergen Thomas Presscorn-Tigson from the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at the Copenhagen Business School.
Interdisciplinary Context of the Paper
00:06:37
Speaker
uh two names we've not heard before are they a department of management politics and philosophy okay so they are they are they are they from the philosophy perspective or the more sort of social sciencey one well i keep the impression this is one of those ppe things but
00:06:54
Speaker
politics, philosophy, and economics, which has been a kind of growth area in the Western academic circle for a while, because it promotes kind of interdisciplinary research. It also allows philosophers to talk on issues they don't normally get any credence on, so political economy and the like.
00:07:14
Speaker
and allows economists to then also go, by the way, operationalizing these terms in these particular ways leads to particular consequences. So people working in departments like this are kind of expected to have a toe in each of those particular pools, which when I think about it, there are three pools there. Most people only have two toes, or at least two big toes. I suppose technically, I mean, everyone has, you know, 10 toes or
00:07:41
Speaker
on average most people have 10 toes but they're normally on two feet and three pools and two feet is difficult although i suppose technically if the pools are quite shallow you could have one one foot bridging or if you happen to have conveniently dislocated one of your toes and it's sticking off at a funny angle that might um
00:07:59
Speaker
That might make it convenient. Apparently. And in that way we bring the preamble and make it content in the content. In the Amble. Yeah. Precisely. Yes. So, I mean, the first thing to say about this paper is that it's called Truth Claim or Language Game, which rhymes and I am 1000% on board with rhyming paper titles. I think we need more of them.
00:08:18
Speaker
Also, it does sound like it should be a ballad from the 1990s. Or possibly a game show. Truth claim or language game. Yes, even better.
00:08:31
Speaker
But yeah, but it's not either of those things, unfortunately. But fortunately, not yet. It could be licensed. It could be licensed into both music, a game show, and a feature film. But no, it has an abstract that tells us what it's all known. Whose turn is it to read the abstract? It's mine. It's been so long. Right. Then by all means, get to it.
00:08:51
Speaker
The paper is a contribution to current debates about conspiracy theories within philosophy and cultural studies. Wittgenstein's understanding of language is invoked to analyse the epistemological effects of designating particular questions and explanations as conspiracy theory. It is demonstrated how such a designation relegates these questions and explanations beyond the realm of meaningful discourse.
00:09:15
Speaker
In addition, Agaben's concept of sovereignty is applied to explore the political effects of using the concept of conspiracy theory. The exceptional epistemological status assigned to alleged conspiracy theories within our prevalent paradigms of knowledge and truth is compared to the exceptional legal status assigned to individuals accused of terrorism under the War on Terror.
00:09:41
Speaker
The paper concludes by discussing the relation between conspiracy theory and the paranoid style in contemporary politics. So yes, there's going to be some Wittgenstein here for all you Wittgenstein fans, and I gather that Wittgenstein does have his fans out
Wittgenstein and Conspiracy Theories
00:09:57
Speaker
there. I never really studied it, studied the man when I was doing my philosophy degree, but I seem to remember people get quite into him, those of them who are fans.
00:10:07
Speaker
Yes, well, I mean, late Wittgenstein has a lot of fans. I mean, as we'll talk about later on in the paper, there were kind of two Wittgenstein's, early Wittgenstein and late Wittgenstein. And people are very fond of the kind of pragmatic term that late Wittgenstein represents in contemporary analytic philosophy.
00:10:28
Speaker
And we've also got Agaben, who is one of those scholars who isn't really discussed in any large extent outside of Europe, but my God, European philosophers love their Agaben.
00:10:44
Speaker
All right, well we'll be hearing from both of them shortly, but we start with an introductory chapter that just sort of lays a bit of the groundwork. Interestingly, its initial example, this being a paper published in 2017, the example it first appeals to is the Charlie Hebdo attacks in France from 2015, and mentioning that almost instantly there were false flag theories circulating about that.
00:11:08
Speaker
So talking about conspiracy theories in general, they say, This is what the current article aims to provide.
00:11:24
Speaker
And they're not just looking at conspiracies theories in and of themselves, they say. Such scrutiny should include not only conspiracy theories themselves, but also the operations by which the distinction between conspiracy theories and non-conspiracy theories
00:11:39
Speaker
are drawn in mainstream politics, media and academic debates. Conspiracy theory is no trivial word, as we're going to see any use of the concept of conspiracy theory always already implies a demarcation between legitimate rational knowledge and illegitimate irrational nonsense. Furthermore, the concept not only refers to a given type of proposition, but it also invariably calls into question the sanity and credibility of the person making or asserting the proposition, the conspiracy theorist.
00:12:06
Speaker
which is some strong language there always implies a demarcation between between rational and nonsense and invariably calls into question the sanity of the person making the claim which
00:12:17
Speaker
Sounds on the face of it that they're very much going for that sort of pejorative, the more colloquial use of conspiracy theory, where by definition they're a bit crazy and wakey. But then shortly after that, they say, in this article we explore the intricate relation between epistemology and politics and the definition and use of the concept of conspiracy theory. Using Wittgenstein's early and late theories of language, we first demonstrate how the concept oscillates between a seemingly neutral categorization of particular types of theories
00:12:46
Speaker
and a powerful tool to exclude, discard, and suppress these very same types of theories. And so it actually looks like they're going to be looking at the more sort of a neutral, more general definition of conspiracy theory and the pejorative one as well.
00:13:01
Speaker
Yes, so this is very much a paper which is looking at how do the common people refer to these things called conspiracy theories? How do academics refer to these things called conspiracy theories? And can we use a theoretical framework to shine a light on the differences and similarities?
00:13:20
Speaker
Having done the introduction, we then get into the next section, Existing Research Literature on Conspiracy Theory. So we start with a bit of a survey of what's out there. I start by saying conspiracy theories flourish in gossip. Have you done a paper on gossip yet? I know that's something you've been talking about. I wrote a book out on the distinction between rumour, gossip and conspiracy theories. One of my first publications, actually.
00:13:44
Speaker
And yes, I distinguish between gossiping, which is largely kind of back talk, and rumour mongering, which is normally a veristic activity. So when you engage in rumour mongering, you are trying to work out whether the thing you've just heard is true or false, whilst gossiping tends to be done for more personal reasons. You gossip behind people's backs, you discuss rumours to work out whether they are true.
00:14:11
Speaker
At any rate, so they say conspiracy theories flourish in gossip, at special conventions, and on blogs, web forms, and other outlets on the internet. Beyond the descriptive approaches that try to take stock of the heterogeneous body of outlets and theories, for over you see Knight 2003, Greig 2006, Hegstad 2014. The existing academic research literature may be roughly divided into three major categories, each characterised by a specific approach to conspiracy theories.
Literature on Conspiracy Theories
00:14:36
Speaker
I'm assuming Knight, Greig, and Hegstad are
00:14:38
Speaker
from disciplines outside of philosophy? What names? Peter Knight is an American Studies scholar, although we might also refer to him as being a Culture Studies scholar, so he was a particular field within Culture Studies in the UK and the EU.
00:14:55
Speaker
which looks specifically at American culture as an object of study. So they are American studies scholars, but they kind of fall into the category of culture studies more generally. And I believe Greg and Hegstar to come from the same kind of tradition as well.
00:15:12
Speaker
They're categorizing the literature into three major categories, the first of which are studies that analyze conspiracy theories as expressions of some kind of psychological, social, or even political pathology, starting with Godot Hofstetter and the paranoid style in American politics.
00:15:31
Speaker
They talk about that a little bit mentioning that, as recently argued by Dentist 2014, the focus on pathology implies an often problematic and reductive approach to the very belief in conspiracy theories. This Dentist person sounds quite interesting.
00:15:47
Speaker
Probably want to look into more of their arguments, but for now, the second major category of conspiracy theory analysis studies that approach conspiracy theories as expressions of contemporary culture on par with art or literature, which tend to have a more human, eutect, and less dismissive approach to conspiracy theories. And Joe Ucinski gets referenced as being part of this sort of category.
00:16:11
Speaker
And then the third category are philosophical studies that analyze the epistemology of conspiracy theories, somewhat familiar to us. They say there seem to be two interrelated questions within this category of research literature. The first concerns the proper definition of a conspiracy theory. The second concerns the rationality of conspiracy theories. And so, having already mentioned you, they also bring up Charles Pigdon, David Coady, and of course, the infamous Sun Student Vermule paper, which we'll be getting a work over in this one as well.
00:16:40
Speaker
Yeah, that is a paper which is going to get a lot of traction in the literature right up to the current day. People were really quite taken by the kind of audacity of Sunstein and Vermeule's position, which is kind of made even worse now because Adrian Vermeule
00:16:59
Speaker
he tweets and has a sub-stack, and frankly his politics is getting more and more libertarian and authoritarian, which is a very weird combination as time goes by. He no longer thinks that democracy is a good idea, because it turns out most people don't support his desired policy initiatives. So it'd be much better
00:17:25
Speaker
if democracy weren't in effect so that his desired policies were brought into effect, rather than what the people designed. Now, actually, I heard this is a note further down when he starts talking, when they start talking about the paper in general, but it just occurs to me now. Are Sunstein and Vermeule aware?
00:17:42
Speaker
of the effect that their paper had or did they just sort of drop it and walk away? Well I mean oddly enough Sunstein wrote a book going to extremes which actually contains that paper in it but that paper in the book is a solo authored
00:17:58
Speaker
There's no reference to Vermeule in it at all. So Sunstein has continued to talk about these things, especially in his development of echo chambers and more latterly the notion of the nudge. Vermeule seems to have kind of disappeared from that equation.
00:18:17
Speaker
It's really hard to know exactly what they think of the reaction to it, but then again they're also writing in an academic framework or even a pop culture framework that doesn't really require them to respond to the concerns of sociologists or philosophers.
00:18:37
Speaker
Anyway, back to this paper, which they say, the paper begins with a clarification and analysis of the epistemology of conspiracy theories.
Rationality of Conspiracy Theories
00:18:45
Speaker
In this analysis, we side with philosophers from the third category of academic research, such as Pigdon and Cody, arguing that conspiracy theorising cannot and should not be dismissed as outright irrationality.
00:18:57
Speaker
And then get into the, introduce the concept of Wittgenstein and early Wittgenstein versus late Wittgenstein. Like I say, I never really studied the guy, so I don't know much about it. But from what they're saying, I gather that his early Wittgenstein saw languages all about simply about asserting or denying empirical facts. Whereas later on, he looked more at less about what the language was asserting and just how the language is used and what the words are used for. Is that a fair summation?
00:19:27
Speaker
Yeah, so Wittgenstein's career is kind of interesting because the break point between early Wittgenstein and late Wittgenstein, and I am also not a Wittgensteinian scholar here, so anyone who is is probably going to have issues with my description here.
00:19:44
Speaker
Wittgenstein at one stage goes off to teach primary school children, and he's going, well children would be a great way to show how, you know, we can just divide concepts up into their constituent parts, and everyone knows what the meaning of those things are.
00:20:01
Speaker
And so he does these kinds of exercises with kids in school. And then he realizes quite early on that actually it's not simply the case, you can just carve up a concept at its joints. And then everybody agrees what the constituent parts mean. Because children would go, yeah, but what about this thing? And what about that thing? And so from the mouth of babes, Wittgenstein went, oh, there's actually a whole bunch of
00:20:28
Speaker
assumptions which are operating before we even engage in that activity, which philosophers have kind of just sidestepped or completely ignored. So he goes away from being someone who simply thinks we can break apart concepts into their constituent parts, to someone who's going actually
00:20:50
Speaker
There's a whole bunch of pragmatism going on here without understanding of the language as well. And that kind of conceptual term or the language term ended up being very important for mid to late 20th century philosophy.
00:21:06
Speaker
Because suddenly people are going, actually, we can explain all these disagreements here by going, look, we can't just carve concepts at the joints. We also need to talk ever so slightly about what assumptions we bring to that conversation in the first place.
00:21:22
Speaker
So yeah, there's a really interesting move here, and what Berg and Presscorn, I'm going to get their names completely wrong without actually looking at them, so what Berg, oh no, I was about to say it properly, what Berg and Presscorn Sykeson are doing here, so look,
00:21:41
Speaker
Some people are doing early Wittgensteinian analysis of these things called conspiracy theories, and some people are doing late Wittgensteinian style analysis of these things called conspiracy theories, and maybe understanding that distinction actually tells us why there's such a divide here, and maybe we can then use it to explain some other stuff in the world as well.
00:22:04
Speaker
And indeed, they say themselves, within the context of the present article, this tension between the early and the late Wittgenstein allows us to identify a paradoxical duality in the concept of conspiracy theories. On the one hand, a conspiracy theory seemed like a theory to be empirically tested like any other hypothesis,
00:22:21
Speaker
But on the other hand, the actual usages of the concept of a conspiracy theory often carry the implication that even its possible truth is excluded. In its actual employment, the concept is implicated with a rhetoric of exclusion, here referencing Husting and Orr, 2007.
00:22:37
Speaker
Have we... I know we've had, um, Jenna Hastig and Marty, or interviewed with them, have we looked at any of their papers yet?
Wittgenstein's Pragmatic Influence
00:22:45
Speaker
No, in part because they're sociologists, they don't really fit into the philosophical stream, but maybe we should actually take a break and have a look at dangerous machinery, because it is a rather important paper, and I'm not just saying that because I'm currently working on two papers with Marty and Jenna,
00:23:06
Speaker
I do legitimately think their Dangerous Machinery paper is a very important contribution to the ongoing debate about the warrant of conspiracy theories. Nothing else sounds like a good Nine Inch Nails album title. That is true. So let's listen to the next section, which is, how do you say this out loud? Conspiracy plus theory is less than conspiracy theory. We have actual mathematical symbols in our chapter titles, which is good.
00:23:35
Speaker
So they say, the typical way of beginning a philosophical analysis of conspiracy theories is by posing the question, what is a conspiracy theory? There are, however, two very different ways of answering this seemingly straightforward question. The first is to formulate a logically consistent definition of the concept of a conspiracy theory. The second is to investigate what we actually mean when we use the phrase conspiracy theory in a sentence.
00:23:58
Speaker
a little bit later as we're going to see there is a huge gap between these two levels of meaning. The gap is what makes conspiracy theories interesting not merely from a logical but also from a political point of view. So already we see there are these two sort of early Wittgenstein and late Wittgensteinian approaches that we're going to be
00:24:17
Speaker
pursuing. So how do you define a conspiracy, then, they ask? And they say you can use the first approach simply by considering the meaning of what is a conspiracy and what is a theory and sticking the two together. And they give three examples of definitions along those lines, including the one of Brian L. Keeley's that we're all familiar with. But then, of course, they point out, as others we've seen, I think David Coady was big on this, that this approach clashes
00:24:42
Speaker
with the more colloquial use of the term. First, they say that the definition of a conspiracy theory is a proposed explanation of some historical event in terms of the significant causal agency of a relatively small group of persons acting in secret, to paraphrase Brian.
00:25:00
Speaker
They say that, but then that brings in much of, for example, what goes on in the boardrooms of corporations. That definition also seems to be the case that the way we normally use the term conspiracy theory excludes instances where the theory has been generally accepted as true. In other words, they're saying, as we've seen, a lot of people use the word conspiracy theory as by definition false. If something has been proven true, then it no longer is a conspiracy theory.
00:25:27
Speaker
They say the point here is that when we employ the term conspiracy theory in actual language use, we are implicitly assuming and implying that the claims advanced by the theory are not true. Now, I'm not sure who this we are. Certainly a lot of people do. There's no arguing that that is how many people do use the word.
00:25:45
Speaker
I don't know that it's universal, but it sort of shows the approach where we often make that observation and say, yes, so what? We then argue for the fact that a more general definition is more productive and more useful.
00:25:59
Speaker
and avoids the sort of social problems that allow people to get away with doing bad things and writing off their detractors as conspiracy theorists and so on. They seem to basically take it as read rather that the fact that the term conspiracy theory in conspiracy theorists is used this way colloquially is important enough that the logical definition by its own is in some way inadequate.
00:26:26
Speaker
So that brings us on to the next one, Tractatus' ideological philosophicus, which I assumed did Wittgenstein do the Tractatus? He did, yes. There was a fondness for fancy Latin-named philosophical texts in the early to mid-20th century. Everybody was naming their texts after a fancy Latin or Greek name.
00:26:49
Speaker
So they sort of modify that for their own purposes. So again, they do a bit of an introduction. And I've always heard it as Tractatus. Tractatus. I've not heard it much anyway, so I'll take your word for it.
00:27:04
Speaker
I would just use a joke from Psych. We've heard it both ways. So they talk about, in early Wittgenstein, he distinguishes between two sort of binaries. You have things can be truer and false and also they can be sense and they can end nonsense. So
00:27:24
Speaker
propositions make sense insofar as they contain factual claims about reality. So I think the example they give is, the Earth revolves around the moon. It's false. We know it's false, but it makes sense. We know what these words mean. It's a thing that we can make sense of enough to be able to judge whether or not it's true or false.
00:27:45
Speaker
And so as to how this relates to conspiracy theories, they say, we can demonstrate how the political function of the concept of conspiracy theory is performed through a short circuit of the two conceptions of language that we find in the early and late Wittgenstein respectively. What is inconsistently combined in this short circuit is the seeming adherence to open rational empirical inquiry combined with a simultaneous rhetoric of exclusion, deeming empirical examination superfluous, if not inappropriate. So in other words, the wanting to say that
00:28:15
Speaker
If I'm understanding what they're saying here correctly, people treat conspiracy theories as though they were things that could be proven true or false. And yet when you get down to it, they really use the term as if to me, no, they're just nonsense. They can't be proven true or false because they're not that sort of thing. And so they're sort of swapping between the two equivocating perhaps between the two different meanings.
00:28:40
Speaker
which is why things go a little bit wonky. Yes, I mean, it's the equivalent of going, well look, of course it's a theory, but the kind of people who believe these theories are mad, bad and dangerous, so we'd need to spend any time considering the particular merits of their claim. So, okay, it's an admission that, of course, I mean, a conspiracy theory could be true, but we all know they're a bit stupid, aren't they?
00:29:05
Speaker
So they illustrate this with an example. They point to a 2014 article in The Guardian talking about the downing of MH17 over Ukraine.
00:29:18
Speaker
The article presents six theories. One of them is what you'd call the cock-up theory, that the plane was shot down accidentally, versus five conspiracy theories. What are they? They basically boiled down to the Ukrainians did it. It was the Ukrainians attempting to shoot down Vladimir Putin. MH17 was shot down to conceal the truth about HIV AIDS. It was Israel or the Illuminati did it.
00:29:43
Speaker
And the fact that they place those five in opposition to the other theory, basically by doing that, they invalidate the conspiracy theories right off the bat. The way they're presented, they basically make it clear that the conspiracy theories are all nonsense. That's just how it goes, which means this other one must be true.
00:30:02
Speaker
And they then point to the political aspect of doing so because the article contrasts itself with the sort of state propaganda that you see in other countries, the likes of Press TV and Russia's RT. What is that Russia today? Yeah.
00:30:19
Speaker
and sort of positioning themselves as truth tellers opposed to the propagandists from other countries. And so the paper says, we see here how the initial analytical distinction between cock-up and conspiracy is grafted onto a politically loaded distinction between the enlightened free Western press and the state-governed Eastern press.
00:30:40
Speaker
And so at the end of the section, that basically all boils down to the sorts of arguments that we've seen made plenty of times, and that we've made plenty of times, that there's a danger in writing off conspiracy theories as simply being nonsense.
00:30:54
Speaker
So they finish up the section by saying, if we follow the rhetoric of exclusion inherent to the use of the term conspiracy theory and dismiss it without further examination, we lose the very criterion of empirical falsification by which it could be legitimately dismissed at all. But even more damaging than this epistemological problem, highlighted by Wittgenstein, such a blanket dismissal entails that we're running the political risk of losing sight of actual conspiracies, such as the famous Los Angeles transit system conspiracy leading to conviction in 1949,
00:31:24
Speaker
the Watergate scandal of 1972 or the recent Volkswagen scandal of 2015. I'm sure we've mentioned the Los Angeles transit stuff, the streetcar scandal or that. I don't know if it's ever...
00:31:35
Speaker
come up fully in a episode. So I actually had a conversation with Brian Keeley about this when I was in LA several years ago. And his argument is it's actually, it's a lot more complicated a story than just mere conspiracy. Because part of it was, yes, it was, it was designed of obsolete obsolescence. It wasn't the case that
00:32:02
Speaker
automotive manufacturers forced the streetcars to be dismantled and the tracks pulled up. It was always intended that that was going to be the case. They sold the properties on the notion there was easy transit to get out there, and then didn't tell people, by the way, the easy transit system we've built is going to go away
00:32:27
Speaker
And then you're going to have to buy a car, because we're subsidising that to sell the houses. Once the houses are sold, then we just have to get rid of them. Being the tracks, not the houses. That would be silly if you got rid of the houses. Would be a little bit. So yeah, there probably is actually a nice story to be told there we could do in a future podcast. But not this one, because this one we move on to the next section, which is the war on epistemic terrorism.
Conspiracy Theories vs. Terrorism
00:32:55
Speaker
I don't actually remember Rumsfeld announcing that one. No, no. He said a lot of things, though, to Donald Rumsfeld, and not all of them made sense. Could have just slipped it in there somewhere. But so this section looks at the sort of analogous relationship between conspiracy theories and terrorism, suggesting that conspiracy theories are conceived as a kind of epistemic terrorism. And by that they mean
00:33:23
Speaker
that terrorism, especially post-September 11, terrorism kind of became a matter of guilt on association, looking at the likes of people just being rounded up and sent to Guantanamo Bay and held there without trial.
00:33:37
Speaker
to this day, in some cases. And the idea that terrorism was special, because it was especially bad, the usual sort of rule of law and the usual processes had to be suspended so that we could deal with it properly.
00:33:56
Speaker
And so where the analogy comes in is that they want to say conspiracy theories are kind of treated in the same way. They think that the rules of sort of logic and argumentation kind of get suspended because they're special somehow and that these things don't apply to them. So they say, as soon as a certain possible explanation for an event is designated as a conspiracy theory, it is implicitly assumed that the explanation obviously cannot be taken seriously.
00:34:21
Speaker
it is thus futile to investigate the truth value of the claim, since this would imply that one was taking it seriously. I was a little bit unsure about this one sort of conspiracy theories. They're like terrorism, aren't they? It seemed a little bit almost sort of like comparing people to Nazis or something. It seemed like a bit of an extreme rhetorical move, but maybe
00:34:46
Speaker
maybe like terrorism is certainly a very much a sore point in say the States and other countries, but maybe there's a different perspective on Europe. So it's not that controversial a claim to be making. I don't know.
00:34:58
Speaker
I mean, I think what's interesting about the discussion of terrorism here is that they're right that there's something interesting about the way the label terrorism is applied, in the same way the label conspiracy theory is applied in contemporary debate. But I agree it's confusing here because it's quite clear if you follow the arguments they make in the early part of the article.
00:35:21
Speaker
that when they're talking about the role the label conspiracy theory plays, it basically just cuts out the idea that we should treat particular ideas seriously. Well, it seems they're also trying to argue that when you apply the label terrorism here, you're not meant to question the application of that label, when the state designates
00:35:43
Speaker
x as a terrorist or y as a terrorist group, you're not really meant to be able to disagree with that designation. So it seems that they're talking about labelling practices here, but it almost seems as if the labelling practice associated with terrorism is almost the reverse of the labelling practice associated with conspiracy theories. You dismiss something because it's a conspiracy theory,
00:36:09
Speaker
you accept that something is a terrorist act when it gets labeled as a terrorist act by people in power? Yeah, yeah, I don't know. I think, I assume the earlier section was, the point of the earlier sections, when they're talking about the definition of it, was that following on from that, they're specifically using the colloquial, more pejorative definition of it, but I don't, I think maybe they could be a little bit clearer when
00:36:37
Speaker
they're talking about our things being called conspiracy theories. They're very, very much not talking about it simply in a logical, academic sense. But at any rate, they say
00:36:48
Speaker
I agree. I mean, the analogy holds, I think, but my wonder was that it was just a bit of a... might be a bit of a sore point, but a bit of a touchy topic to be comparing things to, but that's not relevant to their actual argumentation itself, which concludes as follows.
Critique of Exceptional Treatment
00:37:04
Speaker
The point here is, of course, not that most conspiracy theories are true, or that the individuals detained at Guantanamo Bay are somehow all-innocent.
00:37:12
Speaker
The point here is merely to show how the procedures by which the truth value of claims designated as conspiracy theories is determined differ from the procedures by which the truth value of ordinary claims is determined, just as the legal procedures determining the guilt of terrorists are exceptional in differing from ordinary legal procedures.
00:37:30
Speaker
In summary, what makes it tempting to argue that conspiracy theories are treated as a kind of epistemic terrorism is a shared form of exceptionalism. What is invoked by the concept of conspiracy theory is thus arguably a state of epistemic exception. And to illustrate what they're talking about by people treating conspiracy theories as exceptional and all that that entails, they then turn to the Sunstein and Vermeule, what they refer to as their seminal article.
00:37:56
Speaker
Yeah, they're really, you know, sticking the boot into the Sun's tune in from your paper, as we have seen numerous others do. And we also see numerous others do in future. Yes. So they start by pointing out that there's another relationship that can be drawn between terrorism and conspiracy theories, which is the idea that conspiracy theories can, as they say, serve to inspire and support the dangerous ideologies which ultimately motivate people
00:38:25
Speaker
to become terrorists. And this, as they say, is basically the idea behind Sunstein and Vermule's paper, and the justification for the somewhat, should we say, questionable conclusions they come to in that paper? Very questionable. Yes. So they say the paper is interesting as it exemplifies a number of ways in which a proper Wittgensteinian logic is suspended when it comes to the investigation of conspiracy theories.
00:38:55
Speaker
So they take issue as, was it Curtis who took issue with the demonstrably false conspiracy theories before? Yeah. Yeah. Where they say at the beginning of the paper that, you know, they acknowledge, okay, they're not all crazy, these conspiracy theories. We're just going to be talking about the ones that are demonstrably false.
00:39:18
Speaker
But straight away, going back to the Wittgensteinian sort of analysis, they make it sound like they're only going after, they're only interested in the nonsensical theories. And so whether something's sense or nonsense is kind of an a priori judgment, but then they start talking about truth and falsity and demonstrability, I guess, which is moving into more of an a posteriori empirical analysis.
00:39:43
Speaker
And they also point out the contradiction in their paper that where Sunstein and Vermeule appeal to Popper's open society at the start, but then they ended the proposals are, as this paper says, hardly compatible with the idea of an open society with a well-functioning marketplace of ideas and free flow of information.
00:40:02
Speaker
they say something we will argue how conspiracy theories constitute a special type of knowledge which can therefore be dealt with which sorry which cannot therefore be dealt with through normal deliberative procedures and then later on that the special quality of conspiracy theories call for extraordinary measures democracy must be sacrificed in order to save democracy that's one of those great sentences democracy must be sacrificed in order to save democracy
00:40:27
Speaker
and they're comparing with the sort of, the sort of, we had to bomb the village to save the village style of rhetoric you hear in other places, but another point is... Or if your child had had a few more fatal beatings in the past, they probably would have grown out to be a much better person. Classic Rowan Atkinson. But all of this is to illustrate the idea that conspiracy theories in this way are treated differently, that the rules don't apply, you can suspend the usual
00:40:57
Speaker
the usual rules and strictures that might be in place for analyzing this sort of thing because conspiracy theories are just plain different.
00:41:05
Speaker
And then furthermore, they go into some detail of the idea, the whole concept that Sunstein-Fimmiel put forward, that we should be conspiring to stop conspiracies, which we've seen plenty of people already argue against in fairly, I want to say explicit, but that always sounds rude to me for some reason in terms.
00:41:33
Speaker
The point is, they're very much not in favour of Sandstein and Fimmel's paper.
00:41:39
Speaker
Not many people are. No, no. Funny that. And so that leads us to the conclusion. Concluding discussion, paranoid style, in contemporary politics. Now, I was a little bit lost getting through this section, I have to say. I'm not quite sure. For a conclusion, it didn't seem very conclusive, and I wasn't quite sure of the point of it towards the end. But at any rate, they
00:42:02
Speaker
They talk a bit more about the other problems that we've already seen with treating terrorism and conspiracy theories as special cases to which the usual rules don't apply. They refer to a speech from David Cameron, a speech he gave in 2014 to the UN where
00:42:19
Speaker
talking about the fact that people who have been convicted of terrorist offences have been influenced by the rhetoric of other people. In his speech, David Cameron said—no, sorry, this isn't the quote from Cameron. This is a quote from the paper about David Cameron. They say, rather than trusting our established—whereas Cameron says, you know, we need to
00:42:40
Speaker
not just defeat extremism, we need to defeat the rhetoric that leads to it, which some people could say might not be compatible with free speech and intellectual inquiry. But I say, in fact, as David Cameron says, would we sit back and allow right-wing extremists, Nazis or Ku Klux Klansmen to recruit on our university campuses? No.
00:43:02
Speaker
And so in this paper, they say that they think this is completely wrong and that you should not be short circuiting fact and law. And they say, rather than trusting our established modern institutions, such as the free press, the academic communities of scholars at universities, the educational system, or even just a public forum of rational debate with the capacity to weed out false explanations of 9-11 or 7-7.
00:43:23
Speaker
the terrorist attacks in the tube in London, through their normal functioning, he seems to suggest that the government at one point or another should take extraordinary measures to deal with allegedly extremist forms of knowledge. Which does sound like a bad thing, but I do have to wonder, the institutions that they appeal to, the academic community of scholars, the educational system, public forum of rational debate,
00:43:47
Speaker
Could we say those institutions have done a great job so far either? Well, I mean, therein lies the issue, because of course one of the problems with the academic debate about these things called conspiracy theories is that an awful lot of scholars simply think they're mad, bad, and dangerous, and thus aren't engaging with them in the forum of ideas, or the marketplace of ideas.
00:44:11
Speaker
So you might end up going, all Cameron's doing is advocating what certain academics have been asking people like Cameron to do for a long time anyway. I mean, this is one of the recurrent themes of the academic literature. As Lee Basham puts it, there's a kind of political piety that goes on with the discussion of conspiracy theories in the academic realm, and that we're told repeatedly
00:44:39
Speaker
that they are bad, that they are irrational to believe, and the kind of people who believe them are cooks. And that doesn't seem to be necessarily true across the board. So there's a lot of talk of the effect of this sort of rhetoric on politics and the you-good-old paranoid style in Canadian politics. There's a lot of reference to this Agamben fellow
00:45:04
Speaker
who I do not know nothing about that to be honest I could not 100% follow but it all ends up actually it finally finishes with sort of a little bit of a a little bit of a joke which is preceded by not just a little I mean it's quite a lengthy joke really which they ending which they rephrase twice yeah but just before that joke we get
00:45:28
Speaker
What if the ideas, questions and explanations circulating in the field of so-called conspiracy theories are crude expressions of a vital popular curiosity and scepticism which is the lifeblood of an organic democratic society?
Public Belief and Expert Explanation
00:45:40
Speaker
What if the fact that people in increasingly large numbers believe in things deemed senseless or pernicious by images of an elite that considers itself enlightened?
00:45:50
Speaker
What if that fact is a symptom that university scholars and other official experts are no longer capable of explaining the world in ways that make sense to the public? If either of these two propositions is true, we should be much more worried about sovereign decisions to stifle debate and reflection about particular issues than we should about bloggers throwing wild ideas into cyberspace.
00:46:09
Speaker
Unless you wish to contribute to the instantiation of an epistemic state of exception, the role of intellectuals in this situation should still be defined by the classic virtues of the freedom of speech, speech and expression. And the freedom of speech. And the freedom of speech. I mean, I'm not entirely sure about free speech, but free speech, or for free speech. It's got to be. It's going to turn out if we actually do a search for the word speech online, it's going to be a horrible concept of some kind, isn't it?
00:46:37
Speaker
Let's find out. You should have done that so you could use your magical new typewriter. Yeah, but I don't have my VPN on, so I can't search the internet. Well, it doesn't have a proper definition, but urban dictionary defines screech as the rare condition of when someone attempts to talk, but halfway through ends up screeching like a little bitch. Yeah. I mean, that's a classic urban dictionary definition, along with my favorite, Muntnose.
00:47:07
Speaker
Anyway, so that brings us to what more needs to be made. If you want to spend some time in the bowels of the internet, look up Muntnose on Urban Dictionary. You'll be entertained and horrified for hours and hours. Muntnose knows it's down. But you can do that on your own time, because here we're just going to finish up talking about this paper, so that's essentially the end of it, and I'm not... it didn't...
00:47:31
Speaker
It didn't really seem to have much of a conclusion other than the way conspiracy theories are treated in that pejorative sort of colloquial sense is a bad thing, which I certainly would agree with. It doesn't suggest where we should go from there, though. I mean, they certainly don't seem to advocate, as we've seen in other papers, that we should move away from the pejorative definition.
00:47:55
Speaker
um towards a more general one they just kind of say this is bad and and pretty much leave it at that is there any more i mean i guess it's a case of it's a warning to the curious so they go look here's an issue some people use the term in this way other people use it in this loaded way we need to be aware that actually
00:48:18
Speaker
Both uses can be conflated in certain senses, which is where they talk about the idea that people bring up conspiracy theories as if they could be rationally investigated and at the same time are dismissive on them. We could investigate these things, but we know they're stupid. And they're trying to draw attention to the fact that we shouldn't be allowing that move in public discourse. You're right, they don't really suggest a solution.
00:48:47
Speaker
they're just much more interested in presenting the problem in the hope that by drawing attention to it, people are then going to go, oh, actually, we can resolve it in some particular way. What that resolution looks like, well, the philosophical literature has had a fairly good go at saying either revise the terms, so get rid of the loaded term entirely,
00:49:11
Speaker
and change our lexicon to go when we talk about conspiracy theories we're talking about this thing into definition or stipulate terms for academic debate which is actually my favorite solution here which is to go look
00:49:26
Speaker
There is an ordinary language conception of conspiracy theory. We probably can't change that because you can't really change ordinary language by figures. But what you can do is go, look, when we're having an academic debate on this particular topic, we are allowed to stipulate terms. I mean, scientists do it all the time in scientific papers. Why can't we do it in the social sciences and beyond as well?
00:49:53
Speaker
So yes, I think my key takeaway from this paper that as someone who was a former linguist, I should probably know more about Wittgenstein than I do. So what you're talking about, I mean, his early innate stuff, when I did linguistics, which linguistics was my minor, and I carried it through into my into my email a little bit when I did my main philosophy in
00:50:15
Speaker
Certainly the study of semantics, in linguistics they have semantics and pragmatics, and the whole idea is that semantics, the literal sort of logical meaning of each word, is only half of meaning, and you also have pragmatics, which is all the assumptions and sort of cultural
00:50:30
Speaker
baggage that allows us to actually make sense of the things people say is an entirely different thing. I don't know if a lot of that came out of Wittgenstein or if Wittgenstein, if it was something that all was already being talked about in linguistics and Wittgenstein probably should have been paying more attention to them, I don't know which came first.
00:50:52
Speaker
It does sound interesting. It's possibly the reason why I have such low tolerance for pedantry, which is a shame because the internet is full of it, but it almost entirely consists of people looking at the semantic meanings of words and completely ignoring all of the pragmatics around it, which actually make up half of the meaning of what people say. Anyway,
00:51:17
Speaker
So yeah, I mean, I thought it was good. I thought it laid things out well and was a good, it was another one of those summary type papers that had a lot of stuff that we've seen before and was just kind of presenting it as if a new, just to summarize everything there. You just wanted a stronger conclusion, didn't you? Yeah, yeah. Like you say, it does a good job of pointing out a problem, but I kind of expected it to suggest maybe we might go from there.
00:51:47
Speaker
But if that's not what they set out to do, then I can't really fault them for not doing it. Well, so I've now got an Alan Parsons project song stuck in my head. Where do we go from here now that the children have grown up? Where do we go? Where do we go from here? We go on to more papers, more papers.
00:52:07
Speaker
Well, right now we go on to recording a bonus episode for our patrons, obviously. So what have we got this week to talk about? We're going to talk about that wacky scamp David Ferrier. What's he been up to?
00:52:23
Speaker
A bit more of MH370. Yes, which is kind of a return to a story we had, which I'm surprised had legs, but apparently has had underwater sea legs? Flippers. Flippers of some kind. Now I must talk with the dolphin. Hudson Hawk reference. Always room for one of those. Apparently I should ditch Android. Ian's going to tell me why.
00:52:52
Speaker
And then something about Jane Austen. Yes. Yes. Are you a fan of Jane Austen, Josh? Not a massive fan. I'm married to a human woman and so therefore have been exposed to it, whether I wanted to or not. I've seen the I've seen the 90s pride and prejudice with with old what's Colin Firth.
00:53:19
Speaker
that all the ladies swoon over, and I've also seen the newer one with What's His Face and Keira Knightley. I've seen enough Jane Austen to know what an Empire line dress is, and also I've seen all of Season 3 of Blackadder. It's true.
00:53:37
Speaker
So anyway, if you want to hear about those particular topics and you are a patron, then I've got good news for you because you can. You don't even need to do a thing. If you'd like to become a patron, go to patreon.com and search for the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy and you can sign yourself up and then have access
00:53:57
Speaker
to all of these bonus episodes plus a Discord server plus we might even might even give you a little bit of a shout out like the one at the start of the and actually sorry I meant to say at the start of the episode you gave me crap for an episode of South Park from 1999 forming the the the intro of last week's episode you did the Disney Aladdin in this one which is even older so I don't accept that I should point out people remember
00:54:26
Speaker
Aladdin. People don't remember a single joke from South Park. I mean, they remade Aladdin as a live action film recently with the same songs. It is contemporary pop culture. You are living in the past. I am living two years in the past, but much closer to the present than you, old man.
00:54:52
Speaker
And so that's all we have to say. If you're a patron, stay tuned for the bonus episode. If you're not a patron, thank you for listening to the end of this episode anyway, because without you, we're kind of wasting our time. I think that's all I have to say. Have you anything to round out this episode with?
00:55:10
Speaker
I need the realisation that when we did the intro, I was going Ali, you were going Ellie. And of course, we actually don't know whether it's Ellie or Ali. So it's going to be Ali, Ali, Ali, Ali, land. It doesn't work if you try to combine both into one song.
00:55:28
Speaker
Well there we go. So I think it's time to just simply bring this fast to an end, which I will do by saying goodbye.
Closing Remarks and Contact Info
00:55:54
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy is Josh Addison and me, Dr. M.R.X.Dentist, who can contact us at podcastconspiracygmail.com, and please do consider supporting the podcast via our Patreon. And remember, the truth is out there, but not quite where you think you left it.