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Steve Clarke's Conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorizing
24 Plays4 years ago
Josh and M continue on with Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre, discussing Steve Clarke's 2002 paper, "Conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorising." Meanwhile, Pluddles and Lord Morissey Morrisey find themselves on a train... to Alderthrop!
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
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Transcript
Urgent Train to Oldothrop
00:00:16
Speaker
After a morning of tea and research, as well as the biscuits, Lord Morrissey Morrissey's vellae, Mr M- Oh, vellit, I think you'll find. Are you interrupting my monologue? Yes, I know it should be pronounced vellae, but a man's man in those days was a vellit. Hmm. Indeed. Carry on. Very well.
00:00:35
Speaker
As well as the biscuits, Lord Morrissey Morrissey's valet, Mr. Muna, had baked, Morrissey announced that we had read enough. We needed to be on a train to Oldothrop within the hour if we were to get there before evening. So, with barely enough time to pack my kit bag, we found ourselves northbound and first class. Tuddles, I must apologize my tone. Earlier this morning, I spoke haughtily. Much appreciated, Morrissey, old man. Much appreciated. Quite. Uh, Morrissey? Yes?
00:01:03
Speaker
Is it a coincidence that we're travelling to a place with the same name as the deceased hitching's Alderthrop? Pluddles? There never was a man by
Puddles' Promotion Mystery
00:01:11
Speaker
that name. Ah. I don't think I understand, Morrissey. What interruption is this? Enter by good man? Telegram? Telegram for Mr. Pluddles? That would be me. There you go. How curious, Morrissey. I've been promoted.
00:01:34
Speaker
Morrissey took the telegram from my hands. I see. Congratulations, Puddles. Or should I say, post-master Puddles. It would appear that your work in the sorting room has finally been recognized. Morrissey's compliment was appreciated. It was not often that someone of his stature would even deign to admit what someone of my birth did on the regular. But enough of this, Morrissey. What of this older Throp who never existed? Quite right, Puddles. We must not get Mortland when there is a mystery to solve.
00:02:00
Speaker
Morrissey pulled from his morning coat a tattered postcard and passed it to me.
00:02:13
Speaker
I peered at the postcard. Morrissey, the hotel. Yes, Pluddles, the hotel. Or, as it is known in an alderthrope, the Hitchings Hotel. The Hitchings Alderthrope. What does this mean, Morrissey? Hopefully nothing, Pluddles. Hopefully nothing at
Transition to Conspiracy Theories
00:02:30
Speaker
all. Which is why I hope that when we book into our rooms there, old chum, that no one bats an eyelid when we claim to be two travelling salesmen by the names of Archibald and Medi-Cat.
00:02:55
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. N. Denton.
00:03:04
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am, what the heck is that? That's my whisky glass. That's a whisky glass. I, without a whisky glass, I'm Josh Addison, sitting in Auckland, New Zealand. The bearer of the whisky glass is of course Dr. M. Denteth, sitting in Hamilton, New Zealand.
00:03:26
Speaker
Actually, I think you're fine, Josh. We want to call it Kiri Rua now. Oh, yes, yes, we are. Yeah. We've been doing a bit of pulling down. Actually, we haven't. What did they do to the statue? They didn't pull it down. Have they taken it away yet? They have. It has been removed. It's been picked up and taken off.
00:03:43
Speaker
Major Hamilton is left the city. Turns out the city of Hamilton in New Zealand is named after a Major Hamilton who never went to Hamilton, I understand, and basically got himself killed in sharp order fighting against the Maori.
00:04:03
Speaker
So basically his only claim to fame was massacring the indigenous people of this place and for that he got a city named after him and the reckoning has been maybe that was always a bad idea.
00:04:21
Speaker
Yes, so Kiri Kiri Rua is possibly the name you should be using. I think I really wish it were more like in Australia, where the city of Melbourne was originally called Batmania, after a Mr. Batman. And frankly, I don't care how many people he massacred. His name was Batman, and he got to name the city Batmania. And the thing is, he massacred a lot of people. I would not doubt that for a second, actually, although I know nothing of the man.
00:04:48
Speaker
He was a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very bad man.
00:05:01
Speaker
Right, probably that they changed it to Melbourne, I suppose. And that means I'm not going to do the thing you love the most, which is my Christian Bale Batman voice impression. Good. Because I'd be wrong to elevate Batman to the position of Batman. Batman? Hmm.
00:05:20
Speaker
Ah, now, it is in... This is the perfect time for you to say, talking about Australians. We are talking about Australians, we are, yes. Talking about Australians,
Analyzing Clark's Work
00:05:33
Speaker
it's another episode of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre, and this week we're going to be looking at conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorising by Steve Clark of Charles Sturt University, who I'm given to understand is of the Australian persuasion.
00:05:46
Speaker
He is of the Australian persuasion, and that is not a euphemism. That is literally true. Shall we play the chime and then go into the full boner of the episode? I think there's going to be a lot of accidental Australian isms in the course of the recording of this episode. And for that, we can only apologize. But yes, play the chime.
00:06:14
Speaker
So, Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracy Theorising by Steve Clark, published in Philosophy of the Social Sciences, volume 32, number 2, June 2002. So, just after 9-11? Our first actual post-9-11 paper.
00:06:29
Speaker
No actual mention of 9-11 in the paper because the way that these things work it was published in June of 2002 but it was probably submitted back in 2001 it probably went into pre-production and proofing halfway through the year prior and thus Steve probably wrote it not knowing 9-11 was about to come which once again makes us ask what are these people doing if they can't predict terrorist events of this particular scale?
00:06:58
Speaker
And even then, I mean, I don't know if we've ever really looked into the timeline of it, but the actual, the 9-11 conspiracy theories didn't really get going in earnest until after the loose change documentary, did they? I mean, obviously there was some around right from the start, but anyway.
00:07:13
Speaker
Anyway, so philosophy of the social sciences of memory serves as the journal that Charles Pigdon's of Papa Revisited was published in. Correct, among them. I think, yes. And while this paper mentions Papa Revisited once that I spotted, it seems to be mostly another response to Brian Alkely's of conspiracy theories.
00:07:38
Speaker
Yes, so it's true that Steve mentions Charles's paper. Interestingly enough, doesn't mention Lee's paper at all. I have a theory about this. Actually, I could, I could, I could check this because I know, I know Steve, so I actually could have emailed him about this. My suspicion is that there's actually not enough time between Lee's publication and Steve's publication.
00:08:02
Speaker
for either Steve to have read it or Steve to have updated his paper if he had read it to include mention of it in this new paper. So they're not strictly contemporaneous, but in philosophical publication terms, they're basically published at exactly the same time.
00:08:21
Speaker
So before we proceed, who is Steve Clark? Give us a bit of a bio. So Steve Clark is a philosopher at Charles Sturt University. He's also associated with Oxford as well. I first met Steve back in 2016 at the conspiracy theory workshop that Pat Stokes organised. We hit it off there. Steve and I actually were working on a proposal
00:08:50
Speaker
to look at COVID-19 conspiracy theories in Australia which we were hoping to get funded through Charles Sturt University. That proposal did not go ahead but we're still keeping in mind other places that we could get funding from. So Steve is someone who
00:09:08
Speaker
I have technically worked with in the past, working on a funding proposal, hope be working with in the future, and as such that may well colour the kind of commentary we have in this paper for reasons we'll get to at the very end of the discussion of this particular piece, conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorising. But first,
00:09:31
Speaker
We should probably read the abstract. Joshua, we'd like to use your most dulcet tones to tell us how this abstract actually goes. Very well.
00:09:41
Speaker
How about I stutter on the very first sentence then? I do it all the time. Indeed. The dismissive attitude of intellectuals toward conspiracy theorists is considered and given some justification. It is argued that intellectuals are entitled to an attitude of prima facie skepticism toward the theories propounded by conspiracy theorists because conspiracy theorists have an irrational tendency to continue to believe in conspiracy theories even when these take on the appearance of forming the core of a degenerating research program.
00:10:11
Speaker
It's further argued that the pervasive effect of the fundamental attribution era can explain the behavior of such conspiracy theorists. A rival approach due to Brian Keeley, which involves the criticism of a subclass of conspiracy theories on epistemic grounds, is considered and found to be inadequate.
Epistemology of Conspiracy Theories
00:10:26
Speaker
Bravo, sir. Bravo. Well-read. Well-read. Now, I would like to point out, before we actually get into the meat and potato, apparently there's only one bit of meat and only one potato there. Obviously. He does state at the very end of this paper a comment which, in today's political climate and today's climate of conspiracy theorizing, does seem a bit ridiculous.
00:10:52
Speaker
Most conspiracy theorists who manage to make the headlines these days produce theories which are hairbrained and lacking in warrant. But few are actually harmful. That's on page 148. I think it kind of shows that in the last 18 years, things have changed an awful lot.
00:11:10
Speaker
Yes, actually, I would be interested to see how simple changes in world events have modified people's theories when it comes to, especially if your theory is based on the idea that conspiracy theories are quite niche and quite unsubstantial. But anyway, let's get into it. So this one rubbed me the wrong way.
00:11:37
Speaker
right from the start when it talks about conspiracy theorists in the same breath as creationists and astrologers. Although he does, of course, point out equally quickly that conspiracies have consistently taken place throughout history. So he does, it does at least say that, OK, conspiracy theories are at least some of them have been proved to be right.
00:12:00
Speaker
Now, I think what's going on here is that Steve is doing a bit of a rhetorical flourish here. So he is kind of tilting towards the audience that goes, oh, conspiracy theories are ridiculous. You know, it's like weird science or pseudoscience. So he initially goes, well, look, in the same breath, we can talk about X and Y.
00:12:20
Speaker
But then he goes, but the thing about conspiracy theories as opposed to creationism or astrology is that conspiracy theories have a track record. Indeed he uses a cricket metaphor to describe the fact that actually conspiracy theories have turned out to be true in the past.
00:12:38
Speaker
What he really wants to do is make an association between populism and anti-intellectualism. And go look, the problem isn't really that we associate conspiracy theories with things like creationism or astrology. The problem is that conspiracy theorizing has, and I quote, long been favored by populists who are almost invariably anti-elitist and therefore generally anti-intellectual as well.
00:13:06
Speaker
Some intellectuals may dismiss conspiracy theories simply on the basis of guilt by association with anti-intellectual populism. So, yeah, that first section to me seemed a little bit disconnected from the rest of the paper, but is he just sort of setting the board there, just looking at a reason for the antipathy toward conspiracy theories before he starts looking into it?
00:13:32
Speaker
Yes, and I think that's in part because we're going back to 2002, there aren't really many papers out at the stage proposing that we should believe conspiracy theories at all, the common wisdom or the common superstition. Is it actually these theories are mad, bad and dangerous? So Steve is luring his audience
00:13:53
Speaker
in with guilt by association and then going actually we should probably look at whether this guilt by association actually has any legs. Any legs? Any legs to stand on?
00:14:08
Speaker
So Steve goes on to say, he does say in quoting again, I will not argue that intellectuals are entitled to arrogantly dismiss all conspiracy theories, but I will argue there is an entitlement to an attitude of prima facie skepticism.
00:14:24
Speaker
towards the theories propounded by conspiracy theorists. So he's not saying we're justified in completely discounting conspiracy theories, but that we are justified in being skeptical towards them, just in general. And then as an introduction to things that will come on, he brings up Brian L. Keeley's paper, which we've looked at before.
00:14:53
Speaker
And as we will see, he thinks that the problem is not that you should be picking at the conspiracy theories themselves, you should be looking at the conspiracy theorists behind them. And you have a note that you think you get something slightly wrong there?
00:15:17
Speaker
I am continuing on with my crusade of the argument that people have got Brian wrong on of conspiracy theories. So I think I got him wrong. I think Lee got him wrong. And I think Steve gets him wrong. I think Steve gets him wrong for a really interesting reason we'll get into when we get to that particular part of the paper. But basically, we all took the wrong tack on Brian discussing mature unwarranted conspiracy theories.
00:15:45
Speaker
because we took his discussion in the last section to be a kind of generalist project when actually in the last section, as Steve points out, what Brian is talking about is the attitude of particular conspiracy theorists who believe in these mature unwarranted conspiracy theories, i.e. conspiracy theories which aren't satisfied by the evidence but have persisted in discourse nonetheless like a mature cheese has a stench which continues to persist no matter what you do with it.
00:16:15
Speaker
So I do think Steve gets Brian wrong, but I also think he gets Brian wrong for a really interesting reason as we're going to say. So let's move on to section two, which is titled Epistemological Problems and actually look at the way in which he talks about the epistemology of conspiracy theory.
00:16:38
Speaker
So his concern throughout the section seems to be, why do conspiracy theorists stick to their beliefs? There seems to be less of a concern about why do they come up with these theories in the first place, as why do they cling to them so tenaciously? He talks about, as Keeley did before him,
00:17:00
Speaker
Steve, I don't know, I want to call him Clark, but then that sounds like a first name. So I'm going with Steve so we know who we talk about, but I don't I don't wish to appear disrespectful to a person of academia. But he's also also a person of academia from Australasia. So we are much more. We are less formal. Yeah, precisely. So Steve, as Brian does before him, Steve talks about
00:17:26
Speaker
Hume and his work on miracles and sort of draws the analogy, want to talk about conspiracy theories, kind of how Hume dealt with miracles. Again, there was a little bit of rubbing the wrong way with me when he starts talking about the conspiracy theory of whether or not Elvis is dead and refers to Gail Brewer, Giorgio, the author of Is Elvis Alive?
00:17:50
Speaker
as a typical conspiracy theorist. And I thought, yeah, straight away going for the weird ones and saying that's typical. But again, it was 2002. That was a different time.
00:18:01
Speaker
Although he also points out that many of the people who complain about conspiracy theories don't seem to know much about actual conspiracy theorists. So I mean, as he points out, while it is plausible to hold that there are people who are emotionally attracted to believe in conspiracy theories, anyone who concluded that because of these feelings, conspiracy theorists would go on believing in conspiracy theories on the basis of less evidence,
00:18:29
Speaker
than they would otherwise require to substantiate belief, cannot have had much contact with conspiracy theorists. So he's kind of giving and taking at the same time. Yes, he is doing a kind of guilt by association with respect to particular conspiracy theories, but also pointing out that many of the people who complain about conspiracy theories don't seem to know much about what conspiracy theorists actually say or indeed do.
00:18:59
Speaker
So he quickly moves on to talk about the problem that conspiracy theories appear to form the core of degenerating research programs. Good old Lakotosh. That was a term that came up in the abstract. And this is drawing the comparison between conspiracy theories and scientific.
00:19:18
Speaker
theories. A degenerating research program in science, as he puts it, in a degenerating research program, successful novel predictions and retro addictions, not a word I've encountered before, but I like it. Predictions and retro addictions are not made. Instead, auxiliary hypotheses and initial conditions are successfully modified in light of new evidence to protect the original theory from apparent disconfirmation.
00:19:43
Speaker
Now, for people listening at home, a retrodiction essentially is a prediction about the past. And sometimes we talk about those as being able to explain phenomena that has already occurred. So not just predicting new and novel phenomena, but coming up with an explanation of something which you're already going, I'm puzzled about this thing. Oh, we can retrodictively explain that now. Right. So it's not it's not rude then at all.
00:20:10
Speaker
Well, I mean, it is amongst certain company. I'm going to really retrodict you tonight, if you know what I mean. Yes, I was going to say, I enjoy a bit of retrodiction now. So does this tie into the business about falsification? Yes and no. I mean, so there's a kind of interesting double standard here, I think, which is that
00:20:37
Speaker
Steve agrees with Brian that falsificationism is not a good way to demarcate between a conspiracy theory and some other kind of theory, because it turns out the problem with falsificationism, apart from the fact it's actually not a good standard for demarcating between good or bad theories anyway, is that in the sciences, things like the electrons don't lie about their superposition.
00:21:03
Speaker
whilst people involved in conspiracies are likely to be misleading you. So you shouldn't be using a criteria from the sciences to demarcate between good theories and bad theories about conspiracy, collusions, cover-ups and the like.
00:21:20
Speaker
I think it's kind of weird to then go, but this other contentious theory about the way the sciences work, that could apply in this particular case, because if you're not aware, talk about scientific research programs or paradigms, so Lakotosh or... God, now I've forgotten his name. I want... Kuhn. I also call him Thomas Hume. Thomas Kuhn.
00:21:46
Speaker
These are contentious explanations for a, how scientific change occurs and b, what makes a good theory versus a bad theory. So for Lakatos, you have this particular notion that if your scientific research program is in a degenerative state, so you're basically just trying to shore it up against evidence which is melting against it,
00:22:08
Speaker
then your theory is probably bad, although not necessarily so, because there are examples of degenerating programs that have been rescued late in life and been shown to be good after all anyway. But I just don't think if you're going to discard one particular bad demarcation between good or bad theories, it's appropriate to bring in another demarcating criteria
00:22:33
Speaker
from the sciences to something which is definitely in the realm of the social sciences instead. So this brings us into section 3, unwarranted conspiracy theories, where he actually starts pulling apart Brian's work and looking at this idea of unwarranted conspiracy theories that he first brought up.
Attribution Error in Beliefs
00:22:54
Speaker
To me reading this,
00:22:56
Speaker
I found myself reading through the section thinking he wasn't giving a fair or accurate summary of Brian's views in some places, possibly that's me getting things wrong. I am merely an enthusiastic amateur in these matters these days anyway. But so he gives a summary of the conditions that Brian put forward for what counts as an unwarranted conspiracy theory.
00:23:21
Speaker
and does a little bit of surgery on the paper in that he lists the characteristics that Brian himself set forth, which we talked about a few instances ago of conspiracy theory masterpiece theater, and then also pulls in Brian talking about the fact that conspiracy theories account for errant data, which I remember in the original paper that was brought up as a justification for why they liked the more
00:23:50
Speaker
want to think they're superior to the official version because they account for this errant data. This paper kind of makes it, this paper seemed to make the assumption that accounting for errant data was another necessary characteristic of unwarranted conspiracy theories and that didn't quite ring true to me. No, no, I mean errant data can be used whether you're talking about errant data which is contrary or errant data which is contradictory.
00:24:17
Speaker
And Steve is right to point out that this data does appear in other types of explanations. And if Keeley denied that, that would be an issue. But as you say, it's actually not clear at all that Brian is of the opinion that errant data is solely the domain of the conspiracy theory. Because by definition, errant data is data which is errant to some rival explanations. It's actually built into Keeley's work.
00:24:47
Speaker
that yes, conspiracy theories will use data which is errant to the official theory, in the same respect the official theory is likely to cite data which is errant to some conspiracy theory.
00:25:01
Speaker
So in this paper, Steve, he argues against Kelly's formulation, Kelly's definition, I suppose, of unwarranted conspiracy theories. He reckons that the criteria that he puts up are neither necessary nor sufficient to properly define an unwarranted conspiracy theory and talks about the fact of errant data where later on there's the quote,
00:25:26
Speaker
Keighley is right that social data is generally less reliable than the data that natural scientists locate, but he fails to inform us as to why this consideration should tell particularly against the errant data that conspiracy theories explain. It appears to be a consideration that tells equally against all social data. And I was like, yeah, I didn't think you were saying errant data is something that only conspiracy theories deal with. It's just that it is a thing that comes up in a lot of them.
00:25:53
Speaker
Now, a more telling complaint might be keyly on that kind of totalitizing scepticism. Yeah, so...
00:26:05
Speaker
Basically, Steve argues, if you recall from Brian's paper, he said that, well, falsification may not be a problem. The biggest problem with these unwanted conspiracy theories is the level of skepticism that they can end up causing, that you end up, as the conspiracy theory grows, and you're sort of forced to say,
00:26:26
Speaker
These people must have been in on it, and if they were in it, and then these people must have been in on it, and these people must have been in on it to explain how all these people who presumably would have had to have known about it didn't spill the beans. In a worst case scenario, you end up being completely skeptical of absolutely everything. Steve says that this isn't really the case.
00:26:46
Speaker
He does. He talks about Watergate didn't lead anyone to question whether or not the platypus is a mammal. I thought a platypus was a monotreme. Is a monotreme a type of mammal? I'm not sure. That is a good question. I have no answer for that. Anyway, whatever it is, whatever you believed about the Watergate conspiracy theories would not cause you to doubt the taxonomy of the platypus.
00:27:16
Speaker
In what seems like a bit of a straw man, really, he sort of says that
00:27:21
Speaker
Yeah, it's, you know, Watergate, conspiracy theories around Watergate don't bottom out in you doubting whether or not up is up and down is down and what have you. But then that brings makes me think of, well, hang on, your flat earthers have some definite issues with the laws of physics. David Icke type conspiracy theorists will question the fundamental nature of reality.
00:27:48
Speaker
bringing things a bit more down to earth. The QAnon folks seem willing to believe basically anything Trump says and believe anything they hear to the contradictory is a lie and the people who are professing it is a liar. So I didn't think that point of his worked as well, although maybe again, that's a case of the fact that it was 2002.
00:28:12
Speaker
I mean, it is also the case that I think Steve's argument here is it's not the case that all belief in mature conspiracy theories of an unwarranted kind or all belief in a conspiracy theory produced by degenerating research program leads to people being skeptical of everything. So you are going to be able to find some examples
00:28:35
Speaker
of where it appears that people who believe a particular conspiracy theory might be able to be persuaded to drink bleach or inject bleach into their system. But the fact that those people do exist doesn't mean that this is a natural consequence of belief in conspiracy theories generally.
00:28:54
Speaker
So if you take it, but that is what Brian advocates, and Steve's not the only person to take Brian as making that particular claim, then Steve is right. Actually, it turns out you can believe in conspiracy theories, even really big ones, and still believe in gravity. And I think that's just the point. Yes, okay, yeah, I getcha. So yeah, if you want to say the problem with these UCTs is,
00:29:22
Speaker
that they lead to you being overly skeptical. Well, they don't necessarily. Some of them just don't. I had a point about the definition of theories, but reading the rest of it, it seems like a little bit of a quibble. So I'm just going to skip past that and go on to section four called conspiracy theorists. And I think this is where
00:29:44
Speaker
This is where Steve really sets forth his own position. He says, instead of attempting to home in on the epistemic flaws of a significant class of conspiracy theories, as Kivi has, I will focus my attention on the cognitive failures of a significant class of conspiracy theorists, those conspiracy theorists who continue to hold on to conspiracy theories even when those take on the appearance of forming the core of degenerating research programs.
00:30:09
Speaker
Um, which it did seem to be that, seemed like what Brian was largely concerned with, these mature, um,
00:30:19
Speaker
unwarranted conspiracy theories that people still cling to. Which is kind of why I think it's kind of weird that Steve is disagreeing with Keely on this, because I think when we start talking about mature unwarranted conspiracy theories, and we talk about conspiracy theories as the core of a degenerating research program, they are effectively talking about exactly the same phenomena.
Concluding Reflections on Evidence
00:30:44
Speaker
That's what it sounded like, yeah.
00:30:45
Speaker
the example of people who persist in believing a particular conspiracy theory or set of theories which are not satisfied by adequate evidence. Also, there is kind of interesting thing here that he is going, he's going to find the justification as to why intellectuals have a prima facie suspicion of conspiracy theories. You might just go, well, isn't that just post facto reasoning? I mean, why
00:31:13
Speaker
can't it just be the case that intellectuals are just wrong? And this is why I think it's interesting that Steve is fisking Brian here, and not Charles Pigton. Because Charles Pigton is the one who's going, actually, this notion that conspiracy theories are epistemically suspicious is itself a superstition.
00:31:35
Speaker
and we should interrogate that. So Charles's response to this kind of paper would be to go, but why do you believe that in the first place? Surely that's the thing that we should actually be interrogating at this particular point in time.
00:31:52
Speaker
So what seemed to me to be the crux of the whole thing is when Steve says, the factor that I've identified as being common to the thinking of conspiracy theorists who hold on to degenerating research programs is that they commit what social psychologists call the fundamental attribution era.
00:32:11
Speaker
Dun, dun, dun. So this seems to be his claim. It's not that conspiracy theories themselves necessarily have a problem with them. It's that the people who cling to them are committing a cognitive fallacy. Fallacy? I guess it's a fallacy. Yeah, yeah.
00:32:30
Speaker
So what is the fundamental issue here? It's a heuristic mistake. So it is a kind of fallacy to say it's one which is operating at a level which might be super rational.
00:32:42
Speaker
Right, so what is the fundamental attribution error? Well, this is according to Wikipedia. It's also known as the correspondence bias or attribution effect, and it's the tendency for people to under-emphasize situational explanations for an individual's observed behavior, while over-emphasizing dispositional and personality-based explanations for their behavior.
00:33:05
Speaker
This effect has been described as the tendency to believe what people do reflects who they are. So in short, if you think that conspiracy theories are dispositional, which is to say that they rely on what people intend, then you tend to view the world as being the product of what people want to bring about.
00:33:29
Speaker
Well, if you favor explanations which are more situational, they're contextual based upon historical forces, economics, socioeconomic status and the like, then you're more likely to focus on those kind of factors as being the most salient thing to explain some phenomena in the world. And historically, this has been seen in history over the course of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century, with people going actually through the lens of this particular school,
00:33:59
Speaker
we can reinterpret history. So if you're a Marxist historian who thinks that history is best explained by class struggle, then you're more likely to produce explanations that emphasize class distinctions. If you're the kind of person who believes in the so-called great men of history thesis, where history is made or forged by great men going about doing great deeds,
00:34:20
Speaker
And you're the kind of person who will cast their explanations with respect to, say, what Stalin did rather than the socio-economic situation of Soviet Russia at that particular point in time. And so Steve is arguing the problem with conspiracy theorists
00:34:39
Speaker
is that they're much more likely to adhere to a dispositional or intentional style explanation and thus ignore the situational factors which might be a better explanation of that particular phenomenon. And my response to that, as I wrote in my PhD and in my first book,
00:34:59
Speaker
There is no straight contrast between a dispositional and situal explanation. As any given explanation, conspiracy theory or otherwise is likely to be an example of both. When we explain the assassination of Julius Caesar, which was the result of a conspiracy,
00:35:20
Speaker
We have an example of an explanation which, when it's fully formed, is both dispositional and situational. It's situational because the situation in Rome is what led to Caesar being able to seize control and also led to his ability to submit control as a popular hero of the people.
00:35:40
Speaker
but it has dispositional factors with respect to certain members of the nobility, the patricians, not liking that and having the disposition to want to get rid of that issue through an assassination. So it turns out most explanations of complex social phenomena are going to be both dispositional and situational,
00:36:04
Speaker
And there's no really good reason to think that conspiracy theories are any more dispositional or less situational than their rivals turn out to be. And what's particularly interesting about this, and we'll get to this when we look at his 2006 article appealing to the fundamental attribution era, was it all a big mistake, is that Steve kind of recognises that now as well. But we'll get to that in time. We will.
00:36:34
Speaker
Yes, so that's what, at least in his 2002 incarnation, that's what he is wanting to say. He wants to say that the reason why people stick to these
00:36:46
Speaker
conspiracy theories that are a degenerative research program is that to give up those theories means you'd usually need to abandon a dispositional explanation in favor of a situational explanation.
00:37:04
Speaker
um which I guess I mean I remember talking to a co-worker about 9-11 many years ago and him saying he thought it was an inside job and his reason was because it's the sort of thing they do sort of a this was a those bush folks they always wanted something like that the the ci and everything are always meddling and aren't above that sort of those sort of underhanded dirty tricks look at co-intel pro from last week so
00:37:33
Speaker
His thinking was that it was due to the dispositions of these people are why he believed they would be behind the conspiracy theory. But you're saying that really, there's a lot of it, you could talk about the disposition of Al-Qaeda operatives as well and what they wanted and what they were after, plus a whole bunch of situational stuff, including, you know, the physical evidence on the ground and eyewitness footage and so on and so on and so on and so on.
00:37:59
Speaker
or the socio-economic status, it either led to Al-Qaeda committing their attack or members of the Bush administration going, we need to find a way to justify war in the Middle East. At any rate, so this then moves on to the conclusion, section five, conspiracy theorizing. So it does, having sort of, he believes,
00:38:28
Speaker
identifying what's wrong with conspiracy theorists, or if not what's wrong with conspiracy theories, what's wrong with the conspiracy theorists who promote them. He does say that we should at least consider them even though we know that there is this, that he claims, we know there is this cognitive fallacy behind them.
00:38:51
Speaker
There are several things that can be said in favour of conspiracy theorising. First, the conspiracy theorist challenges us to improve our social explanations. If a non-conspiratorial social explanation is better articulated as a result of the challenge of a conspiracy theory, then that is all to the good.
00:39:07
Speaker
Second, the conspiracy theorist occasionally identifies a genuine conspiracy, giving a thousand conspiracy theories some consideration as a small price to pay to have one actual nefarious conspiracy, such as the Watergate conspiracy, uncovered sooner rather than later. And finally, the prevalence of conspiracy theories confers a third benefit upon us, which is that it helps to maintain openness in society.
00:39:28
Speaker
Now, so it's important to note, and he does note this in section four, as well as reiterates it in section five, he's not so much, again, conspiracy theories. He's concerned about conspiracy theorists. So he does want to say that conspiracy theories are a class of explanation.
00:39:48
Speaker
which needs to be assessed with respect to the evidence. The issue is the promotion of particular conspiracy theorists, sorry, particular conspiracy theories by particular conspiracy theorists. So his interest very much is on the people promoting the theories, not the content of the theories themselves. And I think that's important to note because I think Steve
00:40:14
Speaker
often gets categorised as being kind of a generalist when it comes to talk about conspiracy theories and belief in such theories. But I think he is actually articulating a particularist agenda here. He's just really concerned about the people who promote or advocate conspiracy theories. Now, I think that worry is misplaced,
00:40:42
Speaker
because I think it works on a entirely pejorative gloss of who counts as being a conspiracy theorist. So I take it from this particular kind of paper, Steve is not going to agree with Charles that we're all conspiracy theorists of some particular stripe.
Future Content and Patron Thanks
00:40:59
Speaker
But Steve is of the opinion we should still appraise conspiracy theories with respect to the evidence. He's concerned about the degenerating ones being promoted by the wrong kind of conspiracy theorists.
00:41:15
Speaker
I had a bit of trouble following it right the way through just because, as I think perhaps you saw with Brian's paper a little bit, very clearly starts off talking about unwarranted conspiracy theories or conspiracy theories that form the core of a degenerating research program.
00:41:39
Speaker
But then towards the end, he's just using the phrase conspiracy theory, unadorned the whole way through. And it kind of makes it sound like he's talking about them in blanket terms when, as you say, probably actually not. But it does. Yeah, reading this one and some of the elements we've looked at, it does seem that there seems to be a bit of a theme of people, people tying themselves and knots a little bit because they want to be able to say,
00:42:09
Speaker
Here is this class of things that we want to agree are all silly.
00:42:14
Speaker
And yet that never really quite seems to work out. And so I can understand why then others will say, well, actually, maybe we need to look at that assumption. Maybe we shouldn't just be, we shouldn't allow ourselves the luxury of saying that here's this class of things that we can immediately, if not discount, then be skeptical of right from the start. Precisely.
00:42:39
Speaker
Well, there you have it. So we're up to 2002. This is our what, fourth?
00:42:47
Speaker
fourth one we've looked at. We did Charles then Brian then Lee then this. Indeed. Yes. So there we go. So we're, we're rocketing through them. How big is the field these days? Like, are we going to run out of papers to look at any time soon? So when I was writing my PhD, starting 2008, finishing 2012, they're probably about 12 to 14 papers in general.
00:43:15
Speaker
There has been somewhat of an explosion in the literature subsequent to that. So we're probably going to be able to keep this up for, well, probably almost a year, if not slightly longer. I haven't actually made a complete count because we have the issue that we not only have articles, we have book chapters that we can look at as well. And if we include book chapters, then we should be able to go on this for at least two years.
00:43:44
Speaker
Goodness me. Maybe we need to do a bit of an edited highlights as we go on theatre. I don't know. We'll see. I don't know, grand adventure. Previously on Conspiracy Theory, Masterpiece Theatre. Yes. Well, we're all just making it up as we go anyway.
00:44:01
Speaker
next week
00:44:31
Speaker
which means next week will be a news episode and it is and we will talk about things such as what's going to be coming up in the bonus content if indeed the bonus content turns out to be false which is interesting if there's a news episode next week then the news about next week
00:44:48
Speaker
is wrong. Curious. But also we'll be talking about how the Trump campaign has threatened to sue CNN over a poll they didn't like. We've got an update on Tupac Shakur which isn't really much of an update at all but you know it's worth bringing up and we'll be talking about that SS tattoo that was on a Las Vegas police officer which turned out to not be on a police officer
00:45:17
Speaker
at all. Mmm. Mysterious, but if you want to know more, you'll need to be a patron. If you are a patron, thank you very much. We appreciate you greatly. If you'd like to be a patron, you can go to Patrion and look for the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, or you can go to conspiracy.podbean.com and use Podbean's native patronage system, whoever the heck that works.
00:45:43
Speaker
And if you don't want to be a patron, that's fine. We're quite happy that you've chosen to listen to us today. But that is all for today. That is all for today, isn't it? It is all for today. In that case, I suppose then really we should just say goodbye to a bit of the old good-buying. Well, you say goodbye, I say, murder she wrote. Very well. Goodbye. Murder she wrote.
00:46:15
Speaker
the the
00:46:21
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R.X.Denter, 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.
00:47:22
Speaker
And remember, silent green is meeples.