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Are Conspiracy Theorists Irrational, David Coady?
27 Plays4 years ago
Josh and M discuss “Are Conspiracy Theorists Irrational?” by David Coady, which appeared in the special issue of Episteme back in 2007.
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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
Introduction: Joe and the Bavarian Conspiracy
00:00:00
Speaker
Lord Morrissey Morrissey and his chum postmaster General Puddles will return soon in... The Disappearance of the Esperance Demagogue! But first, some news on the current whereabouts of Joe. He's in Miami. No no no, the other Joe. Oh. The other Joe.
00:00:16
Speaker
Yes, news reports have been flooding into the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy hotline.
Why Pay for Exposure? The Paradox of Conspirators
00:00:21
Speaker
That new patron and chief conspirator Joe, which we assume is their real name, thus identifying them as one of the approximately 90 million people with that name in the English-speaking world, has been seen boarding transport going to and from a space known as work. These reports are not particularly specific, but we've been led to believe that the transport in question is a luxury yacht and the workplace is known simply as headquarters.
00:00:44
Speaker
Joe has been described as both productive and attentive in their dealings, which leads us to think that whatever they are doing, and we think the workplace is in Bavaria or very near to a Bavarian bakery, is crucial to the development of whatever sinister conspiracy we are meant to be uncovering. Can I ask a quick question? Sure. So these people we are investigating are paying us.
00:01:12
Speaker
Yes. So the thing they're trying to do in secret, they are asking us to uncover. That's right, baby. That's the whole shebang. That doesn't make sense. Why do people like Joe pay us to uncover their dastardly plots? Oh, Josh, you sweet summer child. Have you not read your David Ike? Have you not sucked from the cup of Alex Jones? Are you not immersed in the words of Jelon Rappaport?
00:01:37
Speaker
These conspirators can't help but advertise their terrible deeds. Witness Denver Airport. Marvel at the Georgia Guidestones. Read some Dan Brown. They want us to know what they are up to. They need us to know. It still doesn't make any sense. Someone once said to me, your face doesn't make any sense.
00:01:59
Speaker
For someone who's about to become an associate professor, I would have expected a better class of comeback. What can I say? I'm a simple kind of person. Yeah, you are. But not Joe, though. No. Joe is that special kind of person. A patron. Thanks, Joe. You monster.
Personal Updates and Podcast Challenges
00:02:26
Speaker
The Podcastor's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:02:35
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. It's nearly Christmas here in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Edison there, Dr. Emdenteth. And I've just run out of whisky. Just in time too, because this is probably our last episode for the year. Yeah. I think so. I think this is like we could squeeze another one in, but maybe we'll just have a little Christmas ball next week or something, just a little...
00:03:03
Speaker
Just something to confide you along until when we resume recording sometime in January. And that sometime in January is going to be a bit of a flick to the face. Because I am translocating from this lovely location in Milford on the North Shore of Auckland.
00:03:25
Speaker
to a little coastal town in the south of China called Zhuhai, where I'll be taking up a new position as Associate Professor of Philosophy. Now, I don't know when I'm leaving next month, and I will be doing two weeks of quarantine when I get there,
00:03:42
Speaker
so we're going to have to be a bit flexible as to when things resume which means this is technically although actually not one of our last in-person recordings because there's something special coming up for episode 300 which we're going to
00:03:58
Speaker
film in advance. Yeah, not just record. Episodes 300 will be... Well, it won't be a televisual spectacular, but it'll make a lot more sense if you usually watch it. I mean, we could kind of do it as an audio thing. We could do a podcast, but I think it'll be missing something. I mean, it'll kind of work, but at the same time, you do kind of want the video for that
Christmas Gifts and Podcasting Plans
00:04:19
Speaker
one. I think that's true, yes. But I've said too much. Or possibly just the right amount.
00:04:25
Speaker
So for our last sort of proper full episode for the year, we have another edition of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre. Now, I've been thinking, these ones tend to go over time a little bit, I think, because there's always a lot to talk about. But fortunately, this time, we're filming in person, which means we're filming on my camera, which has a fairly hard limit of about 40 minutes before the memory card hits its file size limit and it just plain stops recording.
00:04:53
Speaker
That's true. We're turning a technological limitation on an Android phone into a feature for keeping this podcast short in success. So I'll be keeping a track of the time. You'd never get a short episode if you're recording on an iPhone. Well, yes, exactly. Exactly.
00:05:15
Speaker
You heard it here, folks. Android phones make for shorter podcasts. It's scientifically proven. Shorter is better. Or at least your Android phone makes for shorter podcasts. I bet you've been sure it's not a limitation. It's a file system limitation thing. I don't know if it's possible. It doesn't matter. The point is, we'll try to keep things brief. If I notice us rambling and digressing, either one of us, I will make a point of slapping himself about the face to get us back on track.
Are All Believers Conspiracy Theorists?
00:05:41
Speaker
But before we do that, we should open our Christmas presents. Oh, are we going to do it? Are we going to live on here? Well, in part because what I'm giving you really is it's kind of related to the podcast. OK. Which means this is a fairly visual thing to start off with. We can we can shake it in front of our microphones. Who's going to go first?
00:06:02
Speaker
Uh, I'll go first. Okay, you go first. Because yours may require slightly more explanation. Okay. Well, although this actually isn't a present for me, and it's not from you, because apparently it's from one Time Lord to another Time Lord. Well, we did establish earlier this year that you are indeed a doctor, and I am indeed a master. Ooh! Oh, it's an alien queen. Just like the thing that burst out of my stomach last week. But a tiny one, so it can probably fit in your luggage to China.
00:06:32
Speaker
Or my stomach. Or your stomach. Yeah, exactly. That would actually be more appropriate. Okay, so mine is a little more... Let's get some good paper wrapping action going on into the microphone. Yeah, for those of you who can't watch. It's open now. I'm just pumping the paper more just for the ambience. Okay, I don't know what this is. We've talked about it on the podcast. Have we?
00:06:57
Speaker
Is this a board game or a jigsaw? No, remember Christopher Monkton and the puzzle that you can solve to basically win his house? This is a complete version of it. Now, admittedly, the competition has run out, but I'm figuring next year, if I get to a time machine and you can solve this,
00:07:18
Speaker
then we confirm the development of the time machine from the winnings you got from solving the eternity puzzle. Now, Mitty, that means changing history, which means that the podcast episode we did will now be inaccurate and our lives will go in completely different directions, a la Sliding Doors. But at the same time,
00:07:37
Speaker
You could be winning US $2 million. $2 million. Yes. Very well. Oh, well, good thing it's the holiday season. I'll have, I imagine, a week or two. And the fact you've got children. Well, yes, exactly. If they get bored, you can go look, just solve this. You can't be bored trying to solve a puzzle set by Lord Christopher Monckton.
00:07:59
Speaker
Now I should point out this was discovered down in Kirikiri Rawa by patron of the podcast Georgia who pointed it out to me in a shop and I went oh god have it that must be a rare item. Six weeks later there was another copy of it in the very same store.
00:08:17
Speaker
I think there's a lot of people in Hamilton who got very, very bored about 10 years ago, thought they could win their way out of Hamilton. And now they're just putting them on the shelves as they get sold to fools like me, given to fools like you. Excellent. Well, thank you and Merry Christmas then.
00:08:36
Speaker
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all. Right, I think that's the festivities out of the way. Indeed, have you been keeping an eye on time? It doesn't matter because we can stop when we do the chime. That can be the cunning splice between two different shots. So we start anew at the start of the main bit of the episode, which is going to start now.
00:09:05
Speaker
And we're oftentimes against us.
Rational Skepticism vs. Excessive Belief
00:09:08
Speaker
So this week we are looking at our conspiracy theories irrational. No, our conspiracy theorists irrational. That is an excellent start to this episode. Our conspiracy theorists irrational by David Coady. We're still looking at the issue of Epstein from 2007. The special issue entirely devoted to conspiracy theories, which we're covering all but one article from.
00:09:30
Speaker
This one is following on after the one from the levee that we looked at last time. So there's a bunch of things we could say about it, but we should probably just pile straight in and come to our conclusions at the end, because that's where conclusions belong.
00:09:45
Speaker
Sometimes you like to front-load a conclusion and then explain your reasoning. That's true. In fact, this abstract does kind of include the conclusion of it. So shall we read that? Indeed. Would you like to do the honours? Why not? The paper starts as follows.
00:10:00
Speaker
It is widely believed that to be a conspiracy theorist is to suffer from a form of irrationality. After considering the merits and defects of a variety of counts of what it is to be a conspiracy theorist, I draw three conclusions. One, on the best definitions of what it is to be a conspiracy theorist, conspiracy theorists do not deserve the reputation for irrationality.
00:10:19
Speaker
Two, there may be occasions on which we should settle for an inferior definition which entails that conspiracy theorists are after all irrational. Three, if and when we do this, we should recognise that conspiracy theorists so understood are at one end of a spectrum and the really worrying form of irrationality is at the other end.
00:10:38
Speaker
Now this paper is going to be interesting because the position that David Cody defends in this paper, he will be promptly giving up. And I noticed it does seem a little bit different from the position he defended in the papers that we've looked at before.
00:10:54
Speaker
So to my mind, this is one of those academic papers where an author is working through a set of abstract issues they have with a position. They defend one particular conclusion that they've come to, and then a few years later they go, oh, actually the consequences of believing that are terrible, so I'm going to go in a completely different direction. So when we come back to David Coady,
00:11:23
Speaker
in a few months time and we see his revised position, this paper is going to look very interesting indeed. Okay, well it starts with an introduction, as all good papers should, which basically covers the ground that we've seen a lot before.
00:11:42
Speaker
He says conspiracy theorists generally assume to be irrational. This assumption is so deeply entrenched in our culture that when people learn that I defend conspiracy theorists against a variety of criticisms, they often assume that I am AO Ipso defending irrationality. I am not. Neither, of course, am I denying that there are irrational conspiracy theorists.
00:11:58
Speaker
Well, let me point out, I really don't like academic authors who just dump bits of Latin or Greek into their papers without any explanation. Yes, it's so factor I've heard AO Ipsos is a new one on me. And let it stay that way. I remember one time, oh, I'm digressing, I'm digressing, but briefly. Your time starts now. In a paper, in a philosophy of mind paper, we had someone use the term soi di song.
00:12:25
Speaker
And the entire class was like, what does that mean? And the lecturer is like, I don't know what that means. Let's find out next. And so next week he came back. It means so-called. Instead of saying so-called, he just chucked a bit of French in there, just to frock things up a bit. It used to kind of be de rigueur in philosophy, to simply use a bit of Latin and Greek whenever possible. Even since 2007, that culture is shifting dramatically, in part because there are people who are now going through graduate programs who are going
00:12:54
Speaker
Actually, I'm not entirely sure what Ipso actually means. I mean, I've got an idea from the context, but at the same time, he could have just said they often assume that I am also defending irrationality. Anyway, so he starts by talking about Charles Pigdon, whose work we've looked at lately before and his definition of what a conspiracy is and what a conspiracy theorist does.
00:13:18
Speaker
version of Charles's argument, which is basically if you believe in conspiracy theories, you're a conspiracy theorist. If you believe the news and you believe history, you're a conspiracy theorist. No matter what you believe, it turns out you have to be someone who believes in conspiracy theories because either history is littered with them or you think that history is a lie and thus everything is a conspiracy theory.
00:13:46
Speaker
And so he sort of says to that, well, OK, so if everyone's a conspiracy theorist, then A, that must be fine, because we're not all of us, all irrational all the time, and B, it kind of means the term's kind of useless then.
Epistemic Challenges and Academic Critiques
00:13:57
Speaker
If everyone's a conspiracy theorist, then it tells us nothing to say that someone's a conspiracy theorist.
00:14:02
Speaker
which I thought was a little bit, he glossed over that a little bit quickly. I mean, there's nothing inherently wrong with the conspiracy theorists, but surely the point is that not all conspiracy theories are created equal. Well, see, a lot of this is going to rest upon how he defines who counts as a conspiracy theorist, as we see later on in this paper.
00:14:21
Speaker
But so he says, I suspect that Pigdon would hardly endorse this idea, that being the idea we should just get rid of the term conspiracy theorist. But there are two problems with leaving things there. One is that it is not likely that the concept is going away in the short to medium term, and virtually certain that it is not going away as a result of being reconstructed in philosophy journals. The second is that some dismissive uses of the concept seem to be legitimate.
00:14:48
Speaker
So we go into section two, conspiracy theorists in the context of discovery. So now is when we start actually looking into how he defines conspiracy theorists, and it happens in a few different ways.
00:14:59
Speaker
Indeed. So he starts off by saying it might be useful to compare conspiracy theorists to theorists of another kind. Number theorists. It's a classic philosophy move. Talk about a kind of theory that virtually no one knows anything about. A person does not qualify as a number theorist just in virtue of subscribing to a theory about numbers. The fact that I subscribe to the theory that two is even does not, alas, make me a number theorist.
00:15:24
Speaker
Likewise, we shouldn't say that someone is a conspiracy theorist just because he subscribes to a theory that posits conspiracy. Which seems like a bit of a reach as far as analogies go. We'll see in a second that he's he's working towards a definition of conspiracy theorists that basically makes it the same sort of theorist as a number theorist or something like that. But I did
00:15:48
Speaker
And I mean, this ends up being a bit problematic because most people who work in the faucet of mathematics will go, I mean, it's true you're not an explicit number theorist who holds to notions of how set theories work, theories of irrational numbers and the like, but it's also quite obvious from the way that you use mathematics that if pressed you'd be able to explain what you mean by these things and come up with a rudimentary number theory of a kind.
00:16:17
Speaker
So it's a difference between being a number theorist in kind of capital letters versus, well, I suppose I am a number theorist because I use numbers. I just wouldn't be very good at describing what my number theory is, but I'm fairly sure I've got one.
00:16:34
Speaker
But so David Cote is saying this because he basically wants to propose a definition of conspiracy theorist which goes as follows. A conspiracy theorist therefore may be defined as a person who is unusually willing to investigate conspiracy.
00:16:50
Speaker
A conspiracy theorist so understood actively investigates whether conspiracies have taken place or are taking place, and when an if he discovers them, tries to publicly identify the conspirators. For the rest of this section, I'll use the expression conspiracy theorist in this sense, and he does.
00:17:05
Speaker
Which seemed a little bit, the first thing that, when we looked at his earlier paper, Conspiracy Theories and Official Stories, the thing that struck me right from the start was that he seemed to be basing everything on the idea that how our definitions of conspiracy theory and so on should match the more colloquial usage of the words. And yet here he is proposing a definition that seems to be kind of opposed to the more colloquial meaning of conspiracy theory.
00:17:30
Speaker
Wow, I mean, it's a little bit hard to tell because I think the kind of conspiracy theory he has in mind, and I think this becomes clear later on in the paper, is someone who irrationally believes in some kind of conspiracy theory. So he is kind of rejecting Pigdon's argument that it turns out we're all conspiracy theorists of some sort, because he's going actually to make sense of the common usage of conspiracy theory.
00:17:58
Speaker
We need to narrow down the concept to some notion which describes what people usually mean when they accuse someone of being a conspiracy theorist. So in that respect, he probably is being slightly consistent with his earlier work, but at the same time not being consistent with how he talked about how we should talk about conspiracy theories in
Intellectual Autonomy in Belief Formation
00:18:25
Speaker
that work.
00:18:25
Speaker
But anyway, we needn't insist on consistency and people are allowed to change their minds and views evolve and what have you. And straight away, after making this definition, he does make what I thought was quite a good point, which is, he says, notice that conspiracy theorists so understood need not be particularly inclined to believe in conspiracies. A person may quite rationally investigate whether a conspiracy has occurred without believing that it has.
00:18:51
Speaker
if discovering that it occurred, if it did, is important enough. And then talks about political conspiracies and politics and says how basically the sorts of conspiracies that could show up in the political world are important. We need to know about them. A functioning democracy relies on an informed voter base and any conspiracies that would seek to hide information or to
00:19:17
Speaker
to muddy the waters of information, what have you, is something that should be investigated and found out about. Yes, I mean, as they say, the price of freedom is eternal vegetables. Exactly, that is exactly what I say. I said it just before, you were listening. And I'm a vegan, so I know what eternal vegetables are like.
00:19:38
Speaker
It's high in fiber. That's what a democracy needs, a high fiber diet. So much fiber. So anyway, he says, so he concludes this bit by saying that, of course, the prima facie importance of exposing political conspiracies when they occur does not on its own entail the rationality of seeking evidence of political conspiracies. If political conspiracies never or hardly ever take place, then searching for evidence of them would be prima facie irrational. But political conspiracies do take place and on a regular basis, which I think brings in a few different points.
00:20:08
Speaker
He talks about how Charles Pigdon and his papers goes through history and talks about how the fact that conspiracy theories are in the political sphere and in history are basically ubiquitous, which made me think ubiquity. We've done a paper on ubiquity in the past. We have, by one I believe, Lee Basham. Yes, I mean Lee Basham wrote the book, or wrote the paper at least, on the ubiquity and resilience of conspiracy theories. I remember when we looked at Neil Levy's paper last
00:20:37
Speaker
last instalment. I was surprised when he brought up a couple of points that seemed to be things that Lee Basham explicitly dealt with. And then again, we sort of came up with another point that I would expect a person making that point to cite Lee Basham. But again, he doesn't. Is it just a case of the Australian
00:20:55
Speaker
philosophers sort of talking like themselves because it's easy you don't have time gaps and distance from communication issues or is he? Yes and no. So you could understand that for say David's first paper, maybe when he wrote it before it was printed in the book, Conspiracy Theories, the Philosophical Debate, he was unaware of Basham's work.
00:21:17
Speaker
But David's the editor of this volume has presumably invited Lee to contribute a paper to it, so he should now be aware of it. I think it's probably more the case, and I think this is fair to say,
00:21:33
Speaker
David doesn't quote much, so he will only quote things which are directly related to what he's saying, either as a, I'm furthering the idea of X, or I'm replying to the ideas of Y. He doesn't in his work tend to then go, also, other people have written upon this, see this. So it seems to be his particular style is to simply
00:21:59
Speaker
underplay citations and not do the kind of, if you want to know more about this, see this thing, this thing, and this thing.
Conclusion: Understanding Conspiracy Theorists
00:22:07
Speaker
And I kind of know this from having edited David's work and taking conspiracy theories seriously, I would on occasion suggest it might be nice to link this point to earlier points made by this. And he was quite resistant to putting those references out. I mean, it's not.
00:22:26
Speaker
It's not a hole in the paper or anything, I don't think. It's just a very different style. The other thing I want to note here, so this claim, if political conspiracies never or hardly ever take place, then searching for evidence of them would be prima facie irrational. I think that's plain wrong.
00:22:46
Speaker
If you live in a world where it's impossible to conspire, or conspiring is incredibly difficult, then it might be the case it's prima facie irrational to search for evidence of conspiracies. But if you live in a world where it is logically possible that people could start conspiring, even though they have never conspired in the past,
00:23:09
Speaker
then actually some vigilance seems like a good idea there because if the system can be rotted you can expect that at some point in time someone's probably going to try. So I don't think it's irrational to be looking for evidence of conspiracies just because you don't think they take place. You might go
00:23:31
Speaker
It might be a bit of wasted effort, but at the same time, bit of vigilance. Something we need to know, be sure of. You need to be eating your freedom vegetables. No, fair enough. OK, so that's that's sort of section two. He's brought up this definition. There's this one possible definition of conspiracy theories, people who are sort of particularly into investigating conspiracies, not simply anyone who happens to hold believe that a particular conspiracy theory exists because that's everyone.
00:23:56
Speaker
But now he moves, he moves on to a second one into section three conspiracy theorists in the context of justification. So he ends section two by saying conspiracy theorists run the risk of becoming over invested in the prevalence and significance of conspiracy, leading them to exaggerate evidence for conspiracies or ignore evidence against them.
00:24:17
Speaker
and then moves into section three saying if this happens they'll be conspiracy theorists in another sense as well. To say that someone's a conspiracy theorist in this sense is to say that they are excessively willing to believe conspiracy and of course recall before you was just saying that other sense you're not required to believe these things you're just interested in investigating them.
00:24:37
Speaker
So he says the problem with such conspiracy theorists is not necessarily that they believe in too many conspiracies, they may believe in just one vast conspiracy, rather the problem is that they tend to exaggerate the extent to which conspiracies, however many of them may be, explain observed phenomena.
00:24:53
Speaker
And this then, he wants to say, is an irrational sense of being a conspiracy theorist. And so he states, this is a form of irrationality. And it is certainly what some people have in mind when they talk dismissively of conspiracy theorists. But this rhetoric has the potential to be extremely misleading. We don't normally stipulate that the theorists about a certain subject matter are irrational by definition.
00:25:22
Speaker
No, no. So it's not it's these people aren't irrational because they believe conspiracy theories per se. There's nothing in the nature of conspiracy theories that means just believing in one makes you irrational. He points out that you know, flat earth theorists are obviously irrational, but they're not irrational by definition. Their rationality consists in the fact that their putative subject matter obviously does not exist. Conspiracies, by contrast, obviously do.
00:25:52
Speaker
So the irrationality comes in from the excessive belief, the willing to believe too heavily in conspiracy theories and presumably the reluctance to disbelieve in them or to believe in evidence against them. And indeed this has a label in the academic literature. This is conspiracism. Right.
00:26:14
Speaker
It's a paper by someone on that. I think it's me. It's quite positive. That is your Twitter handle. It better be you. Yeah. So he thinks, he says, you know, this definition, it's a little bit patchy, but he says it may be justified to some extent by widespread usage, which has its own authority on questions of meaning. And now we're getting a bit more Aristotelian, I think. I think he likes his Aristotle, is the thing.
00:26:43
Speaker
So yes, so now he said, so we've got one definition of conspiracy theorist under which that person is not, according to that meaning, irrational, and then we have another definition of conspiracy theorist in a person. If you define conspiracy theorist that way, then you are justified in saying conspiracy theorists are irrational.
00:27:03
Speaker
And then he gets to his third point. He wants to make where things are not so sure. Then he wants to start talking about the other issue. So you have conspiracies, and thus you have theories about conspiracies, which you might want to investigate to check whether those punitive conspiracies are going on.
00:27:23
Speaker
Then you have the conspiracists under his definition, the people who excessively believe conspiracy theories and act in a kind of irrational way. And then he goes, there's our third group, and those are the people who irrationally don't believe that conspiracies occur.
00:27:42
Speaker
Which he then calls the, he labels them coincidence theorists saying in the paper, this is a term that has come up recently. And it is true back around 2005, 2006, 2007. People were talking about coincidence theorists. It hasn't really settled into common usage at all. What a term I'd heard of before I read this paper.
00:28:07
Speaker
I mean, sometimes they get referred to as cock-up theorists, but a cock-up theorist is not the same thing as a coincidence theorist under this particular definition, because the kind of people that Cody is concerned about
00:28:22
Speaker
might not even exist. Well, no. So he gives examples of the kinds of things a conspiracy theorist might believe, sorry, a coincidence theorist might believe. He says, a hardened coincidence theorist can watch a plane crash into the second tower of the World Trade Center without thinking there is any connection between this event and the crashing of another plane into the other tower of the World Trade Center less than an hour earlier.
00:28:43
Speaker
Similarly, a coincidence theorist could be aware that all 175 editors of Rupert Murdoch's publications around the world endorsed the invasion of Iraq without seeing any connection between their expressed views and those of their boss. And I've certainly never heard a person express those views, and I have a hard time imagining a person, any person, who would believe things like that.
00:29:05
Speaker
So I think the issue here is Cody is responding to hyperbole with more hyperbole, so he's going, well look, if you believe that conspiracy theorists generally are irrational and thus they believe in conspiracies that do not exist, then I'll counter that with the coincidence theorist who is unable to ever connect the dots.
00:29:32
Speaker
The problem is he doesn't really make that move explicitly. I think that's what he's trying to do, which is, oh, if you think conspiracy theorists are weird, you'd think that coincidence theorists are weird too. That's a reductio ad absurdum, a perfecto, more or less, we shouldn't actually use either terms. But it's not clear from the way he's written it, that he's actually engaging him in hyperbole here. Because I'm assuming that's what he's
00:29:59
Speaker
doing, he's going, this is ridiculous, which is why you shouldn't believe the other ridiculous thing. But it doesn't really come across that way. Yeah, yeah. And anyway, having talked about the coincidence theorists, he says there is also another sort of people who are irrationally reject conspiracy theorists, and he calls these people institutional theorists. And this is more of the, that sort of the Hanlon's razor never, never attribute to malice, what can be attributed to stupidity, or the people who
00:30:27
Speaker
don't believe in conspiracy theories and prefer to believe in sort of institutional explanations of things. He gives the example of Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky who talk in the example of how they prefer the explanations that talk about sort of systemic society-wide institutional explanations of things and kind of reject the idea of
00:30:53
Speaker
Sort of, I don't know, is it the whole great man theory of history, the idea that the action... But also the fact that Chomsky rejects the idea of conspiracy theories as well. He doesn't think that people should talk about them because he thinks they're intellectually wasteful. He doesn't like his theories being labelled as conspiracy theories. He's very much going, no, no, no, no, no, don't talk about conspiracy theories, only talk about these things going on here.
00:31:21
Speaker
But Cody doesn't have any truck for this line of thought. He says one problem with this whole line of thought is that impersonal explanations in terms of institutional structures and market forces are not inconsistent with conspiratorial explanations. Many institutions owe their existence, at least in part, to conspiracies. Think of the United States government's debt to the conspiratorial activities of the Founding Fathers. And many institutions themselves regularly conspire. Indeed, many institutions do little but conspire. Think of the CIA or the KGB.
00:31:49
Speaker
So, yes, believing that institutions are the main explanatory force behind things doesn't mean you can discount conspiracy theories. And then also the problem is I think you sort of, he said that I think people like to talk about that because then the solutions to problems are we need to change these institutions, which seems like a more sophisticated, more grown up solution than simply saying, well, we need to get rid of these conspirators, we need to stop the evil people.
00:32:17
Speaker
But he says while there's certainly something to this concern, the alternative strategy of concentrating on systemic or institutional change comes with its own dangers. First, it can be unrealistic, at least in the short term, where most of us live our lives. Second, as history has often demonstrated, the new institutions may be worse than the ones they replaced.
00:32:34
Speaker
And then moves on to Section 4, Conspiracy Theorists and Official Stories. Which is basically him. He is replying to Levy. So he talks of his original paper, Conspiracy Theorists and Official Stories, where he said that conspiracies were opposed to official stories. He sort of paraphrases himself as saying that therefore conspiracy theorists are unusually reluctant to believe official statements. And so then looks at Neil Levy's radically socialised knowledge in conspiracy theories, the last paper we looked at.
00:33:04
Speaker
And he agrees with some of what Levi says and disagrees with some of it. He agrees that there are this epistemic authorities whose pronouncements we should believe in, but he doesn't agree that these pronouncements are necessarily the quote-unquote official story.
00:33:19
Speaker
Yes, because official is doing a rather special set of work here, rather than simply being epistemic authority. When something becomes official, it's been endorsed by a particular institution. And the connection between that institution and epistemic expertise is not necessarily tight.
00:34:01
Speaker
And he mentions Lysenkoism, which we talked about all the way back in episode 26. And, importantly, the geneticists in the USSR who opposed Lysenkoism, who were the appropriate epistemic authorities but had no official endorsement, got thoroughly sidelined,
00:34:05
Speaker
Mmm. So he says,
00:34:20
Speaker
And so, yes, so where Levy pointed out, as he did, that government and epistemic authorities can disagree. And I think the example he gave was talking about the US government's official position on climate change versus the position of actual climate change scientists. So whereas in that case, Levy said, so that's the epistemic authorities, the ones who have the official story. Cody disagrees with this. He says the official story is what the people in power say, essentially.
00:34:50
Speaker
And that is more what people mean, I think, when they talk about the official story. And I don't know, casting my mind back a couple of weeks, I don't know if we actually criticise Levy explicitly for this, but we probably should have, because it does seem to be a good point. I've criticized him in print. Well, there you go.
00:35:08
Speaker
So yes, this idea that he defines the official story as the story of the people who are qualified to make that pronouncement, but that isn't really what we mean by official story most of the time. No, we tend to take it to be an announcement made by people with institutional credence, but whoever has institutional credence doesn't necessarily make them someone who's an epistemic expert.
00:35:35
Speaker
He talks about Levy's comments on the media, which I don't think we talked about last time, because they're mostly in a big footnote. He did. I remember there was a footnote in Levy's paper where he sort of said, kind of excused the media for getting things wrong on the invasion of Iraq post 9-11 and sort of said, oh, that was because they had been led astray by their sources and what have you. By that naughty Tony Blair. Naughty Tony Blair. They're making a musical about Amina. Really?
00:36:04
Speaker
Yeah. But that's not, that seems like a bit of a cop out, and especially because the media is an author, they might not be an epistemic authority, but they are an authority in what they say is often taken as being the official story. So Cady finishes up saying it may be that in an ideal society, official stories would carry an epistemic authority such that it would almost always be rational to believe them, but that is not our society, nor I suspect is it any society that has ever been or ever will be.
00:36:34
Speaker
So he does point out that he goes and quotes his previous papers to say, now, look, I'm not saying the government story is always the official story. They can differ. He says in this paper, although governments are obvious sources of what I've been calling official stories, they are not the only sources, but the media and the academy are in virtue of their power to influence opinion.
00:36:55
Speaker
sources of official stories as well. I think that seems to be the salient point. It's the properly constituted epistemic authorities may be completely on the money, but if they can't persuade anyone that what they're saying is true, then their story isn't the official story. No. Now, because Cody is concerned that maybe Livia's got the wrong end of the stick by replying to him, Cody goes, look, I will provide an actual definition of what I mean by an official story.
00:37:25
Speaker
So it says now it would be more explicit and define an official story as a version of events propagated by an institution which has power to influence what is widely believed in a particular time and place. I think this definition conforms to ordinary usage. Furthermore, it is, outside of any specific context, epistemically neutral.
00:37:46
Speaker
And what he means by that is that these sorts of institutions that he's talking about, they can have the power to influence on account of them being reliable and trustworthy, on account of them being epistemically good, and quote marks, but they can also have the power to influence because of, say, they hold a monopoly on the information, or because what they say conforms to people's existing prejudice and so on, they could be epistemically, quote unquote, bad.
00:38:14
Speaker
So it's not a statement of the institutions themselves, whether or not the influence they wield and the official stories they promote are intrinsic to them. So moving on to the final full section before the conclusion, which is section five, conspiracy theorists and intellectual autonomy. Cody now has a look at the ideas that Levy and Brian L. Keeley before him were looking at and the downsides
00:38:44
Speaker
of being the bad sort of conspiracy theorist. So you'll recall Keeney sort of said it can lead to basically being too sceptical, a too broad scepticism. And Levy, we took it even further than that and said that you can end up cutting yourself off from the sorts of
00:39:05
Speaker
epistemic intellectual apparatus that we all rely on when coming up with views every day. In other words, we can end up having too much intellectual autonomy. It's the title of the section.
00:39:45
Speaker
So he says,
00:39:46
Speaker
Which, I mean, on the face of it, that does kind of make a bit of sense, especially if you look in this day and age, the people who reject the MSM, but will think the real authorities are Donald Trump or previously Fox News, or they've gone and fallen out of favor. No, it's Max.
00:40:06
Speaker
But I do feel this is another unkind gloss on Keeley in that Keeley is talking about mature unwarranted conspiracy theories where it turns out that if the conspiracy theory simply hasn't gained adequate new evidence to show that people should change their mind,
00:40:26
Speaker
then there's something going wrong, both at the evidence and the expertise level there. He's not saying this is true of conspiracy theorists in general. He's talking about a particular kind of conspiracy theorist. Yes, it possibly doesn't apply, but at any rate, Cody wants to say that there are two problems with the idea that trusting in your own epistemic resources is an argument against conspiracy theories in general. First of all, he wants to say that being
00:40:56
Speaker
irrational quote-unquote in this way can be a good thing and looks at the idea of information cascades which is the idea when you can get something that's been being has come up amongst possibly a small group of people but it sort of gets
00:41:13
Speaker
repeated by other people who then repeat it by other people who then repeat it by other people. And so by the time a person encounters this idea, it's no longer actually clear that it's really just the theories of a handful who kicked this whole thing off.
00:41:28
Speaker
And so you may you may think that you're doing what you see is and you know, relying on the whole body of human knowledge in determining what's right and wrong, but really you're not. And indeed, in that case, relying on your own epistemic resources could actually be a good thing and might motivate you to look into it and find, realize that this is on much shakier ground.
00:41:58
Speaker
In fact, let's give Cody's word on it. He says if the early answers exhibit a clear pattern, people later in the sequence may decide to ignore their own epistemic resources and follow the crowd. This belief-forming strategy can be entirely rational from an individual perspective, especially if his expertise on the questionate issue is reasonably evenly spread amongst the group.
00:42:17
Speaker
The epistemic danger of this strategy, however, is that it can lead to relevant evidence being hidden from those later in the sequence. Thus, the epistemic authority of thousands of people can be largely illusory, because most of them have had their beliefs determined by a handful of people at the beginning of the sequence. I'm sure we've talked about cases like this in the past, but I can't for the life of me.
00:42:35
Speaker
remember when, but I've definitely had conversations about this in the past. I remember sort of people talking to some weird and wacky belief and saying, how can people possibly believe this? And it always seems to me, well, okay, you start with some sort of bullshit premise, like if I think it was in the context of your Jordan Peterson's or your Stephen Molly news or something, you start with some
00:42:57
Speaker
bit of a historical nonsense or idea that it can be scientifically proven that certain races are superior to other races or something, something obviously bollocks. And then from that you draw this conclusion and from that conclusion you draw another conclusion and from that one you draw another conclusion and a person who comes into it at this point may simply sort of see, you know,
00:43:17
Speaker
A leads to B leads to C leads to D leads to E. You may only come in at the point where it says D leads to E, which might be quite a sensible inference and so therefore it looks sensible because you're not aware that it started from nonsense in the first place. Yeah.
00:43:31
Speaker
Yeah, there are clear examples of cases of people who get a belief which was kind of settled earlier on in the sequence and then follow through from that point without ever having looked at what A, B and C was before they jumped in at day.
00:43:52
Speaker
So information cascades are an issue. Information cascades are an issue in all kinds of beliefs. And indeed, one of the frequent examples you get in the Flossy of Science and the Sociology of Science is that most of us have a fairly naive belief in science when you start thinking about it. Because most of us haven't done any of the foundational work
00:44:16
Speaker
to be able to understand why we think climate change is occurring, why we think that mRNA vaccines aren't a bad idea. We're simply going, oh look, but all these other people over here, they don't believe it's a bad idea. I agree with them.
00:44:34
Speaker
And so I've caught up with where they are now, and I can read a few Wikipedia articles, read scientific American, skim the abstracts and nature, and now I feel as if I know everything about epidemiology. This is a problem generally for most beliefs in a complicated world.
00:44:54
Speaker
because most of us aren't, to use the old palance, the gentleman scientist sitting in the armchair going, so from first principles, I think of a single unit and then I go, what if I double that unit? No, now I have a set.
00:45:11
Speaker
Now, I could have multiple sets of different sizes. Oh, now I've got the idea of complicated addition, but also various means of subtraction and also multiplication. And if you don't stop me, I'm just going to continue going down this mathematical rabbit hole. There's time for you to sleep, you fall across the face. Yes. Well, I'm not going to. Just the threat of it's enough.
00:45:34
Speaker
Okay, so Cody wants to say there are two problems with Levi's idea that it's bad to rely solely on your own epistemic resources. So one of them is that sometimes it's actually a good thing to do this. It might clue you into the fact that you're sort of in this information cascade sort of sequence.
00:45:57
Speaker
And then he also wants to object to this saying that being irrational in this way, that relying on your own epistemic resources, isn't anything to do with conspiracies per se. He says, even if such intellectually autonomous people do deserve criticism, they do not deserve to be called conspiracy theorists in either a pejorative or non-pejorative sense, because the errors have nothing in particular to do with conspiracy.
00:46:22
Speaker
So I think that's basically the point you just made. It's a general thing. And you see nice examples of this, people who believe in perpetual motion machines.
00:46:31
Speaker
They don't believe in a conspiracy by big inertia to stop people from believing in the idea of perpetual motion. Instead, they go, I'm rather clever. People are wrong to think you can't generate a perpetual motion machine. I mean, I've seen them in shops and so they generate these beliefs and they do all the self-sustaining work and they do their own research. There's nothing conspiratorial about that.
00:46:59
Speaker
And we find examples of that everywhere. So it's kind of wrong to specifically pick upon the pejoratively labeled conspiracy theorists for something which is just a general thing about beliefs in the world. Sometimes people go down rabbit holes and not every rabbit hole is a pejoratively labeled conspiracy theory. It's not. That's true. Some of them have rabbits in them.
00:47:26
Speaker
It's true and if you can fit a human being down a rabbit hole, either a very small human or it's a very large rabbit. Well I mean Winnie the Pooh, he fit down one and he was a bear, like bears are bigger than people. It's true but he was a pooh bear. He was a teddy bear, yes that's true. And he was specifically a pooh bear. Only what, yes. Pooh.
00:47:49
Speaker
I fear we're digressing. Well, that's okay because we're at part six, the conclusion, which basically sums up essentially the three points he made right back in the abstract. So he says in his conclusion, the highly polemical way in which the expression conspiracy theorist is often used means that it's unlikely that any single definition can be thought of as correct. The question therefore is not what is a conspiracy theorist, but how and whether we should talk about conspiracy theorists.
00:48:16
Speaker
So he agrees. Let me just... It is unlikely that any single definition can be thought of as correct. Philosophers can stipulate meaning though. So you can go look for the purposes of discussion. What we should be talking about is X. And arguably, the kind of work that Picton has been doing, which is to say, if you think conspiracy theorists just refers to this pejorative class,
00:48:45
Speaker
You're a moron. We're all conspiracy theorists. Pinkton is engaged in reclaiming the term by saying, look, we should just stipulate if you believe in conspiracies, you are a conspiracy theorist and you believe in conspiracies. So you are a conspiracy theorist.
00:49:05
Speaker
But he agrees right at the beginning of his conclusion that it is a bad thing that the label conspiracy theorists can be used to silence people or to stifle debate. But the question now becomes, OK, so what do we do? What do we do about that fact? We know this is a thing we've talked about time and time again.
00:49:25
Speaker
You know, the whole John Key, Nicky Hager thing, you can say of a person, authorities can say of a person, they're just a conspiracy theorist. And the public can go, I mean, that's right, but is their conspiracy theory wrong? So in order to stop the authorities from getting away with this, what can we do? Well, the first possibility
00:49:43
Speaker
Cody suggests that Pigdon suggests that we should just get rid of the label altogether. Which I don't think is true. I don't think Pigdon would agree with that. I think that it still matters that what you're a conspiracy theorist about. So the fact that we may all be them doesn't mean that it's a useless term.
00:50:05
Speaker
So that's one possibility. The other possibility is that we could talk about conspiracy theorists without the negative connotations of irrationality. In other words, using the first of his two definitions of conspiracy theorists. Which allows that people can investigate conspiracy theorists without necessarily believing them.
00:50:24
Speaker
Or we could use the more pejorative definition that he also gave, but says that if we do go with that definition of what it means to be a conspiracy theorist, then we should also acknowledge the other extreme, these people who are, for whatever reason, the coincidence theorists, the institutional theorists, they're just overly credulous and trusting.
00:50:46
Speaker
And so they are irrationally disinclined to believe in conspiracies. And he says that's a little bit trickier because we don't actually have a catch-all term for people who are irrationally disbelieving of conspiracy theories. And so he finishes his paper by saying, until we come up with a single expression to cover all these ways of irrationally avoiding belief in conspiracy, we need to radically change the way we think about conspiracy theorists.
00:51:12
Speaker
I think this does seem to be, and correct me if I'm wrong, but this does seem to be still mired in a sort of generalist kind of thinking. He wants to talk about, even though he's allowing for different senses of what it means to be a conspiracy theorist, he wants to be able to say that they are either irrational or irrational, per se, when it seems like really what you want to say is they're not inherently either, and what makes them irrational or irrational is the particular
00:51:40
Speaker
conspiracy theory that their spells promote or advocate. And as I say, this paper is interesting because as we will see relatively soon, Cody's subsequent workers don't use the terms. Don't talk about conspiracy theories. Don't talk about conspiracy theorists. They're both weaponized terms used by people in positions of power.
00:52:04
Speaker
as propaganda tools to label views that people in power don't like as being irrational. So at the moment he's going, oh, I mean, we could follow Pigton and just get rid of the term. But really, I think that that's not going to work because people will continue to study these things and the term is in use. And in a few years time, he's going, no, get rid of it. Just get rid of it.
00:52:28
Speaker
Whereas, I mean, the likes of Lee Basham are putting forward more particularist views at this point in time, aren't they? Yeah. Has the particularism showed up? You said there was... No, no. There's a paper coming up which is conspiracy theories and fortuitous data.
00:52:44
Speaker
And that is where Joel Bonting and Jason Taylor will suddenly go, actually, we can talk about this as being generalism and particularism. And then people go, ah, those are the labels we were looking for the entire time. Well, there we go.
00:53:01
Speaker
And it's kind of fascinating because it's the only contribution and I believe they've both left academia so they might not even be aware how well-cited they now are. Interesting.
00:53:16
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, like the papers, the last few papers we've looked at, I thought there are a bunch of good points in there, a bunch of things that I agreed with. But yeah, I think the whole thing is still stuck in trying to be a generalist about these things when generalism just seems to cause more problems.
00:53:32
Speaker
Precisely. Now you know what doesn't cause problems? Arsenic. And patron bonus content specifically. Right. Specifically a fascinating article by Hugh Mann, which we'll be looking at in relative depth after the break. Then we'll be talking about, oh look,
00:53:54
Speaker
An ex-cop who held a man at gunpoint for those fraudulent ballots that didn't exist in the U.S. What a stamp. That sounds fun. Then we'll be following up with actual evidence of fraudulent voting in the U.S. and you won't believe who was responsible for that. And then a follow-up on the poisoning of Alexei Navalny.
00:54:16
Speaker
And an interesting story about how the World Health Organization might be conspiring with the government of Italy to ensure that a particular Italian health minister isn't embarrassed by a report on COVID-19. Well, there we go. So if you would like to hear more about that and you're currently a patron, then I've got good news for you because you can. If you'd like to hear more about that and you're not currently a patron, then it's as simple as becoming one.
00:54:46
Speaker
Just like Joe. Yep. Just go to patreon.com and look for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy and you can sign yourself up. And if you are quite happy just being a regular audience member, well, that's fine as well. And no matter where you are and how much money you give us, thank you for listening. And I guess I guess sort of Merry Christmas and yuletide felicitations and all of that business.
00:55:08
Speaker
And also just in case you're listening to these episodes out of order at some point in the future. Happy New Year's, good Easter, good Yom Kippur, a happy Ramadan, good Thanksgiving, and basically any other festive day for you. Chinese New Year.
00:55:34
Speaker
There's the Cantonese and the Mandarin, and I always mix the two, I always get half, speak half in one language and half in the other. Anyway, yes, so just general well-wishing, I think. I mean, whenever there is a holiday.
00:55:49
Speaker
We wish you well. But for now, I think we'll sign off for 2020, a peach of a year. Talk to you all another time. Yeah, we'll talk to you later, hopefully in the glory of 2021, a year that I would like to think cannot be as stressful as 2020.
00:56:15
Speaker
But I'm beginning to think, actually might be. Oh well, goodbye and good luck. Yeah, good luck. You're going to need it.
00:56:35
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron, via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com, or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:57:36
Speaker
And remember, remember, oh, December was a night.