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Shit Happens
24 Plays3 years ago
Josh and M review Pete Mandik's "Shit Happens," another classic paper on conspiracy theory from that special issue of Episteme 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 and Profanity Buzzer Mishap
00:00:00
Speaker
Today's episode features some bad language. Yes, we're going to be discussing Pete Mandeck's paper, shit happens. You're supposed to use the profanity buzzer then? Oh yeah, sorry. Let's try that again. We're going to be discussing Pete Mandeck's paper, shit. No, that's not right. Try again. Oh, sorry, sorry. Got a bit ahead of myself there. We're going to be discussing Pete Mandeck's paper,
00:00:28
Speaker
Shit happens. No, no, no. No, no, no. I think I've got it now. All right. Let's try again. We are to be discussed. Mandic's paper. Shit. Why are you glaring at me?
Hosts Introduce Themselves
00:01:04
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:01:14
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. Sitting before you, Josh Edison and Dr. Dentith waving, what the heck, oh, chartreuse, goodness, waving hard liquor under my nose just for the sake of it, just to try and put me off. Yes, Dr. Dentith is still in the country despite the efforts of two governments.
00:01:35
Speaker
We've not got rid of them yet. Yes, I'm having a bit of an issue with paperwork in that there's a discrepancy between the paperwork that my job usually provides and the paperwork that the consulate demands and because of course it's now the year of the ox in China and there's a whole
00:01:57
Speaker
festivity going on around the New Year. It's going to take a little longer for that paperwork to come through because people understandably are on vacation and don't want to be providing paperwork when they could be eating delicious food and celebrating with their families. And I say, good for them. Good for them and do. That will benefit me next year anyway. Well, yes, yes, yes. So the wheels are still in motion. They're just taking a holiday, as is their right.
00:02:26
Speaker
But so you've been talking in Hong Kong nevertheless?
Dr. Dentith's Talk on Fake News
00:02:30
Speaker
Yes, I gave a talk at Hang Seng which is a university in Hong Kong talking about fake news on Saturday of last week which because it was a conference in Hong Kong time but I was sitting here in Milford
00:02:44
Speaker
meant that the conference started at 1.45 in the afternoon and ended at 10pm with a two-hour dinner break between 5 and 7, which is kind of the worst time for a lunch break for someone who's going, I don't know what to do for the next two hours. I'm kind of stuck at home with nowhere to go, just sitting in front of a computer hoping that something exciting is going to happen. And it didn't.
00:03:10
Speaker
Talk was good though, and I chaired my first ever panel. Very well. I've chaired papers before, but never a panel. How did it go? It went swimmingly. Well, that's excellent.
00:03:20
Speaker
Now, last week, circumstances conspired to make us get one out of the can again. Which means we have to put one back in the can. The can must never go empty. Before that, of course, it was our 300th episode spectacular. Now I understand we did have one glaring omission in all our talk of Kirk Cameron and the Left Behind series.
Ray Comfort's 'Banana Man' Argument
00:03:46
Speaker
Yeah, so it turns out that what we failed to mention was that one of Kurt Cameron's mentors is New Zealand's own Ray Comfort, the man who can't believe the banana evolved. Oh, he's actually the banana guy. He is the banana guy. I've seen the banana video, but I didn't realize he was a... Yes, Ray Comfort is Banana Man. Goodness, mate. Which is actually a reference to an 80s cartoon that virtually no one remembers. I think I remember Banana Man, yes. Was his companion Zippy?
00:04:16
Speaker
I don't know. I think he had a kind of bear-like companion. It's all coming back to me now. But yes, Ray Comfort was the man who, and I think he is dead, so I think he was the man, who believed that the banana was proof that evolution by natural selection can't
Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre Introduction
00:04:34
Speaker
be true because the banana is perfectly designed, in scare quotes, to be eaten by a human being.
00:04:42
Speaker
It was designed for us to carry around and eat. It's a candy bar in its own organic wrapper. All of which is true, of course, but ignores the fact that in biblical times, bananas were quite unappetising bags of seeds which, due to human intervention and selective breeding over the centuries, turned them into the fruits that are indeed designed for us to eat at our leisure. That is heresy and I will not stand for it. Fair enough.
00:05:11
Speaker
So this week, this week, though, we have another installment of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre. What's the paper called? The paper is called... I think... I think we... We might just have to allow a certain amount of profanity. Okay, so the paper is called what? Paper is called Shit Happen. Sorry, again? Shit... Shit... Shit Happen.
00:05:42
Speaker
Shit happens.
00:05:44
Speaker
Yep, I think that must be out there by now. In reference to Brian L. Keeley's of conspiracy theory. So he's the original potty mouth is Brian, really. It's true. Pete is simply following on from Brian's bad behaviour. Brian, I know you're listening to this. I mean, really, you've led Pete down a bad path. But we'll see just how bad after this sting.
00:06:16
Speaker
Does not the fact I can press a button and make a sound effect? It's... It's... Yep. You're going to... No, I was going to say, you're going to stop loving it. I'm going to stop loving it eventually, I think. Possibly the novelty will never wear off for you. I can just have my finger over the button and make everything you say sound... Sounds quite filthy, yes. But now...
Critique of Mandik's Argument Against Conspiracy Theories
00:06:41
Speaker
To the business at hand, we are talking about a paper by Pete Mandig, Associate Professor and Department Chair of Philosophy and Director of Cognitive Science at William Paterson University in New Jersey. In New Jersey? In New Jersey. I can't do it in New York accent to save my life. Neither can I. So we're in good company, I guess, with each other.
00:07:02
Speaker
sitting here in Milford doing what we do. It's from that episode, that issue rather of episteme. That episode, I like that idea. We're doing episodes of conspiracy theory, masterpiece theatre. Actually, that's not a bad idea. No, we kind of are. This is an episode. But journals don't do episodes, they do issues. Yes, yes.
00:07:23
Speaker
So the issue of Epstein from 2007 that we've been working our way through. And as we will see, it ties in several papers we've looked at before, Brian Alkely's of conspiracy theories, plus a bit of Steve Clark and a bit of David Coady. No Lee Basham though. No Lee Basham, no, no, no, still, Lee doesn't get the representation.
00:07:47
Speaker
He'll come in later. He'll start getting a lot of references to lay in the literature very, very soon.
00:07:55
Speaker
So let's begin. This paper has an abstract, which is always nice. And the abstract reads, in this paper, I embrace what Brian Keeley calls in, of conspiracy theories, the absurdist horn of the dilemma for philosophers who criticise such theories. I thus defend the view that there is indeed something deeply epistemically wrong with conspiracy theorising. My complaint is that conspiracy theories apply intentional explanations to situations that give rise to special problems concerning the elimination of competing intentional explanations.
Mandik's Absurdism and Historical Events
00:08:25
Speaker
There's little doubt that at least some conspiracy theories deserve dismissal on the grounds of their cooginess, but are all conspiracy theories dismissible? And are they dismissible on grounds intrinsic to their being conspiracy theories?
00:08:41
Speaker
we should probably explain why. So yes, as he says, he starts off, it's inspired by, of conspiracy theories. And I don't know if we mentioned this back at the time when we first went through this, but at the start of conspiracy theories, there are two quotes, one by Hume, and also the popular expression, shit happens, which is, if you recall at the very end of it. Sorry, what was that expression again? That was shit. Pins.
00:09:11
Speaker
You should have committed to the happens there. And I suppose I should have. Try again. The quote was... Thank you. OK. That would be the last time I used the profanity buzzer, because now the joke is actually quite, quite old. Now, if I do it enough times... If you do it enough times, it'll roll around to being funny again. But it might... Yeah, I suspect the episode would have to go on for a very long time to roll around to that. Um, so...
00:09:40
Speaker
Things kick off with
Analyzing Mandik's Definition of Conspiracy Theories
00:09:41
Speaker
the following quote. Of particular interest for the current paper is a dilemma that Keeley raises toward the end of his 1999 discussion. The first horn of the dilemma is that the more we lend credence to conspiracy theories, theories postulating powerful agents cooperating to commit evil while succeeding in avoiding detection,
00:09:59
Speaker
the more we're pushed to a kind of skepticism about any of our institutions. The second horn of the dilemma is that the less we lean credence to the core idea that agents are able to control events, the more we're pushed to a kind of absurdism whereby historical events may happen due to causes, but not for any reason. In other words, shit happens. My aim is to argue for acceptance of the second horn of Keeley's dilemma.
00:10:21
Speaker
Now, the first thing I want to note is that evil is a little bit of a strong reading of Keeley here, isn't it? Well, yes. I mean, we've always said that there needn't be anything inherently malevolent in a conspiracy, although other people would disagree. But yes, saying that a conspiracy is necessarily evil is quite a strong claim, I think.
00:10:43
Speaker
And of course, the other thing to note is that when we're talking about Brian Keeley's work, we need to be talking about the distinction between mature unwarranted conspiracy theories, which is what Keeley is basically interrogating and of conspiracy theories.
00:10:59
Speaker
and the idea that there are actually warranted conspiracy theories out there, which are rational to believe according to the available evidence. And it seems that what Mandik is doing here is focusing entirely on the mature conspiracy theories. And as we're going to see over the course of this paper, not really leaving any room for the idea that there might be warranted conspiracy theories out there that are worth believing on the evidence itself. Yes.
00:11:29
Speaker
So, like a good philosophy paper, it starts with a definition. Mandik defines conspiracy theories based on Keeley's definition, taking into account some of David Coady's editions as well. There are certain aspects, in particular things like David Coady's insistence that a conspiracy theory
00:11:52
Speaker
is always in opposition to an official theory. Some things like that he's not actually, you know, says maybe true, maybe not, but not what he's interested in in particular. The things he's interested in and the definition of a conspiracy theory, he separates into five points. He says, conspiracy theories postulate one, explanations of two historical events
00:12:17
Speaker
in terms of three, intentional states of multiple agents, the conspirators, who among other things, four, intended the historical events in question to occur, and five, keep their intentions and actions secret.
00:12:32
Speaker
And then he goes on to say,
00:12:50
Speaker
I aim to defend the view that any theory that satisfies all five of the criteria that constitute my working definition of a conspiracy theory is a theory that we have no more reason for believing than any of the possible alternative theories. Yes, so I mean of those five
00:13:13
Speaker
I don't think we would agree with criteria number four that the conspiracists intended the historical events in question to occur. No, and we've talked about this in the past. So one of the issues you have when you start talking about intentionality with respect to conspiracy theories is, of course, there are always unintended consequences to any sophisticated or complex social action.
00:13:37
Speaker
So it might be the case that conspirators intend for a state of affairs to come about, such as the assassination of a dictator, and thus hopefully they becoming the ruling class of the Republic of Rome.
00:13:52
Speaker
but there's no way that they can guarantee that end point. They intend an end, but they don't intend the specific historical event which has occurred. And that seems to be the problem with Mandik's definition there. Mandik's? Mandik's definition there. In that he seems to be adhering to a really strong sense of a conspiracy is only a conspiracy if the conspirators achieve the end they wanted to achieve.
00:14:20
Speaker
whilst as we've discussed in the podcast at length, you can be involved in a conspiracy that results in an event you did not want, but it's still a clear case of a conspiracy because the conspirators intended for some state of affairs to obtain, even if it turns out that state of affairs wasn't able to be obtained due to some other factor.
00:14:44
Speaker
And yes, straight away we see there doesn't seem to be any mention of the distinction between warranted and unwarranted conspiracy theories. It's just conspiracy theories in bulk, which possibly may get things into a little bit of a tangle as we go.
00:15:00
Speaker
Yeah, because it does seem that from the off, Mandik really is an arch-conspiracy theory sceptic. He's arguing, as we will see, that you never have good reason to believe a conspiracy theory. He's actually going to have some really weird conclusions based upon where his arguments go.
00:15:20
Speaker
And what's particularly interesting is that despite what he says earlier in the paper, that he's kind of agnostic as to whether Cody is right, that we need to bring in the idea that there's a distinction between a conspiracy theory and an official theory. It does seem that he does think official theories will trump conspiracy theories even if they've got the same evidence.
00:15:46
Speaker
So having defined terms, the paper starts to get into intentions. And if you recall, Steve Clark's paper that we looked at some time ago was the one that was all about the fundamental attribution error and intentional states and things like that. So it starts to sound a little bit familiar.
00:16:05
Speaker
So he starts by looking, so he had the five elements. One, conspiracy theories are explanations. Two, historical. Three, they involve intentions. Four, the intention, the result was the intent and result of five, secrecy. So he's looking at three, the fact that conspiracy theories involve intentional states. And he says,
00:16:26
Speaker
The third element, and this is perhaps most important to the points I want to make, is that the explanations posited by conspiracy theories attribute a large role to the intentional states, the beliefs and desires, of the agents involved. Intentionality is implicit in the fourth element, insofar as it's required that the historical events explained were intended by the conspirators. Additionally, intentionality is required insofar as it is required in being a conspirator.
00:16:50
Speaker
Being a conspirator involves working cooperatively, and thus doing things that involve the co-conspirators appropriately adopting the intentional stance toward one another so as to, for example, give, receive and understand orders, formulate plans and agree to act in accordance with plans. One of the most significant activities of conspirators that involve intentionality is to engage in the fifth element, agree to keep their plans and activities secret.
Equi-Probability Argument Critique
00:17:13
Speaker
Now we'll be coming back to the notion of secrecy very soon, because
00:17:17
Speaker
Mandik's idea of secrecy here is basically harking back to the kind of secrecy that Karl Popper talked about and was then criticized by people like Charles Pigdom. But we're jumping ahead. Yes, no.
00:17:33
Speaker
So at this point, we go back to Hume, because if you recall, Cayley's paper sort of drew the analogy with Hume's paper on miracles and wanted to take conspiracy theories in a similar direction.
00:17:49
Speaker
Now, there's a bit here, there's a decent chunk to the section, but the bit that stuck out to me was where he says,
00:18:08
Speaker
Modifying slightly yields the question, for any proposed conspiracy theoretic explanation, is there another explanation at least as probable as the one being profited? If there any conspiracy theory there is, in virtue of its being a conspiracy theory, always another explanation that is at least as probable, then the conspiracy theory cannot be known to be true.
00:18:30
Speaker
Now that's weird. That's an interesting thing to say. Yeah, because it is true, if you've got a choice between two theories and one is more probable than the other, then you ought to believe the theory which is more probable.
00:18:47
Speaker
When you have two theories which are equi-probable, i.e. they both have the same kind of evidence, and you can't decide between the two, surely that's the point in time to use the modern palant. You should be agnostic and go, well, I've got no way to choose between two competing explanations or hypotheses for these particular bits of data.
00:19:12
Speaker
But Mandik is going, no, if it turns out that they're equi-probable, and one of those theories is a conspiracy theory, then that's grounds to prefer the non-conspiratorial explanation. And that seems very, very weird. That means he's working with a pejorative gloss on conspiracy theory from the off. He's not actually interested in interrogating
00:19:39
Speaker
how we should deal with conspiracy theories. He's interested in giving some justification as to why we should be dismissive of them, even in a situation where the conspiracy theory might be as good a contender for an explanation as some rival theory.
00:19:56
Speaker
So that's going to come into play again later, but the next section of the paper is conspiracy theories as extremely problematic intentional explanations. So getting back into the into the Clark type. Although not formally until the very end of the paper. So when I did my reread of this paper and this stuff on intentionality came up, I went, is he going to mention Clark at all? And he does, but not until the very end.
00:20:23
Speaker
So he says each of the five elements of the definition of conspiracy theories gives rise to distinct problems for the believability of any given conspiracy theory. And jointly they make any theory that satisfies all five criteria, a theory for which we have no more warrant than any other theory alleging to explain the same data, including other theories that satisfy all five criteria.
00:20:46
Speaker
So he doesn't doesn't really have much to say about element one, the idea that conspiracy theories are explanations. That's I mean, that just seems trivial. So there really shouldn't be much to say at all.
00:20:58
Speaker
He thinks that element two, the fact that the explanations of historical events is a bit of a problem, basically on the grounds that any explanation of any historical event is post hoc and has to depend on reported observations that we just assume are reliable. But the problem is
00:21:18
Speaker
That might be true, but one, that's going to affect every single historical explanation you deal with, because every historical explanation does not rely on someone observing the event in the past, relying on the testimony of people telling us what they observed, and thus there's questions about reliability, whether it's a conspiracy theory or not.
00:21:42
Speaker
And also too, we're talking about testimony here. We're not talking about a problem which is specific to conspiracy theories. We're talking about a general issue with testimony which deals not just with historical claims, but things which are happening here and now you hear about via other people. So if we take Clark seriously here, our social knowledge becomes incredibly sparse.
00:22:08
Speaker
And then elements 3, 4 and 5, the fact that we're talking about conspirators' intentions and their intentions to keep secrets, would then make this even more of a problem because we know that testimony from the conspirators themselves is going to be a lie because they're deliberately trying to deceive us and hide their intentions and so on.
00:22:31
Speaker
He goes into a little digression on predictions, which I had an objection to, but I think I might skip over just in the interest of keeping this thing moving. The point of it all is that Mandak thinks that intentional states as explanations are not reliable because for any event there are lots of possible intentions that could have led to it.
00:22:55
Speaker
which of course, once again, is going to be true for any historical explanation you might think of.
00:23:03
Speaker
So, for instance, he talks about, as you recall, the main example that Brian Keeley used in his first papers was of the Oklahoma bombing example and the conspiracy theories involving the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Mandik says, there are thus a vast range of possible alternate intentional explanations and very little basis for choosing between them. This makes the initial conspiracy theory look post hoc.
00:23:32
Speaker
But then that doesn't really seem to be restricted to conspiracy theories at all. No, once again, any kind of event which occurs in which you've got a variety of different competing explanations occurring within moments of the event, initially your decision to go with one over the other could also be accused of being post-hoc. So once again, this is not a problem specific to conspiracy theories.
00:24:01
Speaker
But this leads into the next section called The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret and I think here is where the paper loses me really. I had quibbles with it up till now but at this point I thought things went a little bit off the rails.
Challenge to Mandik's Secrecy Claim
00:24:16
Speaker
Because following on from what he said before, sometimes we can narrow down intentional explanations with testimony from the actors themselves. People tell you what their intentions were. But because of element five, the fact that conspirators intend to keep their actions and goals secret, we don't have that. We don't have access to that.
00:24:41
Speaker
And so, he says, my central claim may be summarised as the following conjunction of conditionals. If something is a conspiracy theory, then it has all five elements of my working definition. If something has all five elements of my working definition, then it is unwarranted or at least no more warranted than a declaration of
00:25:01
Speaker
happens. I don't anticipate that there will be many objections to the first conjunct, since it has apparently agreed to be true by many if not all of the philosophers writing on the subject since Cayley's 1999 paper. Especially interesting then is the question of what plausible objections may be raised against the second conjunct.
00:25:17
Speaker
Now you have a possible objection. Well yes, and it's basically the objection that Keeley himself brings up, conspiracies occur. And that's the thing which is a problem with Mandik's characterisation of Keeley here, in that by not talking about Keeley's distinction between warranted and unwarranted conspiracy theories,
00:25:37
Speaker
and the question of what to do with mature unwarranted conspiracy theories. Mandik is kind of completely sidestepping Keeney's entire discussion of, we know conspiracies occur, that's why it's particularly vexatious to answer the question, are we justified in being dismissive towards certain claims about conspiracies as encapsulated by conspiracy theories?
00:26:05
Speaker
And so Mandit considers this objection. He says, aren't we warranted in the Kong belief that say Al Qaeda blew up the World Trade Center? And isn't the common belief that Al Qaeda blew up the World Trade Center a conspiracy theory? The strategy I find most appealing is to answer the first question positively and the second negatively.
00:26:24
Speaker
The second question that immediately arises is, why aren't these primer-facey warranted conspiracy theories really conspiracy theories? My answer is that they fail the necessary condition of keeping secret. However, this point needs to be made with special care. Does Mandic make it with special care?
00:26:41
Speaker
Initially, yes. I mean, he points out that there are lots of different ways of keeping something secret. And he talks about, I think referring to what you're talking about with Papa, that there are several senses of what it can mean to keep a secret. You consider that you've kept something a secret if you yourself
00:26:59
Speaker
have never done anything to divulge the secret. If you've kept that secret to yourself, then you've kept the secret. Another sense could be that if someone finds out about it, then you haven't kept the secret by definition, whether or not you did anything. If the secret's out, then it's out. And he sort of says, well, no, we shouldn't go that far. That would be too much. He sticks to the former one. And yet, when he really gets going, seems to kind of be going for that second definition.
00:27:26
Speaker
After all, but and of course the thing which makes us particularly problematic is putting to one side the whole debate about 9-11 truth and whether actually was an inside job if you take the official conspiracy theory of 9-11
00:27:43
Speaker
Then as soon as the attacks on New York and Washington DC are made, Al-Qaeda admits to the attacks and say they're responsible, because they only needed to keep it secret up until the time the attacks occurred. Then of course they wanted to make the most of the attacks go, aha!
00:28:03
Speaker
who attacked you, it was us. So of course it makes sense, you might go, I mean, once you've succeeded in your plot, and you've shown the world you can do this outrageous thing, you want to take responsibility so that then you can say, look, look mainland America, you're not immune from attack after all. Yes, I suppose I should also point out that it's not
00:28:26
Speaker
He's perhaps not saying that, at this point at least, not saying that a conspiracy must remain secret forever, but the conspirators must intend to keep it secret forever. Which makes no sense for particular types of plots. The conspirators who killed Julius Caesar.
00:28:43
Speaker
weren't going to keep secret that they did it because they wanted to either seize power or say we were the ones who saved Ron. I mean certainly there are conspiracies that the conspirators would want to keep secret. The VW emission scandal is a great example of that. They probably wanted to keep that secret for as long as possible. Conspiracies to commit a crime, to steal something or anything. But anyway, so we're jumping ahead a little bit here because to quote Mandak himself,
00:29:10
Speaker
The need for care arises because there are several ways in which one can fail to keep secrets, not all of which are useful in discussing conspiracy theories. One way is by getting caught and being compelled to testify in a criminal investigation. In this case, one may have tried and then failed to keep the secret. A related way of failing to keep secret is illustrated by terrorists broadcasting their involvement in a plot in order to take credit for its success. In this case, the sense in which they fail to keep a secret is by no longer even trying to keep it secret.
00:29:39
Speaker
Another way is of failing to keep secret when direct evidence, videotape of someone building and planting a bomb, for example, renders the secret no longer kept.
00:29:48
Speaker
And I mean, we talked about this all the way back in episode two, episode two of this podcast. You mean 300 episodes ago? Literally 300 episodes ago when we looked at the secrecy condition. And even back then we were saying, well, it doesn't have to stay secret forever, surely, because sometimes conspirators want to commit a crime and get away with it and never have anyone find out. Sometimes conspirators want everyone to know once they've achieved their goal, such as with a terrorist attack.
00:30:16
Speaker
Yeah, it turns out that to conspire is actually quite a complex activity that can be realized in multiple ways as a philosopher might say. Yeah. And so there's no there's no argument for the idea that a conspiracy must be kept secret even after the intended aim has been achieved. It's just it's just sort of taken as read there.
00:30:37
Speaker
And then the talk of where he says he talks about the problem, maybe that conspirators may have trialled and then tried rather and then failed to keep the secret. Well, if we're talking about intention, the fact that they failed doesn't change their intentions. Surely they intended to keep the secret. They were unsuccessful. But if what we're interested in is their intentions, the intentions are still there.
00:30:59
Speaker
And of course that speaks to the complex social arrangement, which is the conspiracy. So it's very easy for me to keep a secret, because for me to keep a secret, all I need to do is simply not tell anyone about it. And it's fairly easy for two people to keep a secret if they're in a highly trusting relationship.
00:31:19
Speaker
Because you know only the other person knows, unless you can check on their behaviour. But as soon as your conspiracy starts involving large numbers of people, some of who know a lot, some of whom know very little, then you're going, well, I'm fairly sure I'm keeping things secret. But Gerald, I don't know what Gerald is up to. And Gerald is not very trustworthy.
00:31:42
Speaker
because it was Alice who brought Gerald into the conspiracy, and she basically had the hots for Gerald at the time, and no one knows why Alice has the hots for Gerald, but she does. And he was the wrong person to entrust things to. So the fact that you and I intend to keep a secret, and even Alice intends to keep a secret, but Alice made a bad decision, means that information may well leak, no matter what you intended to do.
00:32:10
Speaker
And Mandak seems to be saying that if even one conspirator out of a conspiracy fails to keep the secret, then it's no longer secret and it's not a conspiracy anymore. Even though the intentions of all the other conspirators were to keep things secret and they succeeded, it seems to have a bunch of weird implications.
00:32:30
Speaker
In this section, he allows for the idea that a conspiracy, a conspirator may keep their secret even in the face of an investigator trying to make them fess up, even if that investigator has actually found out through other means.
00:32:52
Speaker
And in that case, the secret would be kept and the conspiracy remains a conspiracy. But that sort of has the implication that if investigators investigate a conspiracy theory, find out the conspiracy occurs. At that point, it's still a conspiracy. But if they're able to get one of the conspirators to fess up,
00:33:13
Speaker
But perhaps by, say, confronting them with this evidence, this proof they have of the conspiracy, then at that point it goes from being a conspiracy to being not a conspiracy. It seems like a very weird situation to be claiming. Yeah, and as you point out, despite the fact he tries initially to say, I'm not doing the whole proper perfect secrecy thing, actually he's doing the whole proper perfect secrecy thing.
00:33:37
Speaker
and it's a characterisation of conspiracy which means it's impossible for people to conspire or on the notion that if you know about the existence of a conspiracy then it obviously wasn't a real conspiracy at all and thus any belief in a conspiracy theory has to be irrational because you can't rationally believe in conspiracy theories because people can't keep secrets.
00:34:02
Speaker
And then at this point, it struck me that what about if we're talking about historical conspiracies that have been uncovered, uncovered, say centuries after the fact. So all of the conspirators went to their graves and took their secrets with them. Look, Joshua, proper conspirators should intend that their conspiracy is never uncovered and make sure that they wipe every single bit of evidence off the map.
00:34:28
Speaker
And yes, as we see when he starts talking about history later on, it almost does kind of sound like even a historical conspiracy that's uncovered much later, still then is no longer a conspiracy.
00:34:39
Speaker
which is going to get us into the weird metaphysical issue I have with arguments of this type, which is how do people like this deal with things which have been pejoratively labeled as conspiracy theories historically when new evidence comes to light decades later showing that actually the conspiracy theory was warranted the entire time?
00:35:04
Speaker
Nevertheless, at this point we move to the next section which is called avoiding both the conspiracy theory conspiracy and the fundamental attribution era era.
Avoiding Attribution Error in Conspiracy Theories
00:35:13
Speaker
Very pithy titles.
00:35:15
Speaker
Here we start talking about Clark again. My main complaint about conspiracy theories may be summarised as the view that they are multi-agent, intentional explanations of historical events that give rise to problems of holism and entanglement that cannot be resolved by the testimony of the conspirators, since the conspirators are liars. It is difficult to see then how conspiracy theories can be anything other than post-Hawk.
00:35:40
Speaker
And so now he really starts to have a look at what Clark had to say about these these intentional states. Which is basically he wants to try and distinguish his view from Clark's view in order to make sure that the criticisms that David Cody all made against Clark are not going to be applicable to his view of intentional states when it comes to conspiracy theories.
00:36:06
Speaker
So, if you recall, when we looked at David Cote's conspiracy theories and official stories, Cote's problem with Clark's account was basically, first of all, he kind of argued against the fundamental attribution error itself, but then argued that appeals to the fundamental attribution error basically commit the fundamental attribution error themselves. Which is why Mandik wants to talk about the fundamental attribution error error.
00:36:33
Speaker
So he says, my concern in the remainder of the section is to address the worry that perhaps my own complaints against conspiracy theories are vulnerable to a similar charge, a charge that my complaint is self-refuting. And having looked at it, he thinks he's okay at this point, basically because he's not using intentional states to explain a particular historical event, which is what conspiracy theorists do.
00:36:57
Speaker
He's merely talking about intentional states in general to talk about a class of explanations. Will you stop eavesdropping on a Siri? What is your laptop's problem? I'm going to have to turn Siri off on my laptop for the sheer fact that...
00:37:16
Speaker
it only meant respond to my voice and as you just saw it responded to you and it didn't even respond to a claim of insert activation phase for Apple products it just it just started saying
00:37:31
Speaker
I have to assume I have the most generic voice of all time because it doesn't matter whether it's my watch or my phone or my laptop people can invocate the whole notion of Apple's assistant no matter who they are which means that my voice must be so generic
00:37:55
Speaker
that it goes yep I'll just I'll take commands from anyone and amusingly enough for people who know my mother's cat we're recording downstairs in my mother's other lounge my mother's cat is afraid of anyone who basically isn't mum or me and the cat just jumped through the cat door looked at Josh
00:38:12
Speaker
thought that maybe the cat could get out via the other door, discovered the other doors actually closed and is now flat at high speed on the hope that Josh never noticed she was even in the room. So hopefully having been disrupted by both technology and animals, we can carry on with this podcast. I should say for anyone at home
00:38:37
Speaker
I've been distracted currently because I kept looking over at Em's laptop screen and seeing a transcript of my words cycling down and thinking, is it some sort of transcription software running and then relying that, no, we triggered it at some point five minutes ago and the poor thing was still trying to understand everything we were saying. But anyway. It was doing a very good job. It just shouldn't be listening to your voice at all.
00:39:00
Speaker
No. So Mandig thinks he's okay. He's not self refuting, but still has one final problem, which is how to react to Keeley's shit happens objection.
Summary of Mandik's Conclusion
00:39:13
Speaker
The idea that history, as far as we can see, is full of conspiracies. And if we reject conspiracy theories, then we're left with the idea that in cases, shit just happens. Sorry, what was that? I said shit.
00:39:31
Speaker
But it happens. Good. So he wants to compare conspiracy theories, or rather theories, I suppose, that fulfill his elements one to four, but not five. In other words, conspiracy theories where the conspirators don't intend to keep their intentions and actions secret.
00:39:57
Speaker
Which again, I don't know why that's a distinction. Certainly if we start, if we're talking about history, which we are now, if we're talking about historical theories, they may be hysterical as well, I don't know. We don't like to use the term hysterical on this podcast. Well, I've talked about that in the past as well. But anyway.
00:40:19
Speaker
Why would secrecy be an issue if we're talking about historical cases where the conspirators are long dead? Unless you believe that to be a conspiracy something has to stay secret forever. So Mantic concludes.
00:40:32
Speaker
How big is the gap in credibility between these kinds of non-conspiracy theories and conspiracy theories? The answer to this later question depends on the degree to which the fifth element, that is the secrecy one, exacerbates the problem with conspiracy theories. So not the Bruce Willis... Not film. Not that fifth element, no. Different. Oh, OK. Sorry. A completely different reading of the section.
00:40:54
Speaker
If the overwhelming problems with conspiracy theories are pretty much just due to their first four elements of the definition, then we really do have to embrace the horn of Keighley's dilemma and declare that in the course of human history, time and again, shit. I saw you had your finger over it! Because I was going to press it at a different time for humorous purpose. Shit.
00:41:17
Speaker
If, on the other hand, the non-conspiracy theories which satisfy only the first four elements do fare quite a bit better for not postulating the veils of deception essential to their conspiratorial counterparts, then grounds can be given for resisting an absurdist worldview.
00:41:31
Speaker
My own view of the matter, in the case I've tried to make in the current paper, is that the elements prior to the fifth one create most of the trouble, and the prospects for resisting absurdism are quite slim. So basically he kind of is saying that shit just happens. Yeah, and this is just a very weird conclusion. I think for starters, even if we buy this, he's still
00:42:00
Speaker
talking about theories, either conspiracy theories or non-conspiratorial historical theories.
00:42:07
Speaker
that is just talking about what we can know about them. So even under his view, you could say we can't know how and why things happened, but that doesn't mean there wasn't a how and a why. It doesn't imply that shit happens. It doesn't imply that conspiracies don't occur. At best, it's just saying we can't know if a theory that appeals to the existence of a conspiracy is any better than one that does it. I think he needs to read up on more infallibleism.
00:42:37
Speaker
Maybe he does. Such as my master's dissertation. In my bookshelf and nowhere else. It's just a really, really weird hypothesis. I mean, we'll get into this when we talk about our impressions at the end of the paper, which is coming up very soon, because we basically have just gone through the conclusion.
Hosts' Dissatisfaction with Mandik's Paper
00:42:56
Speaker
But yeah, he's in this kind of weird situation of going, look, even if the conspiracy theory has evidence,
00:43:05
Speaker
Don't believe it. Just don't believe it. No, it's very strange. So yeah, my.
00:43:12
Speaker
When I got to the end of this, it really started to feel like a bit of a throwback. Some of the earliest papers we looked at seem to be coming from the position, okay, we know conspiracy theories are nonsense. Let's see if we can prove why. And in some cases came to the conclusion, huh, turns out we can't actually. And maybe we do have to take them seriously in some cases. But this one, yeah, it really did seem to start
00:43:37
Speaker
with the idea that conspiracy theories are inherently irrational and try to argue its way to that position. But at the time in 2007, when it's written, there's a lot more that kind of needs to be argued around to get there in the first place. So things just go quite wonky.
00:43:54
Speaker
And for me it was here, just the whole talk of secrecy just kind of sunk the whole thing I thought, because when you get to the end of it he's basically defined warranted conspiracy theories out of existence. It's because they're not kept secret in just the right way, so in fact though they can't be conspiracies and thus theories about them cannot be warranted conspiracy theories. So yeah, I mean he
00:44:22
Speaker
He at points in the paper sounds like he allows for the possibility of uncovering a conspiracy, even though the conspirators maintain their secrecy. But when it actually comes to specific cases and examples, he seems to pretty much eliminate any possible way that that could happen, basically.
00:44:45
Speaker
Yeah, and it's because I think he creates the horns of a dilemma out of the work of Kelly, which is actually an accurate representation of Kelly's work. And thus he ends up on the absurd horn, which is never believe a conspiracy theory, even if there's evidence in favor of it. And as you point out, that just seems absurd. And surely if you get to an absurd conclusion,
00:45:14
Speaker
via your argument you must go back and go I think there might be something wrong with what I've said. Yeah and again I mean this is something we've seen a little bit I guess in previous papers is maybe Keeley himself didn't do the best job of making it clear when he was talking about conspiracy theories in general and when he was talking about this problematic kind of mature and more into conspiracy theory
00:45:40
Speaker
and we have some people, and this one really seems to, really seems to fall for it, there at no point is the distinction made, and it talks about conspiracy theories as a whole in general entirely. And the thing is, I mean we have, we have pointed the finger at Kiri's paper saying, look some of it is a little bit unclear, but as we've also pointed out in our discussion of conspiracy theories, it's one of the first two papers
00:46:06
Speaker
in conspiracy theory, in philosophy, since Popper and his discussion of them in the open society and its enemies. And so it's understandable that as Keeley is basically inventing some of the language we use to discuss conspiracy theories today, then he's not precise with it because it's still in the process of being generated. This is 2007.
00:46:30
Speaker
Now, difference between 1999 and 2007 is, I think, a number greater than eight. Or at least equal to eight. I mean, it might be equally probable with eight. Now, of course, according to Mandik, we have got no reason to trust one number over the other in this kind of situation. But I take it that this number of years between Keeley and Mandik's writing indicates that
Conclusion and Patron Invitation
00:46:58
Speaker
They've got time, Mandik at least has, to be able to look at that paper and actually try to work out what's going on there. And this is just a poor showing. Yes, I mean, in between the two, as we've seen, there's been a whole book released of papers that we've gone through and then there's enough work to fill up an issue of episteme that we're looking at right now. So yes, there's certainly less of an excuse for this sort of equivocation.
00:47:27
Speaker
Indeed, I mean, I just find the entire thing rather bizarre, that if you have a choice between a conspiracy theory and a non-conspiracy theory, where the evidence literally cannot decide between the two, Mandic is arguing it's more rational to believe the non-conspiracy theory rather than profess agnoticism and go, actually, we just don't know.
00:47:50
Speaker
Yes, so there we go. That's the end of that one. We were less than impressed in this particular occasion. Yeah, I mean, I remember reading it at the time and not being particularly impressed, but I'm even less impressed now that it's 14 years later.
00:48:05
Speaker
So that's the end of that installment of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre. It's the end of this episode, but not the end of the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy for this week. If you happen to be a patron of the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, what do we have in store in our bonus episode? A plan to blow up the moon!
00:48:25
Speaker
Excellent. And actually some discussion about the whole Trump impeachment trial thing. We kind of have to mention it. It's one of those cases where if there is news we have to cover, we will of course discuss it in the patron bonus episode. And this is one of those situations where we kind of feel at least need to check in on the impeachment. Just briefly perhaps.
00:48:49
Speaker
So, if you are a patron, strap in and get ready for that one. If you're not a patron and you'd like to be one, you can go to patreon.com and search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy and sign yourselves up. That'd be just peachy. It would. But if you don't want to become a patron and you're just happy listening to these episodes, well, good for you also, quite frankly. Indeed. We appreciate your listenership, I guess. Is that the word? Sounds about right.
00:49:18
Speaker
So, until next week, or possibly the next couple of minutes if you're about to queue up the bonus episode, I think it's good bye from me. And it's f*** from me. Disgraceful. I know. The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy is Josh Addison and me, Dr. M. R. X. Dentist. You can contact us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com and please do consider supporting the podcast via our Patreon.
00:49:44
Speaker
And remember, the truth is out there, but not quite where you think you left it.