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Episode 331 - Susan Feldman‘s Counterfact Conspiracy Theories
24 Plays3 years ago
Josh and Me review "Counterfact Conspiracy Theories" by Susan Feldman, as published in the International Journal of Applied Philosophy in 2011.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:09
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Edison lying low in Auckland, New Zealand, and in or about Zhuhai, China, we have Dr. M. Denteth. I was going to say that I'm living large, but actually I'm just living averagely in Zhuhai. I'm not doing anything particularly exciting. I'm not doing anything particularly unexciting. I'm living the false equivalence of doing nothing and everything at the same time.
00:00:45
Speaker
Whereas I continue to be locked down and will be for another week and a bit yet, most likely. But that's mostly because of your sexual fetish rather than COVID-19.
COVID-19 Updates and Lockdown Life
00:00:57
Speaker
Mostly the COVID-19, to be perfectly honest, yeah.
00:01:01
Speaker
So, but the numbers are going down. That's what you want. They're the sort of numbers locking up in your sixth dungeon or the number of people who are suffering from COVID-19. It's not my fault. They keep getting out. Okay. I was sold a faulty locking mechanism, but that's beside the point. Numbers of COVID cases are trending downwards anyway. There's a bit of a spike up again yesterday, but they're down again today and they're lower than they were a few days ago. And that's, that's what you want to see basically. Well, precisely. And I'm told.
00:01:31
Speaker
potentially the spike yesterday was due to undercounting of the day prior.
00:01:37
Speaker
Well, yeah, quite possibly. So things are looking hopeful. Of course, the rest of the country is in level three lockdown. And eating a lot of takeaways. Basically, yeah, I mean, there are differing regulations between levels four and three. But the only one that anyone cares about is that under level three, you can get takeaways from fast food places. But at the moment,
00:02:03
Speaker
as a person on full level four lockdown, takeaway fast food is something I can only dream of. It's true. Or you can start doing that thing where you try to make takeaways at home. So you try to make an equivalent to KFC. You try to make yourself a killer burger. And then you realize that even though we kind of treat fast food as being this instantaneous pleasure that's just made hoi polloi behind the counter,
00:02:29
Speaker
There is an art to making a good burger, and there is an art to deep frying fish in a flash fryer, which the average amongst us are just never going to be able to replicate.
00:02:40
Speaker
Yes, I don't think hoi pollo means what you think it means, but you're largely correct. It's, it's, yeah. I can't be bothered myself. I'll just eat, I'll just eat boring old nutritious home cooked meals until the day comes when I can run to McDonald's and say, give me some grease with a bit of grease on it, please. Slap it straight in my gob. Josh, you are a silent green person. Hmm.
00:03:07
Speaker
I've never denied that.
Skepticism on Conspiracy Theory Papers
00:03:09
Speaker
Anyway, we're getting a little off-topic already because this is another edition of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theory, and we're hearing from somebody new. Do we want to introduce it here or play the chime first? Well, actually, first of all, I do want to state I am not convinced that this paper is either a classic or a masterpiece.
00:03:31
Speaker
So if we were taking Conspiracy Masterpiece Theatre to be something which deals with the best papers, I'm not of the opinion. This is one of the best papers from 2011. But it is an interesting paper. And I think it's interesting in a way which, because it's very flawed,
00:03:53
Speaker
It allows us to say some interesting things, maybe use the word interesting now too many times, some things about the literature which are worth exploring, even though to a very large extent, this paper never gets talked about ever again, apart from impotted literature reviews and say things like my book. And apart from right now. Well, that's also true. But this comes after my book unless things have got really timey-wimey between we are starting the recording and where we are now.
00:04:23
Speaker
Well, I mean, I wouldn't rule that out, but maybe you'd better just play that chime and we get into things as quickly as possible, just in case the very fabric of space and time dissolves as we're recording. Ah, precisely. I can see dinosaur-shaped human beings wandering through my office, so we'd better get onto it right now. Welcome to Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre.
00:04:53
Speaker
It's possibly even worse than that. Those dinosaur-shaped human beings have gone human-shaped. The mutations are out of control. I was going to say, that dinosaur-shaped human being is, in fact, your mum.
00:05:07
Speaker
I think we've both done better your mum, Jabs, than that, to be honest. It's true. It has been a long time since you've done a Your Mother joke. Yeah, if we're going to, we should probably save up for a good one. Anyway, maybe that opportunity will arise this very episode, but not right now, because what right now we are doing is introducing the paper we're going to be talking about today, which is Counterfact Conspiracy Theories.
Exploring Counterfact Conspiracy Theories
00:05:32
Speaker
by Susan Feldman, published in the International Journal of Applied Philosophy in 2011. Now, who is Susan Feldman? I have no idea. Is this her only contribution to the literature? As far as I'm aware, I mean, she has written other things on conspiracy theory. I have not come across them. And given I kind of know the literature back to front, I'd be very surprised if there's any further work from her in the field. It's possible.
00:06:01
Speaker
there are an awful lot of journals which aren't indexed by the standard search engine so it is possible there is work out there which I'm completely unaware of but at the same time as far as I'm aware this is Susan's only contribution to conspiracy theory theory and yes I think I think despite the fact that you may have overused it already the word interesting is a good descriptor of the way but as is short shorten to the point which is is how I like these papers
00:06:32
Speaker
So I guess we might as well just get straight into it. It's one of those papers that has a good old abstract, which always takes the work out of exactly how to introduce it. You can just read out what it says, and I'm going to do that right now.
00:06:49
Speaker
Recent philosophical treatment of conspiracy theories supposes them all to be explanatory, thus overlooking those conspiracy theories whose major purpose is the assertion of hidden facts rather than the explanation of accepted facts. I call this variety of non-explanatory conspiracy theories counter-fact theories. In this paper, through the use of examples, including the Obama-Birth certificate conspiracy theory, I uncover the distinctive reasoning pattern and dialectical strategy of counter-fact theories highlighting their epistemic flaws.
00:07:17
Speaker
First interesting thing, Obama birtherism. Yeah, a topic which was really, really big and then just completely disappeared, which is actually kind of fascinating. It didn't completely disappear, but did fizzle away, yeah. Well, no, I mean, to my mind, it's fascinating for the sheer fact that it was kind of an attack vector being used by Republicans against Obama, often being laundered through third party at the time candidates like Donald J. Trump.
00:07:47
Speaker
and it disappeared in the way that attacks against the Clintons didn't.
00:07:53
Speaker
So to a large extent, when you start looking at Republican rhetoric about the problems with the Democratic Party, most of them are still focused on Bill Clinton's time as premier of the United States of America, with Obama kind of being the hidden Clinton candidate that he was really just a Clinton in disguise. Republicans are so focused on the Clinton years
00:08:18
Speaker
that birtherism has kind of disappeared with the her emails and thus the extension his tenure being kind of the major attack vector for Republicans even to this day. Yeah I mean I guess that is true that that certainly once Obama was out of office nobody really seemed to care about his birth certificate anymore and yet people still make references to Hillary Clinton even though she lost to Donald Trump like five years ago now
00:08:45
Speaker
But anyway, we'll get into the birtherism as we go through this paper, but it starts off as many of these papers do, and as all good philosophical papers should do, I think, with a bit of definition.
00:09:01
Speaker
So it starts at the very beginning. In this paper I highlight and explore a subgroup of conspiracy theories which I call counterfeit conspiracy theories or CFCTs. Like all conspiracy theories, counterfeit theories assert the existence of a conspiracy. Unlike most conspiracy theories examined by philosophers and social scientists,
00:09:19
Speaker
The assertion of a conspiracy is not provided as an explanation of historical events. The distinctive feature of counterfeit theories is their assertion of counter facts, claims of fact which run contrary to accepted factual claims and their evidence.
00:09:33
Speaker
And then we get into the old, the good old what's a conspiracy theory and goes straight into Brian Elkely's definition.
00:09:50
Speaker
And then we take a swing pretty much straight away into David Coady territory when she starts saying, of course, the problem with that is that when we say conspiracy theory, we tend to think it's malign. And when we talk about conspiracy theories, we generally assume that they're opposed to an official theory. And so straight away goes to Bacon, that particular definition that conspiracy theories
00:10:16
Speaker
are for sinister purposes and counter to an official theory. And it's all just kind of taken as written. She basically, she ends up saying, in order to distinguish conspiracy theories from accounts involving conspiracies, we can merge Cody's two definitions, one which focuses on the element of conspiracy, the other on counter narratives, combining this gives us
00:10:40
Speaker
A conspiracy theory is a proposed explanation of events contrary to an officially sanctioned alternative involving the causal agency of a group of agents working together in secret, often or usually for a sinister purpose. And she doesn't really go into why we need to distinguish conspiracy theories from accounts involving conspiracies, but it just seems to be kind of taken as read if you go for the kind of, not Socratic, Aristotelian, here's what we say when we talk about conspiracy theories thing.
00:11:10
Speaker
Now I always have a bit of an issue with any definition which uses what we might take to be a weasel word like often or usually. So here's my definition and sometimes it applies to this thing and sometimes it applies to that thing. These are words that often make it very difficult to work out whether we're looking at an exceptional case or an ordinary case.
00:11:33
Speaker
And I don't even think it needs the CODI editions anyway, because it's the explanation of historical facts, part of it, that she's really, really most interested in. So adding those extra little things on it, I don't think he adds much anyway. But at any rate,
00:11:53
Speaker
after the after the um uh definitions uh susan feldman i don't know should i is she a dr feldman is she a professor i've got that problem again that never seems to give title i mean i am i am assuming it's dr feldman just do the whole feldman claims just work with the whole the whole last name thing
00:12:17
Speaker
then I assume I'm discussing a paper that's been written by dead British comedian Marty Feldman, and that's just gonna really throw him out of my game. But anyway. We'll get to his contribution to conspiracy theory later on in the series. Yeah. At any rate, the name Michael Barkan comes up in the paper at this point. Now, this is another name that I don't think we've heard before. Who is Michael Barkan and why would Feldman be introducing him at this point?
00:12:44
Speaker
So he's a political scientist at Syracuse University. He wrote a very popular book, a culture of conspiracy apocalyptic visions in contemporary America. I believe it's into its second edition now.
00:13:01
Speaker
And in hit, in hit, in it, there is a taxonomy of conspiracy theory. Oh, you're back. Yep. That was just a quick little one. Yep. I'll just be able to sound a bit in here.
00:13:17
Speaker
In his book, he has a taxonomy, and in his taxonomy, he distinguishes between basically a whole set of different types of conspiracy theories, event conspiracy theories, systemic conspiracy theories, and super conspiracy, which should also be super conspiracy theories.
00:13:38
Speaker
And he uses this to kind of diagnose the problem with particular types of conspiracy theories. I think Wythe Feldman uses it here. Because Bachoon uses his taxonomy to make kind of claims that certain conspiracy theories are sensible and certain conspiracy theories are insensible. And that they make grandiose claims which just cannot be substantiated by any kind of evidence. They're too big and they're too grand.
00:14:07
Speaker
The problem with Bakun is that it's kind of built into his discussion of conspiracy theories, that conspiracy theories are irrational, because he takes it that conspiracy theories are the product of a conspiracist worldview.
00:14:25
Speaker
He takes it as a conspiracist worldview and plays a universe governed by design rather than by randomness. The emphasis on design manifests itself in three principles found virtually in every conspiracy theory. Point the first.
00:14:44
Speaker
nothing happens by accident, point the second, nothing is as it seems, and point the third, everything is connected. So he takes it if you believe conspiracy theories, you suffer from a conspiracist worldview, and people who suffer from a conspiracist worldview believe that everything happens for a reason, and all events in the world are connected.
00:15:10
Speaker
which is why I've kind of taken again, Bakugan and his typology, it builds in the assumption that conspiracy theories are irrational. And I think it's problematic to start from that starting point, because it does kind of affect everything you do analytically afterwards.
00:15:28
Speaker
And I think the assumption that conspiracy theories come from a conspiracist worldview doesn't really seem to be borne out by what we see a lot. People will latch onto a single conspiracy theory. And maybe even if the logical implication of that conspiracy theory, when you really look at it, is that, yes, maybe the entire world is a grand conspiracy, but they certainly don't seem to think that way, you know, that you're anti-vaxxers or what have you. A great many of them, I don't think,
00:15:57
Speaker
believe that Freemasons around the country and lizard people and Illuminati and New World orders and what have you, they've just got this one conspiracy theory. And maybe if you really forced them to tease it out, they would have to concede that there are large powers at work or something. But just in and of themselves, I wouldn't say that they would say, certainly, that they hold a conspiracist worldview.
00:16:22
Speaker
At any rate, Bakung says that, and Feldman's following his definitions, are what you get because, as you say, one of the things he distinguishes between is event conspiracy theories and systemic conspiracy theories that assert the existence and activities of hidden power for long-term and often vast networks of conspirators whose agents and activities can be responsible for much of world history.
00:16:45
Speaker
So looking at this, Feldman says, Bakun's taxonomy allows us to see that some conspiracy theories are not explanatory. However, there are some non-explanatory conspiracy theories which do not fit the systemic pattern. These non-explanatory theories assert counter facts. They claim facts which run contrary to accepted and authorized beliefs, and maintain that knowledge of these counter facts is suppressed by conspiracy. Let us call these theories counter fact conspiracy theories. The aim of CFCTs is to establish counter facts
00:17:13
Speaker
and uncover the conspiracy hiding them from general view. As previously noted, CFCTs like systemic theories assert hidden facts rather than explain already accepted events.
Comparison of Conspiracy Theories
00:17:23
Speaker
However, the hidden facts that systemic theories assert involve the existence of conspiracies while counterfeit theories invoke conspiracies as a means of hiding counter facts. And she gives examples at this point of the likes of Obama-Bertha theories, as she said she was going to, and UFO theories as examples of
00:17:42
Speaker
people who are asserting that there are these facts that are counter to what we believe. Mainstream society believes that UFOs and aliens probably don't exist. But these theories are saying actually no counter to what you believe. Aliens do exist and have been visiting Earth and there's evidence of it. And you may believe that Barack Obama is
00:18:07
Speaker
eligible, or was, I suppose, eligible to become President of the United States, but actually this theory is introducing these counter facts that no, no, it turns out that he was ineligible. And then the conspiracy theories come in as to how to, dare I say it, explain why these counter facts are not the commonly accepted facts.
00:18:34
Speaker
So my question here is, aren't these just conspiracy theories about claims of disinformation? Why are we using this weird term counterfact when there's an existing term which is you believe a large amount of disinformation in the world, you are disinformed. The reality is, why talk about counter facts rather than talk about disinformation? Yeah, and I mean, I think
00:19:00
Speaker
As we'll see as we go through this, my problem with it, and I assume yours as well, is that this seems to be a distinction that doesn't really need to be made, and there isn't a lot to be gained by making it. But let's see as we carry on through it.
00:19:18
Speaker
Based on this definition, Feldman says that this provides us with a rough two-step schema typical of any counterfeit conspiracy theory. One, assertion of counter facts, and two, invocation of a cover-up conspiracy. There is some explanation. The conspiracy Clause 2 explains the suppression of the asserted counter facts in one. In this case, it explains how this alien non-native-born other, still referring to the Obama-Bertha theories,
00:19:43
Speaker
was able to trick the American people into believing he was eligible to be president. Unlike an explanatory theory, however, the primary purpose of the counterfeit theory is not to explain, but to put forward the counter facts. And then she compares this to, say, 9-11 truth theories, because obviously it's still 2011. There's no getting away from 9-11 in conspiracy theory literature.
00:20:06
Speaker
So compared with that case where she says that the point is that or the difference is that there is an accepted fact that the theories are providing an alternative explanation for. So she says 911 truth explanations provide alternative casual explanations of the destruction in contrast to the birther conspiracy view interjects into public discourse its own set of counter facts
00:20:29
Speaker
and acknowledges no uncontested facts relevant to the issue. Which, I mean, already is starting to seem a little bit murky and almost sort of just on that definition of it, it kind of sounds a little bit like it's not so much you've got a different kind of conspiracy theory, it's you've got a theory which has a conspiracy theory as part of it. The conspiracy theory bit is explaining the counter-facty stuff, but the counter-facty stuff isn't necessarily the conspiracy theory itself.
00:20:59
Speaker
I find her examples here to be very confounding because I'm not actually seeing a salient difference between 9-11 conspiracy theories and Obama-Bertha conspiracy theories. Her claim is that somehow
00:21:15
Speaker
People who believe in any account of 9-11 have some kind of shared factual basis and disagree only on some details, whilst people who believe in the birther hypothesis have to believe contrary to what non-birthers believe. And yet, I think it's all a matter of description. It is true that to a very large extent,
00:21:39
Speaker
9-11 conspiracy theorists, whether they are truthers or outside job hypothesis holders, agree about a certain number of facts of that day, i.e. the event occurred on September the 11th, the event occurred in New York City, there was an attack upon the World Trade Center buildings,
00:22:00
Speaker
And then the difference there is exactly what you think the mechanism for the destruction of those buildings were and who you thought was responsible. In the same respect, if you're a birther, there's actually an awful lot that you agree with with respect to non-birthers.
00:22:18
Speaker
This person called Barack Obama was elected to be president on a particular day. They were inaugurated on another day. It seems that you share a whole bunch of facts there. And once again, the disagreement is about mechanisms and who was really responsible.
00:22:37
Speaker
So I just don't see how there is a salient difference between the example of an explanatory conspiracy theory he's really keen upon, which is 9-11 conspiracy theories, and these counterfact theories, the Bertha hypotheses, which don't seem to be all that different from 9-11 truth theories, truth be told.
00:22:59
Speaker
It feels like there's a difference. I don't know if that means there actually is one. It's possibly a difference of emphasis more than actual substance. I don't know. I mean, in the case of 9-11, I think what you're sort of saying is there is this event.
00:23:16
Speaker
And then people went out of their way to determine an official version of what caused that event. And then along comes the conspiracy theory opposing that official explanation of events. Whereas in the case of Obama, there wasn't an investigation into how Obama became president. He just did. And then people are coming along afterwards and saying, well, actually, he probably shouldn't have because of these reasons.
00:23:44
Speaker
Now, I don't know if that's actually a relevant difference in terms of how you define conspiracy theories, because when the actual conspiracy theories come in, they are still pretty much explanatory. It's explaining how we could have been taken in by this person who wasn't actually eligible to become president and how he could have been put in that position in the first place. So in terms of the actual conspiracy theory stuff, I don't know if it makes a difference, but possibly
00:24:08
Speaker
It seemed like there's a feeling that there's a difference. Maybe there isn't, but possibly that's where she's coming from. I think that feeling depends on how you describe the event, because you might go, look, one reason why people have conspiracy theories about 9-11 is the feeling, how could America, the superpower, be attacked on its mainland?
00:24:33
Speaker
In the same respect, you might go, look, how can America, a largely white supremacist, white nationalist nation, allow a black man to be elected president? And once you describe the two conspiracy theories with that particular type of motivating question,
00:24:50
Speaker
then I think you end up going, well, actually both of them are about trying to explain why an extraordinary event occurred, which means I think the difference is what's the motivating question that brings you to the allegation of conspiracy. And I just don't see that there's a salient difference when you ask the question in that way. Yeah, no, I mean, I do think, I mean, I agree with you there, and I do think that
00:25:13
Speaker
a lot of it's just sort of how you choose to present these certain conspiracy theories. And actually at this point in the paper, having read, I'm not sure, did we? I think we might have skipped over this in our discussion just now. She actually puts forward her specific definition of what a counterfeit conspiracy theory is.
00:25:32
Speaker
A CFCT is a counter-narrative account about a significant portion of reality, asserting counter-facts, knowledge of which has been suppressed by a conspiracy of powerful actors, usually for their own sinister purposes. And as you sort of got towards this definition, I started thinking, well, hang on. As you've described them, counter-fact conspiracy theories do do a bit of explaining, and explanatory conspiracy theories do offer some alternative facts.
00:26:02
Speaker
But Feldman addresses this point herself straight away. She does say, in practice, it may be hard to draw clear lines between ECTs and CFCTs, since the latter do provide some explanation and the former do put forward some counter facts.
00:26:17
Speaker
But she goes on to say that while actual theories might contain elements of both, there's a clear contrast between idealized ECTs and CFC. I'm just going to, I find it harder to read. It's easier to write, easier to read down, but actually saying it out. I think the acronyms are a little more clumsy, so I'm just going to let go over them.
00:26:34
Speaker
The purpose of an explanatory conspiracy theory is explanation of a significant event, but that of the counterfeit conspiracy theory is assertion of counter facts. Counterfact conspiracy theories, the explanatory role played by invoking the conspiracy, is generally confined to the suppression of the counter facts, while conspiracy is a critical part of the explanation of uncontested facts about events for explanatory conspiracy theories.
00:26:58
Speaker
Again, it sort of feels like this counterfeit phenomenon she's talking of is possibly a bigger thing, part of which involves a conspiracy theory that explains why we don't all believe these alternate effects.
00:27:14
Speaker
It's not a separate species of conspiracy theory. It's conspiracy theory that happens to be applied to a particular kind of claim, perhaps. Yeah, I'm still not buying that distinction. I'm just not buying it at all.
00:27:29
Speaker
Well, she tries to distinguish between them also by going on to say, to look at what she claims the differences between how the two different kinds of theories, how explanatory conspiracy theories and how counterfactual conspiracy theories develop differently as people start to challenge them.
00:27:48
Speaker
And she says that explanatory conspiracy theories will develop as people challenge the validity of this theory. They will continue to attack the official theory.
00:28:01
Speaker
and show that the official theory is inadequate to explain these events, which is why the explanatory conspiracy theory is the right one, whereas a counterfactual conspiracy theory, when challenged, will attack these accepted facts and then the evidence that's presented to try and prove the accepted version of facts, and then that usually ends up by attacking the evidence of that evidence and the evidence of that evidence and so on and so on.
00:28:31
Speaker
And so she goes back to more examples. Bertha's UFO theorist and then throws Holocaust deniers into the mix as well. And in all three of those cases, she says things that what characterizes them is basically a refusal to accept evidence that goes contrary to the counter facts that they're trying to put forwards.
00:28:55
Speaker
So she says that in the case of Bertha's, documents are dismissed as doctored or forged, experts trashed as participants in the conspiracy, normal standards and methods of proof are found inadequate, though quite lenient standards are used to support the counterfeit claims.
00:29:10
Speaker
And I would say there's at least some 9-11 truthers, I'm not going to get into the weeds of a particular 9-11 truth hypothesis, but there are at least some 9-11 truthers who are doing exactly the same thing as well. And yet her benchmark for an ECT
00:29:28
Speaker
is a 9-11 truth hypothesis and yet I would be able to show you that there are at least some truthers who dismiss documents as doctored or forged are going around trashing experts and claiming they're involved in their conspiracy and then using strange standards and methods of proof such as going well you know a jury would convict on this because yeah but it's a scientific standard here we're not using jury standards here
00:29:58
Speaker
So, once again, I'm just not seeing the distinction. Well, yes. She does, though, go on to talk about Holocaust deniers doing something similar in that she says, deniers dispute witness statements as deliberate lies or an inadvertent era, challenge historical documents as faked, tampered with, or insufficient as evidence. Physical evidence, such as the dimensions of piles of bodies and of gas chambers, is analyzed to support the deniers' contention. Documents and photographs are scrutinized to demonstrate forgery or tampering.
00:30:28
Speaker
Notably, evidence in support of denialists is not subject to such scrutiny and standards of proof. And that does seem to be one of the things she comes back to a few times, the idea that the conspiracy theorists don't subject their own side to nearly as much scrutiny as what they're attacking. And again, that's something we've seen all over the place in all sorts of conspiracy theories and does not seem to be unique to counterfactual conspiracy theories at all.
00:30:55
Speaker
and also notably is also a feature we find with defenders of official theories. When you take it there's a distinction between conspiracy theories and officials.
00:31:06
Speaker
Theories, holders of official theories will end up doing the same thing as well. So not only is that I don't think there's a distinction here between ECTs and CFCTs. I don't think the distinctions that she's putting forward are particularly useful for distinguishing between conspiracy theories and non-conspiracy theories.
00:31:25
Speaker
So she goes on to sort of show that this tactic of attacking sort of the evidence and then the evidence for the evidence and the evidence for the evidence for the evidence could be applied to literally any fact at all.
Challenging Evidence and Epistemic Vices
00:31:38
Speaker
She says something as basic as the cat is on the mat. If you were really determined to, you could just keep
00:31:45
Speaker
keep refusing to accept that fact and any evidence for that fact and possibly end up offering explanations for why people want you to believe that the cat is on the mat when in fact it isn't and so on and so forth and says that because this chain of reasoning could be applied to anything and
00:32:11
Speaker
doesn't really get you anywhere. She says, this leaves less room for reasoned exchange with counterfeit conspiracy theory proponents than with explanatory conspiracy theory proponents. While explanatory conspiracy theory proponents accept as factual, generally recognized facts, counterfeit conspiracy theory proponents do not within the domain of their topic.
00:32:32
Speaker
The overlap of accepted facts by explanatory conspiracy theories allows for genuine argument about explanatory adequacy of those facts. Counterfact conspiracy theory proponents have a typically present a set of counter facts at odds with generally accepted facts, though they accept similar facts on similar evidence and domains they do not contest. They cannot claim to be using different incommensurable standards of evidence, since they are not doing so across the board.
00:32:55
Speaker
And once again, I'm pretty sure lots of conspiracy theories do that, and it's not at all specific to once the proposing counter facts, or at least a whole lot of explanatory conspiracies, do present alternative facts as part of the theory, and then end up doing these exact same sorts of things.
00:33:20
Speaker
And then she rounds off by saying, because most of the facts that counterfeit conspiracy theory proponents accept outside the contested domain are the same as those held by ordinary believers, the conspiracy, sorry, the counterfeit conspiracy theory could not be part of an incommensurable worldview. Incommensurability would rule out overlap of this extent. And this is the point, Reiko.
00:33:41
Speaker
I think that the distinction she's trying to make really does evaporate here because she seems to be both saying, look, there's going to be some overlap between these theories. And there's also not going to be much overlap at all. And yet, I take it that if you are a birther, then once again, you agree that Barack Obama, whether or not he was legitimately, was elected to the presidency on a particular date and inaugurated on another date.
00:34:11
Speaker
and that seems to be a salient set of facts that people who are birthers and non-birthers are going to agree to. Unless of course you're a birther who believes that actually the entire election and inauguration was some kind of hologrammatic thing foisted upon the people. So
00:34:31
Speaker
I'm not quite sure where the incommensurability actually lies in this account. It seems to be it must be stuff which is salient to the conspiracy theory. But once it becomes salient to the conspiracy theory, you seem to be offering explanations as to why people believe one thing or another thing, at which point, once again, we're talking about ECTs and not CFCTs. So I'm just not seeing this distinction as being a live one at all.
00:35:00
Speaker
No. Well, furthering her argument, she leads from this to say, conspiracy theorising does not point to possession of an incommensurable worldview, but does suggest possession of defective epistemic character.
00:35:14
Speaker
She says, Epistemic virtues are traits of good cognitive character and include, for example, open-mindedness, dealing fairly and honestly with evidence, and using responsible or reliable methods of evidence gathering and reasoning. In their reasoning schema, we find dogmatic refusal to entertain counter-evidence by unfair and dishonest deployment of evidence and standards, fallacious and unreliable reasoning and close-mindedness. This is not irrationality, but epistemic vice. Now, I just want to note, it is interesting that you went traits and not trays.
00:35:43
Speaker
Yeah, what to some is there a is there a
00:35:48
Speaker
standard pronunciation. I've always seen trays. I think it entirely depends on the academic discipline you belong to. So when I was doing anthropology, it was always trays. When I was doing philosophy, it was always trays. And I just find it really, really fascinating that depending on who you're talking to, they pronounce the same word in a radically different way. Where's the T gone in trays, Josh? Where's the T? It's just gone away. It's disappeared.
00:36:17
Speaker
They don't want you to know where the tea has gone.
00:36:21
Speaker
You mean, hey, don't want you to know. You're blowing my mind. Stop it. Stop it, because we've actually reached the conclusion of this paper. The concluding paragraph reads as follows. Diagnosing a theory as a counterfeit theory goes a significant distance in suggesting the futility in engaging the theory as evidence-based, and that it presumptively supports assessing it and its proponents aesthetically defective.
00:36:48
Speaker
Epistemic evaluation might be beside the point, however, when dealing with counter-fact conspiracy theory proponents. Epistemic considerations relate to the way beliefs connect to evidence and at least indirectly truth or likelihood of truth. While counter-fact theorists purport truth, perhaps the kind of truth we should take them to mean is not factual but expressive.
00:37:05
Speaker
The theory is, quote-unquote, true because it expresses a deeply held worldview, a subjective set of connected associations, values and meanings. It's possible to take notice of the expressive truth of the theory without engaging in futile exchanges about facts and counter facts. The point of engaging such theorists is therapeutic, rather than epistemic.
00:37:23
Speaker
by engaging sincere counterfeit theorists on their underlying expressive truth, perhaps the roots of their views can be exposed, allowing them the opportunity to understand what they're expressing through their views, and allowing outsiders to understand the meanings and values roiling in the body politic. Which again, kind of sounds like it could apply to just about any conspiracy theory. It does seem like in many cases of explanatory conspiracy theories, people are sort of expressing their worldview
00:37:53
Speaker
So, yeah, I mean, my overall impression, I thought, I don't know, it felt like there was an interesting point or two in there, but I don't know that they were
00:38:05
Speaker
points that justified diagnosing an entirely new kind of conspiracy theory. The distinction between the explanatory and counterfeit conspiracy theories didn't really seem to work. It certainly feels like you could if you wanted
00:38:23
Speaker
fold one into the other. You could say that counterfeit conspiracy theories are sort of a kind of explanatory ones where this bit of explanation is, this bit of assertion is lumped in with the explanation. Or conversely, you could say that go the other way and say that the explanatory theories, they're just this kind of theory that happens to place more emphasis on the explanatory side of things. But in both cases, you end up just talking about conspiracy theories. The
00:38:52
Speaker
It's an interesting angle to look at them, but I don't see that it's actually doing what you think it's doing and carving off a whole new kind of conspiracy theory. It seems like the whole purpose of the exercise is what we've seen in a lot of the earlier papers of people trying to say,
00:39:13
Speaker
this kind of conspiracy theory, this kind, is the kind that you can actually disregard. And I do appreciate the fact that she at least concludes by saying this kind of conspiracy theory is probably not epistemically virtuous rather than straight out saying this kind of conspiracy theory is irrational to hold full stop. I think I thought that was good.
00:39:34
Speaker
But as we've seen in a lot of other cases, it doesn't really work out this attempt to try and mark out a particular kind of conspiracy theories as ones you can disregard or at least be suspicious of straight away. And it did though remind me a little bit
00:39:56
Speaker
I'm not sure if I might have even just been getting myself a little bit confused, but the idea of talking about epistemic vice and virtue rather than rationality or irrationality reminded me of some of the other conclusions people have come to. Possibly I'm just confusing myself with the pragmatic rejection business we talked about before. It sounded a little bit like she was saying you could pragmatically reject these ones even if you're not doing so in terms of pure rationality.
00:40:23
Speaker
Well you also admit it is it is of a feather with Sunstein and Vermeule and their idea of in quotes the crippled epistemology of conspiracy theorists and we'll see a similar kind of conclusion with the work of Kasam Qasim who will be talking about some at some point in the future who also takes an epistemic vice approach to diagnosing the problem of conspiracy theories so
00:40:53
Speaker
It is something which has come up in the past and it definitely will come up again in the future. My worry with this paper is that it seems she's going, look, some conspiracy theories simply disagree about conclusions.
Critique of Conspiracy Theory Typologies
00:41:08
Speaker
So we have some evidence and people then disagree as to how we get to the conclusion. Was it a conspiracy? Was it a non-conspiracy?
00:41:16
Speaker
Some conspiracy theories also add in, there's also disinformation out there, information which is designed to distract you from the right reasoning to get to the conclusion you ought to believe. And she's taking it that these conspiracy theories which invoke disinformation are separate from standard explanatory conspiracy theories, and also it's advised to suggest disinformation is out there in the world.
00:41:43
Speaker
And that seems like a problem because we know disinformation is out there in the world. We know it's being used to cover up conspiracies in the past. So going, look, it's advised to suggest that disinformation is out there kind of ignores the fact that it is out there. And this just seems like a very bad recommendation, given what we actually know about our political cultures.
00:42:10
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I can sort of understand why you might start down this track. I mean, the paper itself starts with Keeley's definition, a proposed explanation of some historical event or events in terms of the significant causal agency of conspirators, blah, blah, blah.
00:42:31
Speaker
I mean, yeah, it is an interesting point to say, well, hang on, an explanation of historical events. Well, what about your Holocaust deniers? They're not offering an alternate explanation for the Holocaust. They're saying that it didn't happen at all. And that does seem a little bit at odds with it, although possibly when you really look at it, I mean, the conspiracy theory side of it
00:42:58
Speaker
is explaining historical events, the history of why we have these beliefs that we have. So it's not as immediately obvious in the way that 9-11 stuff is where
00:43:13
Speaker
explaining the destruction of the World Trade Center towers. And that's kind of stated right up front, whereas the Holocaust deniers will be talking about the Holocaust never happened, and the historically explaining stuff is kind of implied.
00:43:29
Speaker
So yeah, I think maybe there's a difference of emphasis perhaps, or in the same way, or at least analogous to who was talking just recently about certain things pointing out salience rather than the whole
00:43:47
Speaker
benevolent versus malignant thing is pointing out salient conspiracy theories, but without actually being a definition of conspiracy theory and so on. I believe that was Lee in the pragmatic rejection. Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, we've been over too many of these papers now and they're starting to blur a little for me and I'm forgetting where I've heard things before in the past.
00:44:09
Speaker
It seemed possibly analogous to something like that. It's pointing out an interesting feature of them, but not an interesting feature that defines them, perhaps. And that is all I have to say.
00:44:21
Speaker
And that's all I have to say as well. So, yeah, I mean, we keep saying interesting and I'm going to say it again, an interesting paper. I don't really agree with kind of where a lot of it goes, but it did. It got me thinking, not wanting to sound patronizing or anything, it genuinely did. And I do appreciate a paper that keeps things short and to the point.
00:44:43
Speaker
Well, we won't have many of those in future. Oh, lovely. Anyway, so that's the end of this instalment of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre. We're going to say goodbye to you shortly, but if you're a patron, we're going to say hello again to you very, very shortly after that as we record our bonus episode. And this time we've got
00:45:06
Speaker
It's not a news roundup for once, but it is a listicle. What are we looking at? We are looking at 10 things you're not supposed to know. I should have made that into a 10 things I don't like about you joke or some kind of Heath Ledger reference. 10 things you're not supposed to know about how I hate you. I had no idea how this is going to work.
00:45:30
Speaker
No, no, probably wouldn't have. Yes, you didn't. But yes, if you want to know what these 10 things you're not supposed to know are, then stay tuned for the... 10 things you would hate to find out about. There we go. That's what it should have been. 10 things you'd hate to find out about. Something like that, yes. Save that for the title when you publish it.
00:45:50
Speaker
Well, I'll let it go for about that in 10 minutes time. Oh well. That's what these 10 things are. Only our patrons will know. And if you are a patron, good luck to you. But if you're not a patron, all is not lost because you can become one by going to Betrayon.
00:46:04
Speaker
and searching for the podcasters to guide to the conspiracy and signing yourself up. And if you do, that would be just peachy because it lets us pay for things like recording gear and podcast service hosting and all of that business. And Josh is going to need a new microphone, sir. I am going to need a new microphone, yes, in events totally irrelevant to the recording of this podcast. I am going to be changing jobs soon.
00:46:29
Speaker
And the microphone I have been using up until now is actually part of my work gear that I use for recording stuff at work. So I'll be handing that one back. And yes, grabbing us a new one. Josh has been showing a middle finger to the man by using his work equipment for his hobbies. Yep, probably shouldn't have said that. But what are they going to do, fire me?
00:46:57
Speaker
If you're not wanting to become a patron, well, I mean, that's just fine, really. You've listened this far, so bless you all the same. But patron and non-patron alike, right now, I think you're both going to simply hear me saying goodbye. I like the impression you said there are, you've just implied there are two patrons. You both, the two of you, about to have just goodbye. There are patrons and non-patrons both.
00:47:23
Speaker
And for me to go, I actually don't have a Marty Feldman reference to make, apart from Abby Normal? And remember, the truth is out there, but not quite where you think you left it.