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In conversation with Brian L. Keeley
27 Plays3 years ago
M talks with Brian L. Keeley (Pitzer College), and Josh wonders where M has got to...
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Absence of Dr. Dentith
00:00:09
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Dentith. Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. I am Josh Addison alone once again, because while I remain in Auckland, New Zealand, that wily Dr. M. Dentith
00:00:29
Speaker
is nowhere to be seen, at least around these parts. When last we heard, the good doctor was disappearing into a tunnel in North Head here in Auckland, and it seems like that tunnel might have gone a very, very long way indeed.
Interview with Brian L. Keeley
00:00:47
Speaker
I have received some correspondence from him in the form of an interview
00:00:53
Speaker
recorded with a friend of the show and subject of more than one episode, Brian L. Keeley. So, M is at least in a position to be recording and reaching out to other people, so that's nice.
00:01:10
Speaker
But I'm still not much closer to figuring out exactly what's going on here. So I think the best thing to do for our purposes is to simply play the interview. It's a good interview. And then close out on my thoughts and see where we go from there.
00:01:31
Speaker
Hello and welcome. It's the 23rd of June and I'm talking once again with Brian L. Keeley, philosopher and conspiracy theory theorist at Pitzer College, Claremont. Good afternoon to you, Brian. Hey, how's it going, Em? Oh, it's going well. I've been understandably a little bit bored the last few days, but I'm sure the boredom will pass. How are things in sunny L.A.? Ah, yeah, boring and hot.
00:01:58
Speaker
But that beats abject terror any day, I think. Well, precisely. Although I suppose in the era of COVID-19, it's not so much the terror that terrifies us, but just normal people going about their lives just being ignorant as to what they really should be doing. Yeah, like breathing. Yes. Who would have known?
00:02:21
Speaker
two years ago, that breathing would be the deadliest weapon a human being could actually use. It's very, very disturbing. In fact, we'll be talking about COVID-19 later on in our discussion, because we're going to talk a little bit about that whole mature conspiracy theory thing and both of our attitudes towards COVID-19 conspiracy theories.
Discussion on Literature and Misinterpretations
00:02:42
Speaker
But to engage in a bit of vain, glorious stuff with regard to the podcast first,
00:02:47
Speaker
Now, you've been listening to the Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre episodes. Do you think we're doing justice to the early literature on conspiracy theory in philosophy?
00:02:58
Speaker
So I will admit that I listened to it for a while and actually just went back today to see, because I knew I was behind in keeping up with it. And I see that the last one that I listened to was the Lee Basham Ubiquitous, what does that forget the actual title? Ubiquitous and Resilient maybe is the title, which was around a year ago or maybe a year ago, September. So I have fallen behind in my
00:03:28
Speaker
Uh, my podcast listening, uh, I think part of the problem is, is that, uh, whereas most of my podcasts are just kind of fun, entertaining things, uh, the, particularly the, uh, masterpiece theater has, it's, you know, it's, it's actual, like you do a really good job of actually summarizing things, including papers that I haven't had a chance to read yet. So, uh, and even the ones that I have read, they were a while ago. So.
00:03:54
Speaker
It's actually I actually have to kind of clear my decks and actually spend some time listening to it. I've got a road trip coming up soon. So I'm planning to catch up on a couple of them then because I can just kind of concentrate on them and
00:04:07
Speaker
and think through it. But yeah, I mean, I think you're doing a good job and definitely a service of kind of getting the basic frameworks out on the table. And I am thinking that if I, the next time I teach conspiracy theory stuff in the actual classroom, that it might be useful to
00:04:29
Speaker
when I assign these particular papers to also assign the you and Josh kind of giving your pracy of it and discussion of it and because it's nice that you guys often you know kind of add in a few points of debate and question and you know issues that you want to have with the paper and that could be a good
00:04:48
Speaker
starter to a conversation in a classroom or a seminar. Yes, I mean it's been quite interesting going back to the early literature and picking up on stuff which gets repeated later on, which kind of gets ignored for say a decade or so, or noting that people have consistently got people's positions wrong.
00:05:09
Speaker
for long periods of time, something which of course we've talked about a lot with respect to your work, with your 1999 paper of conspiracy theories, where kind of end up being the villain of the piece, despite the fact that you don't write a villainous paper in the first instance.
00:05:28
Speaker
Yeah, and I think actually, I mean, I think you guys are pretty generous in your interpretation that, you know, I have gotten misread, but I think the blame is as much to me as to anybody else. And I think, you know, as you point out, being one of the first people to kind of be talking about it meant that I hadn't quite figured out where the slipperiness would lie and therefore the places I had to be careful when it came to
00:05:54
Speaker
you know, being careful. And one of them is I think the point that you raised is this idea of, of beginning conspiracy theories or the, or the early days of a given conspiracy theory as versus its maturity, sometime on as it gets older, and it gets kind of
00:06:11
Speaker
uh, investigated or at least begins, people begin to investigate it. And I think I must've just kind of stumbled into that in part because I, you know, that original paper was on Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma city bombing. And that was a relatively new conspiracy theory at the time. And I was looking at some of the first
00:06:29
Speaker
kind of published conspiracy theories around it. But then the kind of standard conspiracy theories that we're kind of used to talking about like JFK or the JFK assassination or the moon landing hoax and the American intelligence agencies monitoring all transatlantic conversations, those were quite old conspiracy theories at the time that I was writing.
COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories' Evolution
00:06:56
Speaker
And even though I had examples of both new immature and mature conspiracy theories, I had not, I think, fully picked up on what work was being done by the age of the conspiracy theory in each. Or at least I was allowing myself to slip back and forth without noting that I was doing that, which led to confusion, I think.
00:07:16
Speaker
Yes, I mean the language thing I think is really quite fascinating here for the sheer fact that when you're laying down the groundwork as both you and Charles were doing with these initial forays into discussion about conspiracy theory theory,
00:07:32
Speaker
If you're not working with a pre-existing language, of course, you are having to kind of invent terms to try and describe the type of issues that you're trying to map. And of course, that first foray is going to be the kind of thing which in retrospect, you might go,
00:07:49
Speaker
Maybe I should have been slightly more cautious about these terms if I knew people were then going to follow up on this work and then write a lot of subsequent papers in the field. Yeah, and I certainly at the time didn't, you know, I...
00:08:05
Speaker
didn't think it would take off the way that it took off. I mean, I think I thought of it. I mean, I think I mentioned in an earlier discussion with you and maybe on the podcast of when I originally wrote it was somebody who was working in a completely different field of philosophy and was just looking for something that was publishable on its own and that hadn't been done before. And that's why I picked this particular topic.
00:08:30
Speaker
And little did I know that conspiracy theories themselves as well as the study of them how would blow up in years later I mean, I'm happy that it happened. But yeah, it did not
00:08:42
Speaker
did not predict it, and if I had done so, yeah, I think I would have been a little more careful in laying things out. Yes, I think this is actually something that Charles Pigton has also talked about, that his initial paper, Popper Revisited, was basically written to be performed or presented at a kind of graduate night, and then thought, oh, I can actually probably send this into a journal as well.
00:09:07
Speaker
And then, of course, it, like your paper, was the people that started the avalanche in our discipline. So let's talk about that original paper and where people have got you wrong or got you right. So let's start off with kind of the crux of conspiracy theories, which is the talk of these mature unwarranted conspiracy theories. What makes a conspiracy theory mature?
00:09:34
Speaker
I mean, I think it can't be a matter of, you know, the chronological age because a new theory is, you know, a quite old theory could not, you know, may not have been investigated very much because I think, you know, the level of maturity, the metric of maturity has to be something like the amount of energy that has been put into investigating it.
00:10:01
Speaker
something like the Woodward and Goldstein conspiracy theories about Nixon being behind Watergate, matured very quickly. I mean, you had two up and coming investigative reporters, you had inside sources, Deep Throat and others that were trying to get a story out. And even though it took, looking back on it, we sometimes forget how long that period of time was.
00:10:30
Speaker
you know roughly uh you know almost two years i think between the actual break-in and the resignation of uh richard nixon so it was a couple of years that it took for that story to really kind of come to fruition but to you know go from a an event to and then very soon after conspiracy theories about that event
00:10:52
Speaker
to the resignation of a president more or less admitting to the truth of the conspiracy theories in a matter of two years, that matured very quickly. Whereas I think there are probably other conspiracy theories that
00:11:11
Speaker
did not receive a lot of attention at the time that they came about or just there wasn't as much intense interest about them such that it took much longer for there to be investigations of them.
00:11:26
Speaker
It's that degree of investigation that is the maturing of a conspiracy theory as people start putting energy into determining whether or not it's got legs and what the anomalous data there is that needs to be pursued, what kinds of error data is starting to track things down. Think about some investigations around criminal conspiracies.
00:11:55
Speaker
There are criminal conspiracies that people have been working on that are unsolved cases, and some of them are cold cases for many, many years, decades even, that maybe just not as sufficient resources were put to them to begin with. And so they mature perhaps much less quickly.
00:12:15
Speaker
This just actually reminds me of a comment that Charles Pigton once made to David Cody at a talk at one of the New Zealand philosophy conferences, which was kind of drawing a contrast between Elvis's alive conspiracy theories and JFK was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald official theories going, well, look,
00:12:36
Speaker
There's been a lot of ink spilt on who killed JFK. It's been investigated in such rigorous detail that you really can say that we know what happened on that fateful day.
00:12:49
Speaker
And the Elvis thing, I mean, there are people who go around proposing that Elvis is still alive, but there's just nowhere near as much investigation into those conspiracy theories. And in part, that's because the death of a president is incredibly important.
00:13:06
Speaker
whilst the death of Elvis was really important to his fans, but really didn't mean much for world history and indeed politics,
Political Influence on COVID-19 Narratives
00:13:14
Speaker
which of course is usually the most important thing that happens within people's lives. And so that theory has remained largely uninvestigated, despite the fact that people point to, but there are all these books, case of yes, but look at the mountain of books about who killed JFK.
00:13:32
Speaker
No, that's definitely true. So yes, I think you're right that maturity with respect to an unwarranted conspiracy theory kind of persisting in public discourse can't just be about how long it is. And I mean, this is where I think we bring in the COVID-19 conspiracy theories because COVID-19 has really only been with us for about a year and a half now.
00:13:57
Speaker
And yet I would say that most of the conspiracy theory is about its origin, purpose, and transmission. The idea that it's not of zoonotic origin, it is a bioweapon being put forward by some malevolent government, and its purpose is bringing about a new world
00:14:15
Speaker
order, those theories matured very quickly, possibly within weeks or months of them appearing on online. It kind of seems odd to refer to a conspiracy theory, which seems fresh in the sense of it being completely brand new as something being mature, i.e. the kind of thing that we can look at with justified suspicion. Although, because, I mean, it actually has some interesting, I mean, the
00:14:43
Speaker
There's all sorts of interesting features of it that I think, and there's things that we've talked about and you've talked about on the podcast as well, of this idea that the way in which this particular conspiracy theory got folded in with others, right? I mean, people connecting it to things around 5G and cell towers and things like that. And people have even kind of made connections to Bill Gates, right? So there are aspects of it that even though in some sense it was a new historical phenomenon,
00:15:12
Speaker
part of conspiracy theories immediately made connections to earlier standing conspiracy theories. So if you already had your suspicions about Bill Gates or you already had your suspicions about George Soros, that it kind of immediately got folded into those. So in those senses,
00:15:30
Speaker
And those aspects of it, at least, it takes on a level of maturity because it's kind of, it becomes a piece of a larger conspiracy that has already gotten lots of investigation. Other aspects of it, I mean, things having to do with the
00:15:51
Speaker
the potential stories about whether it was accidentally released or on purpose released by one government or another. Some of those aspects I thought are relatively new and also ones in which I think the
00:16:08
Speaker
you know, there is still a level of immaturity about it that we just can't say for certain. I mean, I'm actually kind of pleased with myself that there was an interview that I did with a podcast, actually was a radio show early on, I think it probably would have been around April of 2020. So fairly early in the
00:16:32
Speaker
in the thing. And when we were talking about conspiracy theories having to do with it, and one of the things I said at the time was, you know, the conspiracy theories about its origin are still relatively immature, or, you know, there's lots of things that we at that point didn't know. And there are still things that we would like to know. And
00:16:52
Speaker
I think this is one of the reasons why we've seen the kind of recent resurgence in some sense of even at the official level with, you know, with President Biden in the U.S. calling on the intelligence services to to reinvestigate or to to look back through their intelligence to see whether we can, you know, find anything now about the origins of it that we maybe missed in the midst of just trying to deal with it.
00:17:16
Speaker
Because in some sense, it doesn't matter where it comes from. If you've got a virus that's out in the environment that's doing bad things, your first order of businesses try to get the virus under control and then only later worry about like, where did this come from? How do we stop the next one? And that's going to require things like figuring out, well, where did it come from? How did it get into the environment? What was its original source? It seems like now we've gotten to the point where we're
00:17:45
Speaker
returning to that seems to be an issue that at least some people want to reconsider. And I think part of it is because of the relative immaturity of that aspect of the story. Although I feel that it's going to mature very quickly in the next year, for sure, as we start throwing resources at it in a more concentrated way. And I think part of it also is just
00:18:11
Speaker
to, I mean, at least in the US context, the shift from one presidency to another, which had very different kind of attitudes towards both the potential sources of it and what it meant for their presidency. There's a way in which just the sheer handing off of
00:18:30
Speaker
from one presidency to another means that okay at least a different kind of lens is going to be placed on a different kind of investigation is going to be taken about just simply because you know the new administration in some sense might want to blame the previous administration for dropping the ball whereas the previous administration would want to make sure that everything looked good for them.
00:18:54
Speaker
So, you know, at least then we can kind of at least get a new kind of investigation or an investigation with new elements to it that will help with the maturity of the overall things, such that say in a year's time from now, we can say, well, you know, we had the, the.
00:19:09
Speaker
the Trump administration had its look at the origins and then we had the Biden administration's look at its look at the origins. These are two very different approaches. Certainly they had different things that they wanted to be true. So if there's any motivated belief going on here, they're at least countervailing motivated beliefs such that whatever comes out as a result of the two investigations or the two periods of investigation
00:19:36
Speaker
know, are going to add to the general maturity of how we should feel about it and whatever answers they come up with. And indeed this this actually kind of reminds me of going back to 2003 and the whole weapons of mass destruction thing because it seems that often what motivates investigations is either an epistemic challenge
00:19:58
Speaker
or a political situation. So as you point out, if you're going from the Trump regime to the Biden administration, then you've got very different political goals with how you're dealing with a pandemic within your nation state.
00:20:16
Speaker
The Trump administration wanted to blame China for the entire state of what was going on in the US. The Biden administration has been much more interested, at least initially, with, oh, we've got to mop up the missiles left behind by the last administration. And now we're going to look at the side question, which wasn't so important at the beginning of the pandemic, where we should be dealing with people being sick. Now we're going to look at how did we get to the point where people are being sick.
00:20:46
Speaker
And what's kind of interesting in the way that these investigations kind of start or they get restarted with respect to the origin conspiracy theories about COVID-19 is the way in which a new data point can suddenly spur new investigation. So it seems that what really spurred the Biden administration to go hard on the lab leak hypothesis about the origin of COVID-19
00:21:13
Speaker
was because a biologist by the name of David Baltimore wrote a report saying, oh look, there's the smoking gun in the genome of the virus, which looks like it's actually been to some degree engineered through a gain of function thing, which means it must have come from a lab. That intelligence then got to the US. The US intelligence establishment then went, oh, we've got to do investigation into this.
00:21:42
Speaker
And then about a week later, the biologist in question then went, oh, I kind of misspoke. It's not really a smoking gun per se, because it turns out that this region of the virus's genome, which I'm taking to be a really, really big thing,
00:21:59
Speaker
Actually, that's found a loss of viruses naturally anyway. So you probably shouldn't take so much from what I've said there. And that kind of made the lab leak hypothesis go from being relatively implausible, given what we knew, to suddenly something which was a political football. And then it's gone back to where it was, say about a year ago. Yeah, although I don't know, did you see there is a piece recently in the Atlantic? I'm actually was gonna
00:22:29
Speaker
to look it up. Terry Gross on our National Public Radio interviewed the author taking it's basically investigative journalist taking a deep dive into the origin story and
00:22:47
Speaker
brings up the stuff about Baltimore, but also this, I mean, it's a much, it's actually a much more interesting story in terms of geopolitics as well as biology of kind of figuring out like, you know, just even the question of like, how would you tell? It's not like, it's not like, you know, somebody who creates a virus is gonna sign it, you know, the way they might sign a painting, trying to figure out exactly what you would look for in order to,
00:23:17
Speaker
to find the telltale signs of a human origin to it. Part of it goes back to my own interest in this
00:23:31
Speaker
topic of conspiracy theories comes out of an interest in philosophy of science. And one of the things that I think is really interesting about the COVID-19 story, whatever that story is going to be, it's ultimately going to be a scientific story, or at least in part a scientific story. It's also going to be in part a political story.
00:23:50
Speaker
But you run into all the problems that you have. People have been trying to figure out the origins of viruses for quite a while and figuring out what animals do they come from, what leads them to jump. We used to talk about the species barrier. We don't talk about that so much anymore just because it turns out not to be as clear of a concept as one might have thought.
00:24:21
Speaker
I mean, you run into all the problems you run in the sciences in general and understanding how sciences go about establishing the claims that they have. So it kind of inherits all the problems of philosophy of science and then kind of adds an extra layer of politics on top of it just to make it more fun. So that's why I think it's a much more interesting story than
00:24:52
Speaker
than some of the other conspiracy theories that we might have.
00:24:56
Speaker
don't have anything to do with science at all or aren't really scientific stories at all. And also an interesting story for the sheer fact that I think the writer of the initial Vanity Fair piece on the David Baltimore allegations of the smoking gun was also one of the writers who pushed hard for Iraq having those weapons of mass destruction back in 2003. So there's also this worry that there are certain vested interests who want to
00:25:25
Speaker
be hawkish about overseas activities, so then justify a kind of imperial response from the US. So as you say, the politics here becomes really quite fascinating.
00:25:40
Speaker
Yeah, and there was also, there was a reporter, I guess a letter that came out right around the same time, I think it's the original Baltimore piece that you were just mentioning, saying that, you know, hey, this, maybe it was even in some sense a reaction to Baltimore's, you know,
00:25:57
Speaker
Soundbite that he had about it saying that you know, hey, there's you know, there's no chance that this you know This is more than likely, you know We're a bunch of scientists and we can tell you it had it had it a biological source It was not man-made and oh by the way, we you know, and we're just a group
00:26:14
Speaker
a group of uninterested scientists who just want to get this out on the table. And then it turns out that some of the people, and particularly the person that was most behind getting this letter written and signed in the first place, turned out to have some conflicts of interest, had actually funded some of the laboratory in Wuhan that had been
00:26:40
Speaker
fingered as a potential source. The original letter did not make clear those connections. You get back to some of the standard things that we often see around conspiracy theories of various levels of self-interest and lack of transparency that
00:26:59
Speaker
again, make the story a little more complicated than it seemed on the surface. Yes, I mean, I think one of the things which is going to be interesting about the COVID-19 pandemic and the conspiracy theories around it is that at the moment when you're trying to both combat a virus
00:27:18
Speaker
and also deal with various origin transmission and purpose theories about COVID-19. There's a lot of information which is very hard to get to the bottom of now which will make the study of COVID-19 much more interesting in say 10 years time where hopefully the pandemic is
00:27:37
Speaker
is well gone, or we're used to living in a COVID being like a seasonal cold thing. But when you're in the middle of a pandemic, fighting on multiple fronts, not a very good idea. Now moving away from the terror of the virus to the other kind of central point of your 1999 paper, which is after you talk about the problem of mature unwarranted conspiracy theories, you then move on to talking about the kind of
00:28:07
Speaker
pervasive skepticism that continued belief in these mature conspiracy theories can lead to. And it seems that a lot of the writers on conspiracy theory who followed you kind of took it that you were advocating that belief in conspiracy theories generally leads to this kind of pervasive skepticism and thus that is a reason to reject belief in conspiracy theories.
00:28:34
Speaker
But that isn't a fair portrayal of your view, is it?
Public Trust and Disinformation Campaigns
00:28:38
Speaker
No. And oh, by the way, just to throw this in, you're right, it was actually the Vanity Fair piece by Catherine Eben that I was thinking of.
00:28:45
Speaker
Uh, that just came out a couple of, uh, about two weeks ago, I think. So, or I think it's e-ban, but I just didn't want to lose that thought. So yeah, this is a topic that I'm, I'm currently trying to think through. As you point out, it's one of the, it's one of the other areas of contention around my paper, this idea of what's come to be known as the public trust argument or.
00:29:08
Speaker
the this idea that we shouldn't that that it's a knock against conspiracy theories and a reason for not believing in them because if you believed in them it would erode our public trust right that they are kind of a you know this is the idea of conspiracy theories as being kind of a cancer in a society by causing people to be
00:29:37
Speaker
playing around with conspiracy theories instead of trusting the authorities that they ought to be trusting. That was never the argument that I thought I was making in the original paper. I thought I was making the argument that was kind of the other way around, which is that in many ways, the only way that you can take certain conspiracy theories seriously, particularly certain mature conspiracy theories seriously,
00:30:02
Speaker
is if you had a pre-existing lack of trust, that it kind of presupposed a level of distrust, not that it would necessarily lead to distrust, but that it's in some sense, yeah, you have to have a high degree of distrust to take it seriously, often because of the amount of work that must have been put into it. People have looked at this,
00:30:32
Speaker
Not found evidence in favor of the conspiracy and so the only way you can hold on to that conspiracy or take it really seriously is if you just Discount all of that stuff that's been done like everybody's been lying up to this point or everybody's been doing a shoddy job or perhaps They had conflicts of interest and and they just didn't want us to know the truth
00:30:54
Speaker
And when you think about, I mean, I thought about cases of things like the moon landing hoax, the number of people that would have to be in on that particular conspiracy, and with relatively little incentive to go ahead with the hoax, if it is indeed a hoax, seems to, you know,
00:31:21
Speaker
involve a pretty negative view of the people that are involved, that they would be so willing to lie so easily. And it's like, okay, that requires a pretty significant degree of public distrust.
00:31:37
Speaker
The ironic thing is that even though that wasn't the argument, the public trust argument is not the one I thought I was making originally. These days I actually find myself kind of being more interested in the argument that I was accused of holding and maybe find it a little more plausible than I did then.
00:31:54
Speaker
And that's the idea of the use of conspiracy theories as disinformation campaigns or as parts of disinformation campaigns, that at least we have some reason to believe that conspiracy theories as a phenomenon in the West may be in a case where it's being promoted by parties that wish to undermine the public trust, that there's
00:32:20
Speaker
there's a general sense that if you can get people really taking conspiracy theories seriously, then they aren't gonna trust people on other things. For instance, it might be good for certain people in the world that the US not vaccinate itself against the new virus. So if you can do something that kind of generates distrust about vaccines, then you can make sure that the US is gonna be kind of held back
00:32:51
Speaker
by its lack of vaccination. So, I mean, I think there's a role of conspiracy theories in public trust. There's clearly a connection between the two. And one of the things that I'm kind of actively looking at these days is kind of revisiting that argument and saying, you know, basically that wasn't the argument that I thought I was making before. And I think there's a reason why in 1999, it probably wasn't necessarily an argument
00:33:19
Speaker
That was very sound in the sense that that there weren't forces perhaps pursuing a disinformation project although that's not completely clear in the KGB and the and the CIA were kind of had combating you know we're fighting on the stage of misinformation for you know quite a long time during the cold war.
00:33:42
Speaker
So maybe it's naive to think that this is a relatively new phenomenon, but that nonetheless that it seems to be something that's kind of worth looking into to see what is the role that conspiracy theories play on the public trust and what are the implications of that.
00:33:59
Speaker
I mean certainly we saw with the Trump administration the labeling practice of calling information the president didn't like as fake news was very much a mis or disinformation campaign coming out of the White House to either distract people from news which was bad or to undermine trust in traditional sources and make people trust say the president and his team.
00:34:23
Speaker
So yes, there is obviously something about the labelling practice of calling something a conspiracy theory, which can then lead to a pervasive erosion of trust over time. But I was also thinking, going back to the Elvis example,
00:34:41
Speaker
One of the interesting things, say, about someone who sincerely believes that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone and that there was a coterie of people on the grassy knoll made up of the FBI, the CIA, Cuban rebels, Russian mafia and the like, all shooting at JFK at the same time to get their, to get their bulletin. This is the kind of person who believes that actually Elvis Presley is still alive and is recording music to this day.
00:35:11
Speaker
is that you could go, well look, given the amount of investigation that's gone into the JFK assassination, if you believe that it wasn't Lee Harvey Oswald or it was Lee Harvey Oswald and all these other people, there's a whole bunch of other things that you've got to kind of give up to be able to maintain that belief.
00:35:33
Speaker
Well conversely with the Elvis is alive conspiracy theories which have not been investigated to the same extent you can believe that without actually giving up much else about the world because all you're doing is going well I just believe he's alive and recording music
00:35:49
Speaker
It doesn't actually say anything about politics or world history or governments being complicit in covering these things up over time. It's just one man faked his death probably with the help of his family and then went on to lead a new life. So the thing that
00:36:08
Speaker
the Elvis theory isn't mature in the same way that various JFK conspiracy theories are, means that you have different levels of skepticism about things generally in the world around you. Yeah, I think there might be also kind of what you're pointing to is this kind of connection between skepticism in general and the maturity, right? That the
00:36:34
Speaker
If the metric of maturity has to do with the degree of effort that's put into the investigation, that is going to mean that less mature theories just are just connected to the rest of the epistemic network far less or far more tenuously. There's less going on there and therefore it's much more compartmentalized.
00:37:01
Speaker
I mean, again, thinking back to in the case of science, right, there are certain counterfactual claims that have been, you know, investigated. And, you know, I mean, I think here of somebody like Lakatos, you know, with this idea that, you know, that different ideas that different ideas and science, different claims and science have a different degree of centrality to them. Right.
00:37:27
Speaker
and that some, you know, if you want to call the law of gravity into question, right, that's, you know, if that were to be false, right, or the implications, the downstream implications of the falsehood of that claim of the law of gravity would be monumental, right? It means so much of science would have to be rewritten if it turned out that that was a
00:37:51
Speaker
you know, was false, which is why Einstein was so monumental, right? It's just like, you know, when you mess with things that fundamental, right, it means significant revolutions in science that go out and, you know, affect many, many things. Whereas if you are somebody who thinks that the claim that, say, stress causes ulcers, it may be false, and that instead it's being caused by a microorganism, all right, that area, that kind of claim is much less central.
00:38:21
Speaker
You would have to change certain ideas about the immune system perhaps and about the digestive system, but unlike the law of gravity, that's a much more constrained set of claims and a much more constrained set of connected claims.
00:38:40
Speaker
such that change that will get you a Nobel Prize, but you're not going to be picked as the most important scientist of a century the way that Einstein was.
00:38:53
Speaker
Falsifying that claim is important, but not nearly as connected to so many other things and therefore requiring a kind of a revolution. And I think the same sort of thing can be said for different conspiracy theories, and often maturity is related to that.
00:39:11
Speaker
As you say, not much is going to follow from discovering that Elvis Presley is actually alive or at least lived longer. Instead, we worry about what, if JFK was assassinated in a different way,
00:39:27
Speaker
that might have massive impacts on geopolitics.
Philosophical Implications of Conspiracy Theories
00:39:30
Speaker
Yes, I think there is something really quite interesting about the way that relative maturity affects relative skepticism, if we're going to go down this particular path.
00:39:43
Speaker
We've kind of dealt in the past here with 1999 and your paper, although you've talked about how you're now looking as to how you're going to take those arguments from 1999, the way that people have looked at your arguments from 1999, and maybe rehabilitate yourself to a certain extent.
00:40:05
Speaker
in the literature by reframing this debate around the kind of misinformation, disinformation thing. And of course, this has all been a discussion in social epistemology, the way that as social beings active in communities, our knowledge is very much dependent on learning things from other people and transferring that information along. But there's also a question as to what other avenues in philosophy can
00:40:35
Speaker
the interest in conspiracy theory actually lead to so there are obvious connections with epistemology given we're talking about knowledge claims but what other connections can we make in philosophy to say things like ethics or metaphysics do you think yeah this is i mean something i've been thinking about recently and i i'm also kind of curious to to hear what you have to say about it as well uh but yeah as you say the kind of the source of
00:41:03
Speaker
of thinking about conspiracy theory, or conspiracy theory theory, at least within the context of philosophy, has come out of epistemology. And I think this has a lot to do with this idea that both Charles and I kind of pushed on early is this, focusing on the theory aspect of conspiracy theory. Noting that it's not just a way of speaking, but there really is something theoretical, explanatory,
00:41:33
Speaker
in the kinds of conspiracy theories that we are interested in. And so that, you know, and I mentioned earlier, you know, that I was coming at this from a perspective as a philosopher of science. So I was interested in kind of scientific explanations and some of the stuff that I've written about conspiracy theories afterwards kind of compared scientific explanations and religious explanations with conspiratorial explanations and just
00:41:56
Speaker
you know, kind of focus on that explanatory and knowledge and understanding aspect of conspiracy theories. But now that, you know, more and more people are getting interested in conspiracy theories more generally, you know, like, as we know, all these people outside of philosophy, the political scientist and the economist and the cultural theorist and historians and the, you know, the
00:42:19
Speaker
The kind of this idea that conspiracy theory theory isn't just philosophy anymore it's it's now lots of different psychologists and neuroscientists and all these different people involved that I think with that comes this idea of like oh who else in philosophy may want to kind of get in on thinking about conspiracy theories and
00:42:43
Speaker
you know, in, at least in my, the, when I think of, you know, uh, philosophy more generally, or when I'm giving, you know, talking to my intro philosophy students, uh, in, you know, in my first year seminars or whatever, you know, I kind of, you know, tell the story of like, there's kind of three main branches of, of philosophy. There's metaphysics, you know, what is there, what exists, what sorts of things are in the universe and, and you know, what's our ontology? What are the things that,
00:43:13
Speaker
are there to talk about. And that's metaphysics. And then the second area is epistemology, which is like, well, what can we know about those things? What knowledge can we have? How do we titrate our level of belief to any particular claim? How to think about the difference between truth and fiction and those sorts of things. And then the third area,
00:43:37
Speaker
So you got metaphysics, you got epistemology. And the third area is kind of the more general area of value theory of what's good, what's beautiful. And that's where you get your ethics. That's where you get your aesthetics, your judgments of good and bad, right and wrong, those sorts of things. And obviously all three of these are connected, but they kind of constitute the three kind of big areas of philosophy.
00:44:05
Speaker
So if the epistemic is the original source of conspiracy theory, what is there for metaphysics and value theory to do? And this is, like I said, something I've been thinking about for a while. I mean, one of the metaphysical issues that I think that comes up is just getting our heads around exactly, you know,
00:44:28
Speaker
What sort of a phenomenon is a conspiracy? It's a social phenomenon. It has certain features. It seems to require more than one person, more than one agent. But as one of the things that I've been interested in when thinking about religious explanation is,
00:44:48
Speaker
If God does it on his own, and we're monotheists, then is that by its very nature something which then can't be conspiratorial? Because it's being done by—it's the ultimate lone gunman, if God does it by himself.
00:45:10
Speaker
Well, that's the thing, right? First of all, it forces you to think, thinking about conspiracies and the relationship to religion raises these kinds of metaphysical questions of like, well, is that the right way to think about God? Would that problem go away if you had a non-monotheistic view of God, or if even your monotheism involved these different three persons in one God kind of idea?
00:45:39
Speaker
I mean, I think, you know, part of it is like, okay, well, what is really, you know, what are the essential aspects of a or central elements of a conspiracy? Is it that it be done by one? Or is there something else about it? You know, is the secrecy component the more important component? Is the nefariousness of it the more important thing?
00:45:58
Speaker
Right. And so getting at the kind of metaphysics of what sort of a thing is a conspiracy? What are its features? You know, these are, I think, some kind of interesting metaphysical questions that come up and the relationship, you know, what kinds of beings are required to participate in the conspiracy, right? How much foreknowledge do you have? How much sentience do you need to have? And so forth. So
00:46:25
Speaker
getting clear about these metaphysical issues I think are interesting and even these questions about whether conspiracies are really about explanations at all, right? Because a number of people who've critiqued work in the philosophy of conspiracy theories kind of really push on this idea that, you know, yeah, Charles Pignan and I started out with this idea that it's all about explanation, that we really concentrated on the theory aspect of conspiracy theory.
00:46:51
Speaker
But maybe it's a different kind of a speech act altogether, right? It really isn't an attempt to explain anything. Maybe it's a signal of tribe membership, right? It's more when somebody participates in conspiracy theories or at least an important segment of people who perhaps participate in conspiracy theories aren't really in it for the explanations and knowledge claims at all. They're thinking of it as
00:47:15
Speaker
as being a way of identifying who they are and who they are whose team they're on whose tribe they're in and so forth that maybe you know charles and i have gotten the wrong into the stick from the very beginning because metaphysically we took conspiracy theories to be ultimately.
00:47:33
Speaker
Something epistemic and explanatory maybe it ought to be in a different category altogether you know should really been philosophy of language that we should have been doing or calling upon not not human and works of epistemology. And I think there's also all sorts of interesting obviously interesting things to be thought of in terms of the epistemic realm right this idea of.
00:47:55
Speaker
of conspiracy theories as problems. Right. Is is there a problem associated conspiracy theories the public trust story that we were just talking about being one aspect of it. But as we've seen in other cases as well.
00:48:09
Speaker
There was a famous paper on the ethics of belief, this idea that there is a normative component to holding certain beliefs. It isn't that epistemic considerations are completely divorced from ethics. What you believe can have important impacts. If you are somebody who believes that the ship that you own is seaworthy,
00:48:36
Speaker
And in fact, it isn't seaworthy and you send a group of sailors out to their death because you had the wrong belief, right? There might be ethical implications to that that maybe I ought to have investigated more to find out whether that belief was actually a good belief that, you know, maybe or maybe I was acting through prejudice and so forth.
00:48:59
Speaker
that I think we see this especially in the cases of the things revolving around people like Alex Jones and the Sandy Hook shootings where you have somebody who is saying, hey, I'm just investigating conspiracy theory that maybe there were crisis actors and no children were actually hurt.
00:49:18
Speaker
There are all sorts of ethical issues come up of, well, okay, but if you're wrong, you're causing a great amount of pain to somebody who's already experienced a great amount of pain. They've lost a child in a shooting, and now you're calling into question whether that child ever even existed. And you're forcing somebody to, or you're trying to get them to produce a death certificate to prove that their child was actually killed. There's all sorts of kind of moral implications of like, well, yes, you're asking a question.
00:49:48
Speaker
But there's an ethical dimension, a normative dimension to the questions that you're asking, right? If you ask questions in an inappropriate way or in an inappropriate context, that may be doing more harm than good that you're not showing sufficient humility in your question asking.
00:50:05
Speaker
So yeah, I'm just kind of interested in these other ways in which conspiracy theories intersect with philosophy that aren't just about epistemology, just aren't about them being theories. And kind of curious also just to hear what you think of like other aspects of philosophy that should be brought in or could be brought in when thinking about this phenomenon that we've been thinking about for the last decade or so.
00:50:29
Speaker
Yes, I mean, as we've seen with say the work of Pat Stokes, which has kind of looked at the ethical dimension of what it's like to be a particularist around conspiracy theory and doing the whole look.
00:50:41
Speaker
There are consequences to the just asking questions mode, which is that you're kind of sometimes actually covertly making assertions about people doing unethical acts. There probably is a kind of norm that says maybe you shouldn't.
00:51:00
Speaker
engage in those kind of speech acts without actually having enough evidence. It's not enough to go, I'm just asking questions. You kind of need overwhelming evidence before that licenses making claims of, I think maybe Prince Charles was responsible for the death of Princess Diana. If you want to make that claim, you should have really good evidence rather than just mere suspicion.
00:51:26
Speaker
Now of course the issue as people have pointed out with Stokes' position is that there actually there are certain people in the world who are allowed to make those allegations. Police officers when they're investigating crimes are allowed to merely suspect that maybe you murdered your wife and we're going to bring you in for questioning now.
00:51:46
Speaker
And maybe the courts then exist to kind of mitigate that by giving you name suppression during the investigation. But there's still a serious allegation being made against you. But we take it that these people are licensed in just the right way. So yeah, I mean, there are there are kind of interesting issues around the ethics of belief there and what kind of licenses and doesn't license allegations.
00:52:08
Speaker
I mean, on the metaphysics part, I think what's kind of interesting about all of the work in philosophy, I'll say all of it, probably most of the work in the philosophy on conspiracy theory, is a lot of it starts with definitions. So a lot of it seems to start with a little bit of conceptual analysis, which we typically take to be kind of a form of an analytic metaphysics, where we're defining our term to go and look by conspiracy theory, we mean the following.
00:52:36
Speaker
So even though we're doing epistemology, we're doing a bit of metaphysics first in order to then go, look, if we accept the following definition, do we take it this is the metaphysical state of affairs, then the following epistemic analysis is naturally the consequence of this thing. And of course, Martin Orr and I, when we did our
00:52:59
Speaker
did, wrote our paper, Secrecy and Conspiracy. We kind of did a metaphysical analysis of what is the secrecy component of conspiracy, because we just typically take it that a conspiracy is two or more people working in secret towards some end. But there actually had been very little discussion as to, but what do we mean by working in secret here, keeping secrets from home?
00:53:24
Speaker
How many people? How long do we keep the secret for? If something is a kind of open secret, do we still consider it to be conspiratorial? So there is some work to be looked at with kind of
Art Project on Moon Landing Hoax
00:53:40
Speaker
fleshing out that definition of what both a conspiracy is, which I think most people are going to say are things that do occur within the world. Although I sometimes think that some of the generalist analyses of belief in conspiracy theories are almost committed to a metaphysical view of the world where conspiracies never happen at all, given the way that they talk about conspiracy theories and this really, really pejorative gloss.
00:54:07
Speaker
But the question is to what conspiracy theories are. I think that's a really, really interesting notion there.
00:54:17
Speaker
To kind of move beyond that, we talk about the value theory generally stuff. So I think there's probably some really interesting work to be done in the aesthetics of conspiracy theory with their kind of their presentation, the way that they work, what makes them pleasing, what makes certain conspiracy theories the kind of thing that people will pick up and move with.
00:54:43
Speaker
versus the kind of conspiracy theories that people kind of glance at and go, no, I'm not going to buy that for a dollar at all. And I know that there's there are some people outside of the domain of philosophy who are looking at aesthetic notions of conspiracy theory. I'm
00:55:03
Speaker
kind of tangentially involved in an art project that's going on in Lund in Sweden at the moment where they did a exhibit of moon landing hoax memorabilia and photos and they then had a guidebook associated with the exhibition and I wrote a short piece on that about
00:55:26
Speaker
about space conspiracy theories, their history, and where they come from, which allowed me to then do a long diatribe about the film Capricorn 1, which is often taken to be the perfect example of why the moon landing conspiracy theories became big again, was when we saw a fake faking of a Mars landing, and people went,
00:55:52
Speaker
that looks at the moon landing so we can think that in a studio so yeah there's a whole bunch of aesthetic stuff which i think would be really interesting to get into as well no no i think it's also interesting it's you know there's the i mean the the
00:56:10
Speaker
precursor to a lot of our current interests in conspiracy theories goes back to the idea of urban legends. People don't talk about this urban legends as much now. That was a big thing in the 80s and the 90s, even though some of the conspiracy theories that we talk about now actually just are urban legends, just kind of dressed up in a new way. But
00:56:34
Speaker
But urban legends were a big thing when Dawkins originally proposed his idea of the meme, right? And the original idea of the meme is coming out of evolutionary theory and then thinking about, you know, just as there are things which make genes adaptive, such that a gene will, you know,
00:56:55
Speaker
there's the phenotypic traits that are associated with a gene are going to be the things that are going to lead to its being replicated in a situation of natural selection. His idea, well, you know, the same thing happens in the cultural world, except now we're going to talk about memes and not genes. But there's always going to be, you know, what is it that makes a particular meme catchy, right? You know, what makes an earworm
00:57:19
Speaker
an earworm in songs, a nice hook or having a beat. It might not even be something that you like, but yes, can't get it out of your head. Or the same thing, you may not actually like a particular meme, but you kinda can't stop yourself from repeating it to somebody and telling them about all this horrible thing I heard and then now it's in their head and they're gonna pass it on to somebody else.
00:57:45
Speaker
And this seems like an area, at least when people were talking about memes and urban legends, there was a lot of kind of conscious thought about the aesthetic components, right? Because that's, you know, why is it that certain memes are going to be replicated? Well, they must have some rhetorical or aesthetic value that people are picking up on. And then that means, you know, they're gonna, you know, they're gonna replicate them. But I think similar sorts of things can be said about and asked about conspiracy theories. I think that's interesting.
00:58:16
Speaker
you know, what makes a particular conspiracy theory catch on and be the sort of thing that kind of gets legs as it were.
00:58:23
Speaker
And of course, the wonderful thing about talk about urban legends actually allows us to then talk about the kind of recurrent nature of these things. So we talked about how many COVID-19 conspiracy theories actually end up either being the resurgence of say yellow peril conspiracy theory, or an adaptation of the existing 5G conspiracy theories that were around for a long time.
00:58:50
Speaker
say, around for a few years before the pandemic occurred. And of course what's interesting about urban legends is that they are effectively just modern forms of folklore. They're the contemporary form of a traditional tale. I used to, when I used to teach the Critical Thinking course at the University of Auckland, we do an entire section on urban legends.
00:59:14
Speaker
and how urban legends kind of function as a way of giving moral messages. So when you have the urban legend of the babysitter who's left at home, and there's a call that comes from within the house, and you go, well, look, this is the case of if you trust your children with a complete stranger, these things are going to happen.
00:59:38
Speaker
in the same respect, when you had the urban legends about children playing in sand pits and then accidentally stabbing themselves with a heroin needle leading to an overdose, that was a story that never occurred. No one's ever been able to track down a case where that actually happened. But the story functions as a way of telling people, look, investigate the environment your children are going to be playing in. They're just these recurrent
01:00:06
Speaker
or just the superiority of private playpits to public ones. Well, yes, that too. Although, admittedly, if you're rich enough, you also might have heroin needles in your child's playpit as well. That's true.
01:00:23
Speaker
Yeah, I think one of the places where this comes up recently is the recent conspiracy theories around the blue lasers that are causing wildfires.
01:00:36
Speaker
And I think there has to be something to the fact that it's not just blue lasers, but they're Jewish blue lasers. The Jewishness has nothing to do with the story, but I think it has everything to do with its replication. The fact that the story is put in terms of Jewish blue lasers, then suddenly people want to talk about it, if only to make fun of it. Because there's a level of absurdity with adding in that
01:01:03
Speaker
that somehow it's connected to Jewish conspiracy theories or Israel or something like that. It's like that gives it that little extra oomph that if it had just been space lasers, or lasers would have been one thing, but then you make them space lasers. Okay, that's interesting. Oh, Jewish space lasers, right?
01:01:23
Speaker
It's like it almost reminds me of the kinds of stories or the kinds of rules of thumb that people give fiction writers. That's exactly the kind of advice. If you're going to talk about lasers in your story, make sure they're Jewish-based lasers because you want to give it a specificity and a particularity because that sticks in people's minds better. These are the advice that you give fiction writers or joke writers. How do you make your joke land better?
01:01:53
Speaker
How do you make your joke, you know, what's the button that you need to put on your, your joke in order to really make it kind of, you know, you know, funny and memorable, right. I think some of the same aesthetic features in that we see in joke writing and in a narrative fiction writing are the sorts of things that you're going to see in.
01:02:13
Speaker
in conspiracy theories, or at least those conspiracy theories which end up having more legs. And also what's interesting there is, of course, it gives you a kind of cultural context as to who people think the threat is. Because when we had, I say we, in the Southern Hemisphere, when Australia had their massive burning season last summer,
01:02:36
Speaker
The big conspiracy theory there was also about space lasers causing the fires, but the culprits weren't the Jews, it was the Chinese. It was the Chinese space lasers that were causing those fires. So you still have the specificity and you've still got the let's go with an old threat here, but you also have the in the cultural context of say people who are worried about
01:03:03
Speaker
economic expansion by different powers. You go, well, who's our most local threat? Ah, we're going to blame the Chinese for what are obviously fires which either occur naturally, because Australia is a country where gum trees explode in high summer heat because they want to, and also a few cases of what turned out to be actual arson as well. But definitely not space lasers. And even if they were space lasers, probably not Chinese space lasers.
01:03:32
Speaker
And so yeah, there's a kind of nice, a nice rounding there that actually, even though I don't think that conspiracy theories and urban legends are one and the same, because I do think conspiracies occur, also I don't think that children get randomly stabbed by heroin and needles and sand pits and public playgrounds, the recurrent features of certain of these stories.
01:03:58
Speaker
which kind of allow us to judge their maturity to a certain extent, is actually a really interesting aesthetic feature. And there probably is a fairly decent paper to be written looking at doing that comparison and the disambiguation.
01:04:16
Speaker
kind of get us to the root as to why there are certain conspiracy theories that we kind of just see and go no I've I've seen that one before and I'm rejecting it or I know why people are adopting this one because it's a really popular hit from the 1950s that's been repackaged with a drum and bass beat. Yeah or just and I think part of it is
01:04:39
Speaker
is now that we're paying more attention to it, I'm hoping that we're going to get more data on the conspiracy theories that didn't take off or being able to track them through time and figure out
01:04:56
Speaker
at what point did this particular conspiracy theory take off right or even within different subcultures right when did this group of people start paying attention to this particular thing and like you said kind of kind of the same way that we can do you know music colleges do with music right of of tracing trends and so forth through time and being able to kind of
01:05:17
Speaker
spots the bow diddly beat as it's transformed from era to era, from an origins in a particular cultural context, being able to do that sort of thing, conspiracy theories, I think is going to be interesting now that we're, people are paying more attention to it so that we can get some more data on it.
01:05:36
Speaker
And also, we also live in a kind of golden age for being able to track these things. So if you were trying to track conspiracy theories that failed to take off in say the 1930s or 40s,
01:05:49
Speaker
Actually, it's going to be very hard to find them in the first place, let alone see why there was no reaction. Given that so many conspiracy theories originate online now, we can kind of find that first instance and then go, right, so why did this one
01:06:07
Speaker
which seems remarkably similar to this really successful variant here, why did this not take off? Or conversely, I think this is where QAnon becomes interesting. If you look at the history of the Anon accounts pretending to be
01:06:25
Speaker
high-level entities in the American government, why was it the QAnon roleplay that became the really big thing, and not all the other anons doing similar things around about the same time? And you can then look at what actors are involved.
01:06:44
Speaker
How are these things spreading? Is it a case of in the other non-account cases, everyone was kind of in on the joke and they realized there was a role play? Well, maybe with the QAnon one, maybe there were one or two people who came in who didn't realize the rules of the game and then spread it elsewhere. We can kind of diagnose how these tendrils work.
01:07:08
Speaker
And it might give us a better idea as to why some of these things spread and some of them just wither on the vine. But yeah, I think you're right. Which means that there's a lot of exciting work to be done. Yeah. And I think your element, you know, bringing in the aesthetics or rhetoric. I mean, that's a kind of interesting area that doesn't get a lot of attention these days. But the kind of the rhetoric of conspiracy theories and the rhetorical features, I think, are
01:07:36
Speaker
an interesting area that hasn't gotten enough attention. So we've talked a lot about the past. We've talked a little bit about connections with other areas in philosophy, but let's now talk about the future. So put on your academic robes, pull out your academic crystal ball, and use your California sanctioned scrying ability to tell me where we should be going in the future in the study of conspiracy theory. So yeah, I think the big developments
01:08:04
Speaker
Well, there's been two big developments in thinking about conspiracy theories from a philosophical point of view since, you know, Charles and I did our thing at the end of the last millennium. And first of all, is this idea that, you know, there's so many more philosophers that are interested. And we just talked about the different ways in which philosophy could get involved. It's not just about epistemology anymore. I think you're right. There's aesthetics, there's metaphysics. There's all sorts of ethical issues that come up.
01:08:33
Speaker
And so one of the things I'm looking forward to is that this kind of.
01:08:36
Speaker
getting beyond the old stories about whether or not conspiracy theories should be believed or not, whether they're warranted or not, and what goes into that. There's still stuff to be done there, but I think there's lots of other interesting philosophical stuff to be said about conspiracy theories. But I think the other big development is that not only are there more philosophers paying attention to conspiracy theories, there's just more academics in general paying attention.
01:09:04
Speaker
The nice thing that we have now is this kind of wealth of investigators from a variety of different fields. Just mentioned the possibility of rhetoric, but there's history, political science, economics, cultural history, psychology, neuroscience, all these different areas of people that are interested in conspiracy theories.
01:09:26
Speaker
And I think what's gonna be incumbent upon philosophers are to kind of engage with that larger literature, that recognizing that this, you know, the study, conspiracy theory theory is an interdisciplinary or a transdisciplinary endeavor, right? That there's this interesting social phenomenon that just as, you know, if we wanna study something like religion, sure, there's philosophy of religion and there's lots of philosophy to be done about religion, but, you know, to try to do,
01:09:55
Speaker
a study of religion and not pay attention to the sociology of religion or the anthropology of religion or the politics of religion, the history of religion, all these things are things that need to be folded in to our discussion. And I think that philosophers so far have been a little slow on the uptake of that. They're starting with the philosophical literature,
01:10:21
Speaker
But i think the thing that i'm really looking forward to in the next couple of years is what happens when philosophers start to get into the fray with academics from other disciplines and we start to kind of you know.
01:10:36
Speaker
use our philosophical skills to talk with and to interact with computer scientists and people who are doing digital humanities and all the other sorts of things that are kind of, I mean, in our conversation we've been having today, a lot of those issues are issues that come from outside of philosophy.
01:10:59
Speaker
And to me, that's what's really super exciting and probably has something to do with the fact that my day job when I'm not thinking about conspiracy theories is being a cognitive scientist. I'm a philosopher who thinks a lot about the mind, who thinks a lot about how the senses work. And when I think about the senses,
01:11:16
Speaker
I have to engage with the neuroscience of the senses and the psychology of the senses and the anthropology of the senses. And there's this entire field now called sensory studies, which brings together people from a variety of different fields that are all interested in this phenomenon of how we perceptually perceive the world. It's this cool, fairly interdisciplinary endeavor.
01:11:38
Speaker
And the thing that excites me most about conspiracy theory theory is that it's maturing as an area of study such that now there's a lot of people playing the game and are investigating things and
01:11:52
Speaker
and I'm going to be very interested to see how that feeds back into philosophy and how philosophy can feed into it. Yes, I do think that interdisciplinary work is kind of the future, because at the moment I think there's a lot of work happening in silos. As listeners are probably not aware, Brian is part of the Conspiracy Theory Theorist Social Club, which is a three-weekly meeting where we read papers, discuss papers,
01:12:19
Speaker
in conspiracy theory. We're not just looking at the philosophical literature, we're looking at the literature more generally from sociology to cultural studies to media studies to social psychology. And what's always interesting about reading these papers is the vast amount of siloing that's happening within every discipline which is writing on conspiracy theories at this time.
01:12:44
Speaker
in that most social psychologists are not citing sociologists and philosophers. Most cultural theorists aren't citing, say, philosophers, although they might be citing sociologists. There's a lot of people working within their own epistemic bubbles, effectively. And we need to kind of broaden that discussion because if the social scientists are right and conspiracy theories are a problem in need of a solution,
01:13:14
Speaker
then they should be drawing on what philosophers are saying and either arguing against us or pointing out where we go wrong and where we go right. And in the same respect, if philosophers are going to go around saying, actually, conspiracy theories are not quite the problem you think they are, then we need to be addressing our work towards the social psychologists and the like who are saying, no, but it is a problem so that we can at least come to terms as to
01:13:44
Speaker
how we're going to resolve this particular tension in the broader academic literature. And I mean to blow my own horn to a certain extent, being involved in Karen Douglas' project over at the University of Kent, which starts up later this year.
01:14:01
Speaker
is quite nice of being the philosopher who's been invited into a project in social psychology because obviously Karen has gone look we do need to bring other people into this discussion
01:14:16
Speaker
to make sure that whatever we produce is at least going to be some reason for people outside of our discipline to go, oh, I should have a look at that. I agree. And this does make me think that maybe a new collected project, a new book of new work in conspiracy theory going along some of these avenues of investigation is something I should be looking at proposing later on this year.
01:14:46
Speaker
Keep keep your schedules open. That's all I'm going to say. Okay, sounds good. Well, thank you, Brian. That has been a wide ranging and incredibly good conversation. I hope you've enjoyed it as well. And I hope the listeners have have taken things away from this or make them realize that the academic discussion of these things is a lot more complicated than sometimes we make it out to be.
01:15:11
Speaker
So thank you very much. That was a great conversation. I wish you luck with the rest of the quarantine. Hopefully it stays boring and doesn't get exciting for any reason. And then good luck with the new position. Looking forward to hearing how it all settles out. So am I. I'm also looking forward to the point where borders reopen and maybe we can meet up again in person. Wow, that's an amazing idea. We should try that sometime.
01:15:39
Speaker
Well, yes, because I mean, we we did have that proposed writing retreat that we were going to do last year. And unfortunately, this pesky COVID-19 kind of made that a non-starter. But I'm thinking maybe sometime next year, a writing retreat in the mountains might work out after all. OK, yeah, let's think about it.
01:15:58
Speaker
We just have to hope that another virus doesn't jump into the human species because frankly, as people have been pointing out, it's kind of remarkable that we went so long between the Spanish flow and COVID-19. The next one is probably going to occur a lot sooner than many of us would like it to.
01:16:18
Speaker
Yes, so hopefully the mRNA virus framework will help us with that, but we'll have to see. Well yes, and actually my hope is that now that we've got an mRNA vaccine for one particular coronavirus, maybe we could finally get around to wiping out the common cold. That would be nice, but I'd like to get rid of polio first, but you know,
01:16:43
Speaker
Oh, you and your priorities about diseases which are worse than the common cold. I mean, really. Thank you, Brian. That has been a pleasure. Thanks a lot, Ian.
01:16:58
Speaker
And there you have it, an interesting interview to listen to. I think it's particularly nice given the amount we've talked about Brian's work and the amount we've talked about other people talking about Brian's work to actually hear him put forth his own views and his own words and set the record straight as it were.
01:17:18
Speaker
It was interesting. The point about comparing the death of JFK to the death of Elvis and sort of the different effects on them is a good point. I always think that the more interesting comparison is the shooting of JFK versus the shooting of Ronald Reagan.
01:17:34
Speaker
because there the events are much, much more similar and could have, could have probably gone either way. Like I think a lot of people perhaps don't realize just how badly Reagan was injured. They certainly tried to play it down at the time, but he was, he took a bullet to the lung and you know, was in surgery and there was a, there was a very real chance I think that he may not have survived either. And had he died, then that probably would have been an event
01:18:02
Speaker
on a par with the death of JFK. But as it stands, he survived. The world carried on pretty much as it has been. And so there you see a situation where you have two very, very similar events, which happened to have different outcomes.
01:18:21
Speaker
And then end up, you know, the JFKs being is one of the big, big names when it comes to conspiracy theories really, it has been ever since the 60s. Whereas I'm aware of a single conspiracy theory around the shooting of Ronald Reagan, as people have pointed out that John Hinckley Jr.'s father, I assume John Hinckley Sr., ran the
01:18:46
Speaker
Was it Vanderbilt energy concern or something? The Hinkleys were known to the Bushes, for one thing, were big in Texas, and people had always drawn the insinuation that had Hinkley successfully killed Reagan, then George Bush, Sr., who was vice president at the time, would have become president then.
01:19:13
Speaker
And it's a fairly feeble as far as conspiracy theories go, and that's it. That's the only thing that sort of gets any mention. And the contrast between the two, which otherwise, aside from the ultimate outcome, two very similar events, and yet one generates tons of conspiracy theories and the other one doesn't, simply because of the
01:19:34
Speaker
the ultimate impact it had on society and politics as a whole. I did like the point, I'm not sure if this has come up before when we've talked about it, the idea that when talking about conspiracies and how long it takes conspiracy theories to become mature, the idea that it's actually possible for conspiracy theories to be mature almost straight away if there are variations on or things which plug into existing conspiracy theories and we see a lot of
01:20:02
Speaker
with a lot of the QAnon stuff is just sort of a rehash of the satanic panic, which is a rehash of the protocols of the elders of Zion and what have you. And a lot of the critical race theory stuff we see going around at the moment is just an echo of conspiracy theories that have come before. So you can sort of say that
01:20:27
Speaker
While it may take some time before you want to say that certain conspiracy theories are mature, and the fact that they are mature, unwarranted conspiracy theories is a problem, for other ones you can pretty much say from the outset, well this is really just more of the same.
01:20:42
Speaker
and we can essentially count it as an unwarranted mature conspiracy theory pretty much from the get-go. And finally, finally, what's this about a Swedish art project that Em just casually happens to mention? Oh yes, I've been contributing to some
01:20:57
Speaker
some art project about the faked moon landings or something happening in Sweden. What's going on there? More questions, as if we didn't have enough already for the good Dr. Denteth whenever we managed to track them down.
01:21:16
Speaker
That has not happened yet, so we'll keep you up to date. We'll see if we're lucky. Maybe more of these interviews will materialize in our shared Dropbox, and I'll be able to share them with you good listeners. But otherwise, we'll just have to keep guessing. So until I, or who knows, both of us, talk to you again, all I can say is goodbye.
01:21:41
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy is Josh Addison and me, Dr. M.R.X.Dentist, who can contact us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com and please do consider supporting the podcast via our Patreon. And remember, the truth is out there, but not quite where you think you left it.