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David Coady's "Conspiracy Theories and Official Stories"
26 Plays4 years ago
Josh and M review David Coady's 2003 paper, “Conspiracy Theories and Official Stories” (International Journal of Applied Philosophy, 17:2, pp. 197–209).
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
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Transcript
Intruder Incident at the Hotel
00:00:16
Speaker
Accustomed as I was to an afternoon nap, Morrissey left me to my own devices as he decided to visit the local library before our five o'clock dinner appointment. I awoke then to the sound of my hotel room door being jimmied. As a former post office clerk, now postmaster, I knew the sound of a lock being picked.
00:00:31
Speaker
Many was the time I'd needed to access a post box when one of our delivery men had mislaid a ring of keys. I knew then that whoever was trying to access my room was no novice. The slick and pang of their lockpicking was neat and tidy. Whoever was at my chamber door was quite the experienced burglar. I had two options. Stay in bed and feign sleep when they entered the room, or jump out of bed and hide. The latter option seemed imprudent.
00:00:53
Speaker
Not only did I not know how much time I might have to create a makeshift hiding spot, I could not guarantee that my movements would not be heard. I was, after all, sleeping off my afternoon ration of ale.
00:01:06
Speaker
I opened one eye very carefully to see if I could fix my gaze on the miscreant, only to see that there were two of them. In the dark of my room, I could only make out their general form. One was burly and short, while the other was significantly taller, and appeared to be wearing a hat, inside. The fact that it was a topper made it all the more galling. They whispered something to each other, and then spread out across the room, carefully looking over my things. Then, without warning, there was a knock at my door.
00:01:31
Speaker
Cluddles! Cluddles, wake up, my good man! We must repast, and quick! The two men froze on the spot, one looking at me, the other at the door. Cluddles, I say do get up. My stomach is being most rude. Coming! Coming! I pretended to yawn and stretch as I sat up in bed. The two figures were still frozen in place. I fixed the fellow's tearing at me squarely in the eyes, and then rubbed them dramatically as if I could not believe what I was seeing. Hold on! You don't want to turn on the belly light!
00:01:59
Speaker
I reach for the lamp beside my bed intending to turn it up. At this moment the two men sprang into action looking at each other with what I can only surmise was both fright and conviction. And then with barely seconds to spare as I increase the flame they dashed towards the window and defenestrated.
00:02:15
Speaker
Pluddles, what was that? Morrissey, two men were in my room. Morrissey stared at the broken second floor window before crossing the room to look outside. No sign of them. They've always here made their getaway. The rose garden beneath your window would have made an adequate, if uncomfortable, cushion to their fall. Morrissey turned to me and his face softened. I'm sorry, Pluddles. I should have asked if you are all right.
00:02:37
Speaker
I nodded in appreciation. Still, I think we have a problem, my friend. How so, Morrissey? I mean, aside from the break-in? They know your name since I shouted it through the door. And if these men are in any way attached to my old companion-turned-nemesis-stickle, then they will doubt this put two and two together to get pluddles and Morrissey. Rum, Morrissey. Rum.
00:02:59
Speaker
Indeed, Puddles. We may need to disguise ourselves this evening. I am assuming you have brought with you your selection of moustaches. Indeed I have, Marcy. The Spaniard? A little too exotic for orderthrob, I think. No, I am thinking maybe the French linesman, or maybe the Irish ramble. Smiling, I fetched my disguise kit.
Introduction to 'The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy'
00:03:32
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Edison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:03:42
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison sitting somewhere in New Zealand. They are Dr. Emdenteth sitting somewhere else in New Zealand. That's the kind of wacky mixed up world we live in. And that's all the information that we are willing to give you. Things are fine. How are things in your nondescript part of the country?
00:04:03
Speaker
Ah, they're quite literally things. Occasionally stuff, but, you know. Ooh, that's sounding a bit heady. I hope it isn't bringing up the old anxiety.
00:04:13
Speaker
Well, maybe that's a good thing.
COVID-19 Preparedness in New Zealand
00:04:17
Speaker
They've been all in the news at the moment saying, now just be ready in case we get another wave of COVID here. Everything's fine now, but we don't want to become complacent, which I guess is fair enough, which some people have taken to be saying, there will be a second wave, which is then cause other people to say, what do they know that they're not telling us? But I assume all they're actually telling us is,
00:04:38
Speaker
Don't let your guard down and be ready for things to turn south as they have in other countries. Well I think people are very much aware in the medical profession here and the government that countries which appear to be doing well, like Vietnam and also Australia to a certain extent, are suddenly doing very very badly.
00:04:58
Speaker
due to super spreaders in their communities basically and we're going well we're actually not that different and at the moment we think we've contained the virus to the borders of the country but that doesn't necessarily mean
00:05:13
Speaker
that someone hasn't snuck through who is asymptomatic and hasn't come up with a test because we have the problem of false positives and false negatives with respect to COVID-19. So it is possible there is at least one person with COVID-19 out in the community. And we might not detect that for several weeks. And when we do detect it, it could be because there's a wave. So we need to be very cautious.
00:05:41
Speaker
Yes, so things are still fine here for the moment. Did you hear that loud door slamming? Oh yeah. This is a hotbed of activity. It's true. There was a helicopter, a helicopter circling the house not too long ago. What kind of primary are you running? A car, a car ran into the streetlight outside my house just last week.
00:06:03
Speaker
It's madness. It's bedlam. It appears to be a criminal hotbed of activity in your facility. What are you doing? Well, I don't know. I can only assume I'm some sort of magnet. How do they work, though? Nobody knows. That's the point. So we should just discard any thought of them. I'm just a jungle low. Everywhere I go. Sorry, please do continue.
00:06:28
Speaker
Do you know that that has never actually occurred to me to juxtapose those two songs? Oh, I do it all the time. No, anyway, anyway, as to the episode to hand, it's another episode of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre.
Exploration of David Cody's Conspiracy Theory Paper
00:06:46
Speaker
So things are, this one, I mean, the stuff we've looked at so far, there's been disagreement in back and forth, but it all seems to be fairly agreeable, but this one seems to be a bit more contrary.
00:06:58
Speaker
So it should be a little bit, a little bit more interesting. Yes, we are about to encounter, and I say this kindly, the grumpy old man of the philosophy of conspiracy theory, Mr. H, I should say, Dr. David Cote. And his paper, conspiracy theories and official stories. So unless you have anything else you want to get off your chest, shall we pile into the episode proper? Indeed. Let's play a sting.
00:07:32
Speaker
OK, so this week we are looking at conspiracy theories and official stories by David Cote, which was published in the International Journal of Applied Philosophy back in 2003. That's volume 17, issue 2, pages 197 to 209 for those who are playing along at home. It has an abstract, Josh, that goes something like this. Was that my cue to say it? It was, yes.
00:07:58
Speaker
Okay, sorry, you said it like that. Conspiracy theories have a bad reputation. This is especially true in the academy and in the media. Within these institutions, to describe someone as a conspiracy theorist is often to imply that his or her views should not be taken seriously. Perhaps this accounts for the fact that philosophers have tended to ignore the topic despite the enduring appeal of conspiracy theories in popular culture. Recently, however, some philosophers have at least treated conspiracy theories respectfully enough to try to articulate where they go wrong.
00:08:26
Speaker
I begin this paper by clarifying the nature of conspiracy theories. I then argue against some recent critiques of conspiracy theories. Many criticisms of conspiracy theories are unfounded. I also argue that unwillingness to entertain conspiracy theories is an intellectual and moral failing. I end by suggesting an Aristotelian approach to the issue, according to which the intellectual virtue of realism is a golden mean between the intellectual vices of paranoia and naivety. I like to say that you go naivety like I do, even though many people go naivety.
00:08:56
Speaker
Neither tell... Well, it's spelt with a Y. We're not French. We're English. English speakers at any rate. We absorb words into our own language like some sort of linguistic amoeba. Well, I do think it's more like a cephalopod, but you know, whatever floats your goat.
00:09:15
Speaker
So that's how it starts. And straight away, I mean, we can see, much like most of the commentaries we've looked at already, the idea that, yes, actually, you shouldn't just be writing off conspiracy theories entirely. It is an intellectual and moral failing to at least refuse to entertain them. But as we'll see fairly quickly, things diverge a little in the specifics of it.
00:09:41
Speaker
This paper mentions Charles Pigdon at the start and mentions Lee Basham at the end, but mostly it's a commentary on Brian Elkely's conspiracy theories and Steve Clark's conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorising, which we've already covered in this series. So I love the stuff in the beginning is going to sound familiar. But importantly,
00:10:04
Speaker
This is the first time 9-11 gets mentioned in a philosophical literature. This is 2003 and Cody is going to talk about how any standard explanation of 9-11 is a conspiracy theory when you consider a conspiracy theory properly.
00:10:21
Speaker
What is interesting, given it's a 2003 paper, there's no talk of the inside job set of conspiracy theories. There's no Lee Hop or Me Hop because they have not emerged in the literature yet. So it's kind of an interesting look at a point where 9-11 is used as an example in the conspiracy theory literature.
00:10:43
Speaker
as an example of an official theory which cites a conspiracy without any of the weirder conspiracy theories also impinging on that commentary.
00:10:55
Speaker
So, Dr. Cody begins basically by looking at the definition of a conspiracy theory that Brian Keighley and Steve Clark both subscribe to and taking issue with it in some areas. And I have to say, on reading this for the first time, as I did the other day, my feeling is that there's a bit of a
00:11:19
Speaker
I don't know. There seems to be a little bit of talking at cross purposes at times. Reading through it, it seems like Cody has a sort of an unstated assumption that the definition of conspiracy theory should match fairly closely the way it's used in the common parlance, which is quite Aristotle. Did you do ancient Greek philosophy?
00:11:48
Speaker
I did, yes, but I was never a bit... It's one of the things right, you did quite a lot of it, but I still don't quite understand why we spend so much time on the ancient Greeks whilst ignoring recent contributions to their literature.
00:12:03
Speaker
But one of the things I recall from when I did it, 20 something years ago now, was that Aristotle likes to start a lot of his things by saying, when we talk about whatever subject he's discussing, here's what we say. And he would use the way things are commonly talked about as a guide to reach an understanding of them. And so Cody does seem to be, although he doesn't explicitly say this,
00:12:31
Speaker
what he says only made sense to me if we were to assume that he's thinking that the definition of conspiracy theory we use should match the more colloquial ones. So right at the start he
00:12:48
Speaker
He says, this definition does not quite capture the ordinary usage of the expression conspiracy theory. And my reaction on reading that was, well, yeah. But isn't that the point? It seemed to me that the likes of Cayley and Clark
00:13:06
Speaker
find the colloquial definition of conspiracy theory not fit for purpose in an epistemological sense. And so they have no problem with the fact that it doesn't actually match the ordinary usage.
00:13:22
Speaker
Is that like, that was my impression, but as someone who's a lot more familiar with the literature, is that what you see? So what's interesting about Cody's work is actually talking about this paper with respect to what he's going to argue in future papers. So you are right, there's something interesting about his appeal to ordinary or common usage, because in subsequent papers, and most of Cody's recent work,
00:13:48
Speaker
He actually doesn't want people to use the term conspiracy theory or conspiracy theorist because they are pejorative terms that mark out theories as being mad, bad and dangerous and they play a policing role of basically marking out things you're not meant to talk about.
00:14:05
Speaker
So Cody's current work is to go, look, we shouldn't be even bothering with a philosophical or psychological or cultural theory study of these things called conspiracy theories. Even engaging in the language is bad.
00:14:20
Speaker
And that kind of appeals to the ordinary usage stuff he's referring to here, where he's going, well, look, if we work with Steve Clark or Brian Elkely's notion of what a conspiracy theory is, now, these things are going to be amenable to a standard analytic analysis of conspiracy theories, which are rational to believe versus conspiracy theories, which are irrational to believe. That's not how people talk about conspiracy theories and ordinary language.
00:14:48
Speaker
They always take them to be theories which are irrational to believe, even though the philosopher will say there are cases where conspiracy theories are prima facie rational given particular evidence and the like. And we should be working with ordinary language usage whenever possible to try and capture how people talk about these things.
00:15:08
Speaker
Now, of course, you know, from my work, I disagree. I think a simple definition is the way to go about these things, because it helps with the analysis of these things called conspiracy theories. But no, Cody has a very different start point. And I think that then explained a lot of where this article and his subsequent work is going to go. So he carries on looking at the sort of Keeley-Clark definition.
00:15:36
Speaker
He says the first thing he has to say of it is that the requirement that the number of conspirators be relatively small is quite counterintuitive. He seems to think that we assume that sort of conspiracy theories could have lots of people in them and indeed sort of the more conspiratorial a theory is, the more people will be involved, which
00:16:01
Speaker
I don't know. I just kind of glossed past that, really. It seemed an interesting point, but didn't really seem to have much of a bearing on anything. And he goes on to say... So there's one other point there, which is kind of interesting. So he's going, look, this idea that conspiracies are meant to be small for them to be plausible,
00:16:23
Speaker
is kind of odd because the really big conspiracies seem to be the most exemplar form of conspiracy theory we find in the literature. And then he goes look, the more members of a conspiracy, the more conspiratorial that conspiracy is going to be.
00:16:41
Speaker
And that just seems like a really odd thing to say because surely a conspiracy is a conspiracy whether there are two people working in secret towards some end or 4,922 people working in secret towards some end. As soon as two or more people work in secret towards some end, it is conspiratorial. It's not more conspiratorial if there are more people involved. It's just a bigger conspiracy.
00:17:08
Speaker
Yes, yes. An odd thing to say, but it doesn't have much bearing on what comes next. Now, what does come next, though, is Cody says a more significant problem with the Keeley-Clark definition is that it lacks any requirement of success.
Critique of Keeley and Clark's Definitions
00:17:24
Speaker
And yeah, that was the first thing that really struck me. That only makes sense
00:17:28
Speaker
if you're insisting that the definition has to be more like the colloquial definition. Because, I mean, I've said in the past, I remember one time I was talking to, I was about to head off to go and record an episode back when we co-located. And my wife had a friend over and I sort of, we were just saying as I left, I'm about to go off and do this podcast about conspiracy theories. And she said, oh, so what are you talking about? And I said, oh, I,
00:17:58
Speaker
we're doing the Volkswagen emission scandal, and then she seemed surprised, was kind of like, how's that a conspiracy theory? Because A, it's true, and B, it kind of didn't work. But that was sort of the colloquial understanding. But for the way Keeley and Clark define conspiracy theories, like I don't see that's a problem for their definition at all. And I think even sort of
00:18:26
Speaker
in a more colloquial, quote unquote, real world sense. I wasn't sure about that one, really, because like, if you look at, say, the legal world, conspiracy to commit fraud, commit murder, or whatever is a completely different crime from, say, murder. And if if it was part of a conspiracy's definition that it had to be successful, then those would kind of be one in the same crime, really, the fact that you can be convicted of conspiracy to commit murder without actually successfully murdering anyone.
00:18:55
Speaker
would suggest that even outside of the academic definition, that one doesn't really apply so much. And indeed, there's a kind of weirdness to anything which is a success criteria when it comes to conspiracy, which is how are we measuring success? So take, for example, the assassination of Julius Caesar, an example that I mention an awful lot in my PhD thesis.
00:19:18
Speaker
depending on who you talk to, that was either a very successful or a very unsuccessful conspiracy. Because one of the aims of the conspiracy was the killing of the dictator Julius Caesar. But one of the other aims of the conspiracy was to elevate Brutus to a position of power within the Roman Republic and basically replacing Caesar as dictator.
00:19:41
Speaker
So on one level, they were successful in removing one dictator and absolute failures in replacing that dictator with another in the form of bruises, because as we know, you end up getting Augustus as Caesar in the end. So once you start bringing in the idea that you need to measure a conspiracy theory with respect to success of the secretive plot of conspirators,
00:20:06
Speaker
Then you also open up a huge can of worms as to, so what do we mean by success in this particular situation? Including, as you point out, examples of things which are clearly conspiracies, even though they actually failed to achieve anything. Although, of course, with the VW thing, they achieved things for a while. They didn't achieve the ultimate success of never being caught. Getting away with it, yes.
00:20:37
Speaker
Indeed, if you look at, say, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which was certainly the result of a conspiracy, I'm quite certain the conspirators didn't intend to start a world war, and yet an explanation of the start of the world war surely involves this thing which we would want to call a conspiracy.
00:21:01
Speaker
Yeah, the goals and what actually happens can diverge quite a lot. And then furthermore, Cody goes on to say, the most important feature missing from the Keeley-Clark definition is the requirement that a conspiracy theory conflict with an official explanation of the event in question.
00:21:24
Speaker
And so again, my reading of that is, sorry, who says a conspiracy theory has to conflict with an official explanation of the event? And indeed, if you've listened to this podcast for any length of time, you know, that's sort of one of the things we've explicitly at times said a conspiracy theory doesn't have to involve. But again, I suppose
00:21:43
Speaker
And I think that this has possibly wore what my wife's friend was thinking of with the VW thing because it was very much an official announcement that VW had been up to these dodgy things.
00:21:56
Speaker
Again, you think it should match with people's colloquial use of the term, then yeah, okay, people do often think that you have the official version and the conspiracy theory. You have the official version of the Kennedy assassination and the conspiracy theories, the official version of what happened in 9-11 and the conspiracy theories, even though we would say that they're both conspiracy theories.
00:22:19
Speaker
And I mean, it's a metaphysical issue here, which is what happens when your conspiracy theory becomes the official theory over a period of time. The Moscow show trials being a great example of this. It was a conspiracy theory that they were sham or mock trials run by Stalin, according to the Cody story here.
00:22:43
Speaker
But now it's the accepted orthodoxy that actually it was a giant conspiracy by the Soviets to hide the fact that the trials were sham. So it started off as a pejorative conspiracy theory in opposition to an official theory that the trials were free and fair.
00:22:59
Speaker
and now accepted that the official theory was in fact a conspiracy theory by the Soviets to cover up the fact that the conspiracy theory that the Soviets were lombasting as being disinformation was in fact actually the official theory now the trials were a sham.
00:23:16
Speaker
you just don't need to bring in this official theory stuff to talk about conspiracy theories. It does more harm than good. Yeah, and I think, as I recall, this is going to come up again a little bit later. And it's perhaps not as much of a problem for Cody as it might appear, but still. So yeah, I mean, continuing on this line, he says, both Holocaust acceptance and Holocaust denial fits the Keeley-Clark definition of a conspiracy theory. And he means this as a criticism, and yet I
00:23:45
Speaker
would just say, yeah, that's true. The official version of an island is a conspiracy theory. If you assume that conspiracy theories have to conflict with some kind of official theory, but if Keeley and Clark don't require that, then it's not a problem for their particular view. So Cody from his particular view ends up recommending the following three-part definition.
00:24:14
Speaker
A conspiracy theory is a proposed explanation of a historical event in which conspiracy, i.e. agents acting secretly in concert, has a significant causal role. Furthermore, the conspiracy postulated by the proposed explanation must be a conspiracy to bring about the historical event which it purports to explain.
00:24:31
Speaker
Finally, the proposed explanation must conflict with an official explanation of the same historical event. The last part of this definition rules out the possibility of an official explanation of an event qualifying as a conspiracy theory, no matter how conspiratorial it is. To me, that just feels contrived. It just feels official. You've taken the definition and then slapped a couple more criteria on the end of it just because. Now see, the reason why he's doing this is because he's coming from another angle. He's trying to make
00:25:00
Speaker
the terminology fits ordinary usage. Now, the problem with this is it's actually not clear that ordinary usage precludes official theories from being conspiracy theories. People have studied this, people like Michael J. Wood, and if we ever move away from simply doing the philosophical literature,
00:25:23
Speaker
to looking at the social psychological literature will encounter his work. And Wood has looked at the way that people talk about conspiracy theories when you poll them. And it turns out that people don't think that conspiracy theories are necessarily in opposition to some official theory about the world.
00:25:44
Speaker
So it turns out it's not clear that ordinary usage says conspiracy theories are unwarranted theories that go against conventional wisdom. So you don't need to do any of this work because it's actually not clear ordinary usage is easily captured by it anyway.
00:26:03
Speaker
So having got the definitions out of the way, he starts looking more at Brian L. Keeley's paper. He does point out, as other people have, as we've seen, that Keeley has a little bit of a problem and that he sort of switches sometimes between specifically talking about unwarranted conspiracy theories and just conspiracy theories, and it's not always clear
00:26:24
Speaker
Has he now switched to actually talking about conspiracy theories in general, or does he still mean unwarranted conspiracy theories, and he's just using that, he's just shortening the phrase, which Cody seems to take as possibly a little bit sinister, but I'm not sure if that wasn't any more than just carelessness on Cody's behalf.
00:26:48
Speaker
And I think in part because Brian and Charles were kind of all emotional. You just choked it off there. Brian and Charles, it's just so bitter. Why couldn't they just get on? I mean, they've got the same idea. Well, I think because they're both basically creating a literature out of whole class, it's understandable that there's some language slippage going on in that discussion.
00:27:17
Speaker
It's easy to ping people after the fact for not being cautious about the way they use terms, but when people are inventing terminology to discuss some phenomenon, it's understandable they may not get it right every single time.
00:27:35
Speaker
But anyway, that was more of a side note, really. Cody goes on to look at Keeley's claims about errant data.
Debating Success Criteria in Conspiracy Theories
00:27:41
Speaker
So you'll recall that in his paper, Brian L. Keeley talks about the fact that conspiracy theories can be attractive because they can explain away errant data that looks like it could be a problem for the official theory, and yet
00:27:57
Speaker
that's kind of a problem because in any set of data, some of the data is going to be wrong. And so any theory that looks to explain every single little bit of data, even stuff that looks like it might be errant, it might conflict with the main theory in some way, you should probably actually be suspicious of. But Cody, Cody goes in a different direction.
00:28:21
Speaker
He says Keeley and Clark are wrong, however, to claim that conspiracy theories always attempt to explain more than the received alternative does. Conspiracy theories do tend to offer putative explanations of data unexplained by or apparently in conflict with the received alternative, but the received alternative will also, unless it is a transparent fabrication, attempt to explain data unexplained by or apparently in conflict with its conspiratorial rivals.
00:28:47
Speaker
It seemed to me he seemed to be getting towards the fact that it's not just that it's not necessarily that conspiracy theories explain more data. Sometimes they pick different data as being salient. Yeah, so the example he uses is
00:29:03
Speaker
If you take the official theory for the assassination of JFK by the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, the official theory says there were three shots fired. Now this data is errant to a whole bunch of conspiracy theories about the assassination of JFK that claim there were more shots fired. So those theories have to explain away why
00:29:24
Speaker
An awful lot of ear witnesses to the assassination report three and only three gunshots. That data is errant to the conspiracy theories about JFK's death. Now
00:29:40
Speaker
Part of the problem for Cody's account here is he's going, look, Keeley's wrong because he talks about errant data and errant data applies to non-conspiratorial official theories of the same explanation. But of course, as we saw earlier in the paper, Keeley doesn't have to bite the bullet.
00:30:01
Speaker
on conspiracy theories having to be contrast some official theory of the event anyway. So Keely can go, yeah, you're right. If there's more than one conspiracy theory for a particular event, then it is going to be the case that one of those conspiracy theories, which may have been endorsed by people
00:30:22
Speaker
in positions of authority also has data errant to some rival conspiracy theory which hasn't been endorsed by someone in a position of authority. So there's no particular issue for my account says Keely if you're making this claim.
00:30:40
Speaker
And then we see something similar when he goes on to look at Cayley's claims about skepticism, if you recall. Cayley's, at least in his initial of conspiracy theories, said that really the biggest thing, the biggest problem with these unwarranted conspiracy theories is that they can
00:31:03
Speaker
And as they go on, they require you to become more skeptical and more skeptical in the sense that, you know, you think the moon landings were faked. We'll hang on. NASA says it wasn't OK. Well, all of NASA must be into it. We can't believe what they say. But it was also on TV. OK, well, we can't believe anything the news says. And then the government said, well, we can't believe anything the government says. And they can sort of snowball until you're having to be skeptical of everything, which is not
00:31:31
Speaker
not not not practical uh or i guess epistemologically virtuous would you say i don't know um but um cody cody doesn't really buy that although it seemed he
00:31:45
Speaker
It seemed a little bit pedantic to me, some of his objections. He really zooms in on things like their talk about Holocaust revisionists and so on by saying, well, actually, you know, these Holocaust revisionists, David Irving, the main one being, isn't a universal skeptic and says, yeah, he doesn't believe in this conspiracy theory because he's skeptical of everything. He believes in it because he's an anti-Semite.
00:32:08
Speaker
He says, so Cody says, the quote, Keeley and Wilson may admit all this, but insists that their point is not that Holocaust revisionists actually tend to be radical skeptics, but just that their views entail radical skepticism and entailment that they may or may not recognize. I don't agree. As noted, a conspiracy theory, unlike a skeptical hypothesis, is offered as an actual explanation, not as an alternative possible explanation. The radical conspiracy theory seeks not to undermine belief as such, but to replace our current beliefs with different beliefs.
00:32:38
Speaker
which didn't really make sense to me as an objection.
00:32:45
Speaker
If you're saying that these conspiracy theories entail an overly skeptical viewpoint, even if the people making it don't actually realise that that's what they're ultimately implying is, then why does it matter that they don't intend to undermine belief? That just means they haven't followed their views to the logical end point of it.
00:33:09
Speaker
Yeah, and actually, this is the point where when I was having a conversation with this with Keeley a few weeks ago, he actually wants to chase this up because he feels that this is something which people have not really paid much attention to. Because yes, it's not the case that people who put forward these conspiracy theories like Holocaust denialism are trying to engender radical skepticism.
00:33:32
Speaker
It's more to generate that particular hypothesis in the first place requires you to distrust the way that we normally form knowledge in our epistemic communities, which means you give up on a whole lot of bases for knowledge in your epistemic community.
00:33:51
Speaker
which means that as a consequence, you must become quite skeptical about a lot of other things that come from the same basis as well. So you might not be willing to admit that actually if I doubt this thing, I should doubt this thing as well. But it should be a consequence to anyone who is analyzing your view to go, yeah, but if you believe this,
00:34:14
Speaker
then how can you believe this, this, this and this as well, without being inconsistent? And I think at this day and age, there are a lot more arguments that show or examples rather that showed us a bit more clearly, especially the QAnon stuff. I mean, here you have people who basically seem to be quite happy to say, you can't trust anything except Donald Trump and Q, essentially, all
00:34:41
Speaker
All media, all mainstream media, can't trust any of that. All the politicians, all the Democrats, all of them, it's the swamp, it's the deep state, can't trust any of that. And they seem quite happy with that level of skepticism, although...
00:34:54
Speaker
As a side note, one of the things that sticks with me a little bit is the fact that you have all these people saying you can't trust anything at all except me and these YouTube videos that I've looked at. Believe me when I say what I'm saying, but completely distrust anything else. We had an interesting email just this week.
00:35:12
Speaker
that you forwarded to me of someone wanting to talk to us about how COVID's fake and obviously a PSYOP, which you can see when you compare it to the 9-11 PSYOP and lots of PSYOPs, all the PSYOPs. Yes, I have not responded to that email yet. No. I'm leaving it to the point where I've got that. I've got the right set of mind to go, okay, so here's my response to these particular claims.
00:35:41
Speaker
And now, here's the point that we mentioned before. Still talking about Holocaust revisionism and skepticism, what have you. Cody says, although here and now belief in the Holocaust does not qualify as a conspiracy theory because it also has official status,
00:35:56
Speaker
There was a time and place, i.e. Nazi-occupied Europe, in which what would now be called Holocaust Provisionism was the official story. And belief in the Holocaust was belief in an accurate conspiracy theory. To believe in the Holocaust was to deny the official story that the Jews were merely being resettled. And that was what jumped out at me and said exactly what you just said before. So hang on.
00:36:17
Speaker
So that means that if a conspiracy theory can't be an official theory, and yet it's possible for something to go from being official to being unofficial or vice versa, that means it's possible for something to go from being a conspiracy theory to not being a conspiracy theory, even though the actual content of the theory hasn't changed in any way.
00:36:38
Speaker
And that, you know, that immediately I was like, oh, hang on, that sounds like a problem. Although reading further down, it didn't actually sound like a problem for Cody, given what he ends up saying eventually, as we'll see, he talks about saying that sort of the social context is important. So if the context changes, I guess he would say, yeah, actually, that's fine. If the context changes, then whether or not it's a conspiracy changes, because the social context is important.
00:37:02
Speaker
But that also becomes a problem if you think that we should be trying to map conspiracy theory onto an ordinary language use. Because that shows that the ordinary language use of what conspiracy theory is is not settled. Which means why try and capture an unsettled notion of what counts as a conspiracy theory?
00:37:21
Speaker
If that subject change, why not work with a stipular definition that says it's one particular thing and then do the analysis and add in that in your language community, you may have an initial intuitive response to this, but here's a reason to disregard it.
00:37:40
Speaker
So having looked at that, he then turns his eye to Steve Clark's conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorizing, which if you recall, when we looked at that, Steve Clark, at least in his initial paper, said that he believed that Keeley was wrong and that the real thing that makes conspiracy theories unwarranted is that they rely on the fundamental attribution era, the psychological phenomenon where people
00:38:09
Speaker
What's the terminology again? They look for a dispositional explanation rather than a situational one. I've got that right around here. And Cody basically says that he thinks that's wrong because the fundamental attribution error is wrong and that people don't actually make this mistake. And he refers to other psychological studies that have been done that he thinks shows that the fundamental attribution error is not true, which
00:38:37
Speaker
Is that okay? Is that kosher? To be in one discipline talking about whether something in another discipline is right or wrong? It's basically pointing out that the kind of studies that argue for the fundamental attribution error tend to overplay dispositional factors and underplay situational factors. So it's actually fine to then go, well, hold on. The description of the state of affairs you've provided
00:39:05
Speaker
hinges entirely upon saying, x has disposition y, and downplaying situation z. But actually, if we talk about how situation z impacts upon disposition y, then that changes the entire story for x. So that I mean, this is the
00:39:24
Speaker
It's not cited here, but Cody is getting this criticism from people who are criticizing the fundamental attribution error in the in the domain of psychology. So it is actually a problem which is admitted to there as well.
00:39:40
Speaker
Okay. But yes, right or wrong, at any rate, he eventually points out a problem that you get with appealing to the fundamental attribution error, as he puts it. The problem is not just that there's insufficient evidence for the existence of the fundamental attribution error,
00:39:56
Speaker
it's that belief in the phenomenon is itself deeply paradoxical. Those who say there's a widespread tendency to commit the fundamental attribution error themselves seem to be committing that very error. After all, if we do exaggerate the importance of dispositions and our explanations of behaviour, this is itself a disposition, which purports to explain a great deal of our behaviour.
00:40:15
Speaker
The more we explain by appeal to the fundamental attribution error, the more we will ourselves be committing the fundamental attribution error. Belief in the fundamental attribution error appears to be self-refuting in much the same way that naive set theory and logical positivism are. And that's too many times to say the phrase fundamental attribution error in a short amount of time. But I think I managed it. Congratulations. Well done. You probably deserve an award.
00:40:37
Speaker
Probably. So yes, interesting point. That, yeah, I mean, we ended up not being convinced, as I recall, by Steve Clark's appeal to the fundamental attribution era anyway. But that does seem to be a more forceful way, I guess, of arguing against appeals to it.
00:40:58
Speaker
Yeah, and I mean, the problem with the fundamental attribution error is it does tend to present explanations as being predominantly dispositional and ignoring the fact that the set explanations also engage in situational factors as well. So it's quite easy to take any dispositional explanation and then recast it in situational terms, at which point the FAA just disappears.
00:41:25
Speaker
And that's the problem with the FAA analysis. It kind of goes, dispositions are really important. And then people go, but hold on, re-describe the situation in situational terms. And the dispositions don't seem particularly important at all. So are they? Hmm. And frankly, this is all beyond my kin, to be honest, fundamental attribution errors and what have you. So I'll just take them in for it.
00:41:52
Speaker
And so having looked at Keeley and then looked at Clark, Cody comes up to his conclusion, which again, I was left with the feeling that they're sort of talking past each other a little bit.
A New Definition and Perspective on Conspiracy Theories
00:42:09
Speaker
He says, both Clark and Keeley contrast conspiracy theories with their official non-conspiratorial rivals. And I thought, do they? It has been a little while, I guess, since we've talked about them.
00:42:19
Speaker
What do they say about official theories, if anything? Not particularly much, because I couldn't, yeah, I couldn't remember much. But anyway, Cody carries on, but quite often the official version of events is just as conspiratorial as its rivals. And again, I read that and thought, yeah, that's
00:42:38
Speaker
Kind of what Keeley and Clark say, isn't it? That the official version and the quote-unquote conspiracy theory version are both actually, or at least can, both actually be conspiracy theories. Now, of course, what might be happening here is that Cody might be engaging in entirely the thing that he criticized Keeley for, which is mixing up his unwarranted conspiracy theories with his conspiracy theories.
00:43:02
Speaker
theories, because when Keeley is talking about unwarranted conspiracy theories, mature conspiracy theories that have not amounted much evidence over time and thus stink like a bad cheese, then they tend to exist in contrast to an accepted explanation of the event.
00:43:22
Speaker
But of course, that's only particular conspiracy theories, the unwarranted conspiracy theories, which have that particular issue. So Cody appears to be making the same mistake that he claims Keeley made, which is mixing up the broader class with the narrow class.
00:43:43
Speaker
Having said that official events can be just as conspiratorial as the unofficial theories can be just as conspiratorial as their rival theories, he says when this is the case, it is the unofficial explanation that will inevitably attract the label conspiracy theory with all its negative connotations.
00:44:01
Speaker
the degree to which this label deserves those connotations depends to a large extent on the diversity and transparency of the mechanisms for gathering and disseminating information in the society in question. And so here he starts going into that whole, this stuff that we've seen Keeley talking about, and especially Lee Basham and Keeley going back and forth on the whole trustworthiness of society, public institutions and all that sort.
00:44:28
Speaker
And as we've said before, depending on the sort of society you live in, as you've talked about Romania being a much more conspiracy-ridden, I suppose, society, so therefore in that sort of thing, your attitudes towards conspiracy theories might be different. And so he says,
00:44:45
Speaker
As we're looking at, the legitimacy of conspiracy theorizing is therefore highly dependent on social context. This means that we cannot hope to distinguish between warranted and unwarranted conspiracy theories on the basis of content alone, which when I read that, I was like, ah, OK. So where I was saying before, gosh, isn't it a problem that a conspiracy could change a theory could change from a conspiracy theory to not being a conspiracy theory because it's official now?
00:45:10
Speaker
even though the content doesn't change, well, okay, maybe that's not a problem for Cody because he specifically says that the content alone isn't enough to say whether or not something's warranted or unwarranted. Yeah.
00:45:23
Speaker
And then out comes the Aristotle. And so again, as I saw this at the end, it made me think, oh, okay, maybe this is where he's coming from at the beginning, a more Aristotelian rather bent. So, I mean, Cody, like all of the other people we've read, doesn't want to say,
00:45:43
Speaker
we should dismiss all conspiracy theories out of hand. He does want to be able to say, you know, look, if we allow people to write stuff off as just a conspiracy theory or people as just a conspiracy theorist, that can be a bad thing. So we need to do something about that and his proposal is.
00:46:01
Speaker
I propose an Aristotelian approach to the issue according to which the intellectual virtue of realism is a golden mean between the intellectual vices of paranoia and naivety. Paranoids will be predisposed to believe that, in their society at least, official information is untrustworthy. Knifes, on the other hand, will be inclined to believe the opposite.
00:46:19
Speaker
Both groups will hold their attitudes sacred. A realist, by contrast, adopts an attitude of reflective equilibrium toward official information, on the one hand, and conspiracy theories on the other. Her attitude towards conspiracy theories will depend on the extent of her prior trust in officialdom, that this trust will itself be open to the possibility of being undermined by warranted conspiracy theories. Now I've got to say, I never quite got a handle on Aristotelian virtue ethics.
00:46:47
Speaker
But this does seem to be that kind of a thing. And I know there are a lot of a lot of virtue ethicists out there. So is this sort of virtue in Paris, virtue in epistemology? There is such a thing as virtue epistemology and vice epistemology. So if you're aware of how virtue ethics works, or the virtues work,
00:47:07
Speaker
virtues are kind of a middle ground between the vices so the virtue of honesty sits somewhere between the vice of being deceitful but also the vice of being too honest the honest person who has the virtue of honesty
00:47:24
Speaker
No, there are some situations where honesty is not the best policy. You don't want to lie, but you want to get around having to state what you actually think. Such in a situation where honesty might get you killed, or may lead to a loved one feeling badly.
00:47:43
Speaker
toward you. And so vice epistemology kind of deals with both of those particular extremes, that the virtue epistemologist is someone who has all the epistemic virtues that come from practical wisdom and allows them to have the right orientation towards knowing things about the world without being misled by the vices, which might make them either not get information or over interpret information in a way which is vice
00:48:13
Speaker
riddim. So as a footnote, Cody says Aristotle spoke of the importance of identifying exemplars of the virtues to model ourselves on. Not surprisingly, the people I think of as exemplars of the virtue of realism are frequently portrayed as paranoid conspiracy theorists in the media and in the academy. A short list of people I consider exemplary realists would include Noam Chomsky, Edward Said and Gore Vidal. Not quite sure why he thinks it's surprising
00:48:41
Speaker
that exemplars of the virtue of realism are often said to be paranoid conspiracy theorists. Is it just because he thinks that the media or the mainstream are too far
00:48:54
Speaker
towards the vice of naivety. Also, I'd be a little bit cautious about two of the members of that group. So it was Sade and Gord Fidal are not exactly people that I necessarily think of being exemplary thinkers, Sade with Orientalism.
00:49:13
Speaker
and Gore Vidal with his really weird conspiracy theories about what America was actually doing during World War II and his isolationist policies don't seem like realists as per se, fantasists. But you know, that's just me. That's anyway, as I say, that was a footnote, so it was just his little take on things. So now we come to the very end of it. So
00:49:40
Speaker
Cody's final words on the subject are, this raises the issue of how much of herself the realist will devote to pursuing conspiracy theories. On the one hand, Lee Basham is surely right that the constant search for evidence of conspiracy can blind us to what is good in life. Not only does paranoia endanger us epistemically, making both error and ignorance more likely, it can also undermine our happiness.
00:50:02
Speaker
On the other hand, naivety entails the same epistemic dangers and its own distinctive moral danger. The moral danger of excessive willingness to believe authority, like the moral danger of excessive willingness to obey authority, is moral cowardice. Naivety makes it too easy for us to think that we can avoid responsibility for a state of affairs by appealing to the fact that we were not told about it. We may have had a duty to find someone who can tell us. Internet technology has made it much easier for us to fulfill this obligation. Now I want to point out there's a bit of sleight of hand here in the
00:50:31
Speaker
He's going on the one hand, Lee Basham says this thing, but on the other hand, consider this. But Lee Basham also says the stuff which is on the other hand. It's just that, at least in his earlier papers, he goes, well, look, what can you do? Pragmatically, you can't do anything against these malevolent global conspiracies. So you might as well act in a particular way. But he's also saying,
00:50:58
Speaker
Even so, we need to be vigilant because eternal vigilance is the price of our freedom. And David's not really admitting that Lee is making that claim at the same time.
00:51:13
Speaker
So what sort of effect has this had in the world of conspiracy theory theorizing? Because it seems there have been some slight sort of divisions in what we've seen, or at least people with different takes on the same thing. But this seems to be another kind of another division again. Are there schools of thought? Are there factions?
00:51:37
Speaker
Within conspiracy theory theorising, how does this go? I mean, there are factions in that you've got people like Qasam Qasam, whose work we'll get to eventually, who exist in opposition to most of the rest of us writing in the philosophy of conspiracy theory. There really isn't a faction of say, Keeley versus Basham versus Cody. There's more overlap of agreement than there is
00:52:05
Speaker
whole scale disagreement. What does happen next is David Cody produces an edited collection on conspiracy theory for Ashgate. Conspiracy theory is the philosophical debate, which this article is reprinted in as a chapter.
00:52:23
Speaker
and so very soon we'll be looking at the fruit of that particular work which includes people like Picton, like Keeley, like Basham, and like Clark. So what Cody does is generate subsequent discussion which is basically where I come in
00:52:45
Speaker
because the publication of conspiracy theories, the philosophical debate, was instrumental in getting my PhD off the ground. And that last week we talked about the Wikipedia entry on the philosophy of conspiracy theories in which you make an appearance. That's the volume, because I know David Coady came up a lot on that page. Is that specifically this volume of his that it was referring to? Yes, that's how it seemed.
00:53:15
Speaker
So there you go, more for more Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre. What the hell am I talking about? Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre episode done. And yeah, interesting to see a bit more contrary, I guess. I mean, we've seen disagreement in the other stuff we've looked at, but that seemed to be a slightly more disagreement than we're used to. But
00:53:40
Speaker
That's it for now. So next week, next week, I understand we have an interview of some sort. We do. I'll be talking with Byron Clark, who has a YouTube channel, which does some excellent work looking at alt-right material in Aotearoa, New Zealand. We will be talking about a recent interview on the Action Zelandia podcast with
00:54:04
Speaker
Kerry Bolson, who, if you don't remember who Kerry Bolson is, shame on you New Zealand listeners, and also be he's our most prominent right wing pseudo intellectual. So we'll be talking a little bit.
00:54:19
Speaker
about what he's been up to when being interviewed by our local alt-right group Action Zalandia but before then we've got a patron bonus episode coming up and of course we have to deal with the big story which occurred yesterday morning that big old explosion in Beirut now did you see did you find out about the story before or after you watched a video of the explosion
00:54:48
Speaker
No, the explosion videos were the first thing I saw. Yeah, I just saw a tweet saying you've got to watch this, and it was the first thing I did waking up. So I did, and then I went, did that just happen? What the hell was that? Which did give me a lot of memories of the morning of September 12 here, back in 2001.
00:55:09
Speaker
But we'll talk about that later on. So we'll be talking about Beirut. We'll be talking about COVID-19. We'll be talking a lot about COVID-19, truth be told. And then we've got a fascinating Jacob Wall update.
00:55:24
Speaker
hmm yep he's at it again just when you think we won't have anything to talk about he shows up and does something else but i mean this time he really has done something else this is this goes well beyond your usual jacob wall information so we've got that to look forward to
00:55:41
Speaker
Or at least you've got that to look forward to. You've got that to look forward to if you're a patron. And if you are, thank you very much. If you're not a patron, but you're still listening, thank you very much for that as well. But if you'd like to be a patron, go to patreon.com and search for the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. You get these bonus episodes, you get access to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy Discord, where we broadcast live as we record these things.
00:56:05
Speaker
Sometimes people even listen in. Sometimes they do. We do it in New Zealand evening time, which we acknowledge is not the best time for people in other parts of the world. So we're looking at maybe a special one that we do at a more accessible time slot for people in other time zones. But anyway, you get all that. So if you'd like to do that, feel free. But if you don't, keep on listening and just form our audience and bolster our egos that way. We appreciate that also.
00:56:34
Speaker
I also would like to point out that a few weeks ago, we did ask people to write in if they had issue with the drunk podcast. No one has written in to say they have issue with my drunk podcasting. So I'm assuming it's all go for even more drunken podcasting in future. So remember, you should be as drunk as possible at all times. Like drunken podcasting, you do need to get in contact because otherwise it is going to happen again.
00:57:00
Speaker
We can't stop it, quite frankly. I mean, it's just natural. These things happen. It's the laws of physics. But anyway, that's the end of this episode, I think. Good old conspiracy theory masterpiece theatre. Always keeps the content coming. So until next week, or until a moment from now, if you happen to be listening to the bonus episode after this. Or you happen to be chaining through a whole bunch of old episodes trying to catch up.
00:57:30
Speaker
It could be the future where you are. It could be centuries into the future, frankly, and you've stumbled upon this podcast and now you're binging your way through the whole lot into your subcranial brain implants or however things work. If we were the only cultural artefact left from the early 21st century.
00:57:49
Speaker
God, that wouldn't be a good look to be honest. We had to do a lot more pop culture stuff. I suppose we do have more responsibility to tell people about the future generations. We need to go on about the fact there's a Blu-ray release of Split Second coming out. And I'm so excited by the idea. Yeah. If you're asking from the future, Split Second was a very good film, possibly the best film. And that's all you need to know about movies. It was. It was the Citizen Kane of movies.
00:58:19
Speaker
anyway i think we're done i think we're done for now so i'm just gonna say goodbye and leave the rest to you and i'm going to say toodly plop plop hooray
00:58:37
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:59:38
Speaker
And remember, it's just a step to the left.