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Vice Epistemology (Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre)
36 Plays3 years ago
Josh and M review Quassim Cassam's "Vice Epistemology" from The Monist in 2016.
—
Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Josh's Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
So imagine a person called Josh. Sure, that's my name. Very convenient. Anyway, Josh is the kind of middle aged man who decided at some point five or maybe six years ago to start a podcast. I started a podcast about that time. And this Josh reviews papers on conspiracy theory theory, tearing into them and pronouncing judgment upon his intellectual peers.
00:00:26
Speaker
Well that's what we do now in our classic conspiracy theory masterpiece theatre sections. Yeah, well remember this is a hypothetical situation. Okay, seems less hypothetical the more you describe it. Anyway, this Josh hits a snag.
Reviewing a Friend's Paper: A Delicate Situation
00:00:41
Speaker
He has to review a paper by someone he knows personally, and he usually reviews papers with that person. You mean like your paper, when inferring to a conspiracy theory might be the best explanation?
00:00:53
Speaker
Well, let's say it's a hypothetical paper by a blemmenteth called a loose Bayesian approach to conspiracy theory explanations, just to make sure that this case remains in the realm of the speculative. Okay. Anyway, this Josh... Hold on, why does this hypothetical person like me still get to be called Josh, but the hypothetical person like you gets a new name?
00:01:16
Speaker
I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about Josh. You aren't Josh. Well, I mean, you are Josh. But you're not Josh, Josh. Or is it Josh Josh? Anyway, where was I? I don't know. I don't even know why we're talking about this. Actually, nor do I. All right, let's try again. So there's this hypothetical person called Oliver. Well, he sounds like a right bastard. Oh, believe me. Someone at Warwick really, really agrees with you.
Introducing Dr. Dentith from Zhuhai
00:01:53
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 in Auckland, New Zealand. They are Dr. M. Dentith sipping from a cup in Zhuhai, China.
00:02:13
Speaker
Not quite loudly enough for it to have been worth me pointing out that that's what you're doing. Give it a good slurp. You need a slurp. I do. Ah, that's the stuff. Sorry, I actually did swallow that the wrong way. Get a good aspiration, that's what we're after. That's what we call radio drama, folks. That's what we call radio drama.
00:02:36
Speaker
When you're not choking to death on whatever fluids you're choosing to imbibe, you're going to be... Which is all fluids all the time.
Keynote Excitement at Philosophy Conference
00:02:43
Speaker
I understand you're off keynoting again. I am. I'm giving a keynote this weekend at an undergraduate philosophy conference in Australasia, which is all very exciting because, I mean, I've given keynotes before to the point where I'm a bit blase about giving keynotes now, but being invited to give the opening keynote.
00:03:01
Speaker
to a conference of undergraduate students in Australasia is kind of exciting because it means, Josh, it means I am still hip and with it and down with the kids. Yeah, I'm very definitely not, but good for you. So when you say in Australasia, I assume it'll be remotely, you're not actually leaving the country.
00:03:22
Speaker
No, no. So I'll be giving a Zoom presentation at just after lunchtime in my time zone and 4.30pm in Eastern Australia. So AEDT, I believe. Eastern Australia. So about 6.30 New Zealand time, which actually isn't that relevant because I can't imagine I'll be tuning into it, but you never know.
00:03:46
Speaker
I mean, you aren't an undergraduate in philosophy, Joshua. That is unfortunately true, yes. I mean, you finished your undergraduate and then you surpassed yourself. I did, yes. You did a postgraduate study. I did a postgraduate degree, I sure did. But anyway, enough of my academic history.
00:04:04
Speaker
I suppose I have a thing as well in my spare time, as longer time listeners of this podcast will know, I like to make computer games for the youth of today to perform upon electronic devices. Sorry, I got computer games. Computer games? Computer games. Good old my six.
00:04:24
Speaker
Yeah, and that's a band, by the
Explodo Pool: Josh's New Game
00:04:28
Speaker
way. Em is not referring to their own particular brand of sex, about which I don't speak very much. Which is very much computer games. No, so I've made one.
00:04:39
Speaker
Experiment with a new tool that lets me make mobile games for Android. So I've released an Android game in the Play Store, will accept any old crap it turns out, and it's there. So if you were to go, if you, if you possess it of an Android device and were to go to the Google Play Store and search for Explodo Pool, all one word,
00:05:00
Speaker
you'll find my little game where you basically have a pool table and you tap on it which causes explosions sending the balls rocketing all around the table in a way that I'm still actually not bored of yet and I made the game. So I think I assume that means it's fun. Now for the majority of listeners I have to ask when is it coming to Apple iPhone?
00:05:17
Speaker
Um, I don't know. My, my wife has an Apple laptop. So it's possible because I'm pretty sure I can't produce. I'm pretty sure I need an Apple machine to actually produce something that will go onto the, onto the Apple store. But I think I should be able to copy my project. So it's possible. It might happen. I'm not saying it will happen, but it might happen. Or you could just buy an Android. Sure.
00:05:43
Speaker
I don't need two phones. No, but some days I wish I had none. I think that's not true. I do love my phone. Why are we talking about phones? Because I've written a game that can be played upon them. As long as it's an Android phone. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, that's that's my bit of plugging out of the way. Go look for explode a pool on the Play Store and then like, do what do all the like and subscribe and give it five stars or whatever it is you do on the air. So I'll get good reviews and then
00:06:10
Speaker
Make sure you write a review. Yeah, definitely write your review. In the Apple iTunes store for this podcast. Yeah, that's exactly what you should do. Anyway, so that's your news and that's my news. Is there any more news?
00:06:25
Speaker
No, not really. I think we should move straight on to the content, which is yet another episode of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre.
Vice Epistemology in Conspiracy Theories
00:06:33
Speaker
And this is a little like the Sunstein and the Mule paper. A classic of the genre, not because I think it's good, but because I think it's bad in a really interesting way. Well, should we get straight into it then? Indeed. Let us engage our vices and engage in advice epistemology.
00:06:54
Speaker
Welcome to Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre.
00:07:04
Speaker
Right, well, I don't know about you, but I have spent the last week trying to work up some sort of a Miami Vice reference in celebration of the fact that we're looking at the paper Vice Epistemology today, and Vice Epistemology does sound like a kind of a more sexy sort of exotic kind of epistemology, but I've had absolutely no success. I don't believe you've you've fared any better either.
00:07:29
Speaker
No, I did try my best to come up with something that will work, say, with Warwick Vice, which is where the author of this piece is currently located, not in a place called Warwick Vice. Or a person called Warwick. And I'm going, Warwick Vice, can we do some kind of British version of a Miami Vice thing? And frankly, no, just nothing. All we can guarantee is next week,
00:07:54
Speaker
will have worked out exactly what we should have done. And then we'll talk about it at length next week by the time that it's really trite and we're over it. But no, we're just going to talk about bad epistemology, which is kind of ironic. The paper is called vice epistemology. And I think the person who wrote vice epistemology is suffering from some epistemic vices, but we'll get into that.
00:08:15
Speaker
Yes, so the paper is called Vice-epistemology. It's by Kasim Kasam. It appeared in the Monast. Monast, Monast. Monast, I believe. Monast in April of 2016. Is that a philosophical journal? It is. It's a very good philosophy journal originating in the UK. Very good. Now, I might need you to take the lead on this one a bit, because I have to be honest, I didn't quite get
00:08:42
Speaker
why we're talking about this. It's just that from what I can see, this is a paper about epistemology that does talk about conspiracy theories a bit, but it isn't a paper about the epistemology of conspiracy theories, which is largely what we've looked at before. So I might need you to take me by the hand a little and lead me through it a bit more.
00:09:03
Speaker
So this is not the first time that Kasam has written on conspiracy theories. So back in the glory days of... Where is the date on this? It does not say... 2015. So back...
00:09:22
Speaker
Back in the glory days of 2015, he wrote a paper for Aeon, which is an online magazine that specializes in intellectual material called Bad Thinkers. And this was his discussion of why people believe conspiracy theories because they are gullible.
00:09:40
Speaker
Now Aeon is not a peer-reviewed publication. They're one of those publications where they approach an academic and say, look, we want you to write on this particular thing. Or the academic approaches the magazine and says, I want to write on this particular thing. And then you spend some time working with the editors to produce the final copy. So it's definitely not peer-reviewed stuff, but it's carefully curated content.
00:10:05
Speaker
At around about the same time, Kasam appeared on the podcast Flossy Bites, which is a UK podcast which interviews philosophers, and he talked about conspiracy theories and the fact they're ridden with vices on that particular podcast. So by the time that the piece in the Monast came out, many of the particularists who were doing work
00:10:28
Speaker
on conspiracy theory theory, we're aware that Kasam had particular views on what is wrong with conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists. And so in vice epistemology, he's developing a bigger project
00:10:45
Speaker
in the epistemology of vices, which is kind of a companion to the talk of virtue epistemology, which is kind of a resurrection of Aristotelian virtue discussion with an epistemic rather than ethical lens.
Oliver: A Case Study in Intellectual Vices
00:11:01
Speaker
And he spends about a third of this paper talking about conspiracy theorists who suffer from conspiracist ideation in the manner of this person called Oliver.
00:11:13
Speaker
So to a larger extent we should probably really only focus most of our time and effort today on the section on Oliver and why Oliver doesn't quite do what Kasam thinks Oliver should be doing for his argument. But before we get there let's start as we usually do. Let's start with the abstract which goes thusly
00:11:39
Speaker
Physopistemology is the philosophical study of the nature, identity, and epistemological significance of intellectual vices. Such vices include gullibility, dogmatism, prejudice, close-mindedness, and negligence. These are intellectual character vices, that is, intellectual vices that are also character traits.
00:12:00
Speaker
I ask how the notion of an intellectual character device should be understood, whether such devices exist, and how they might be epistemologically significant. The proposal is that intellectual character devices are intellectual character trays that impede effective and responsible enquiry.
00:12:20
Speaker
I argue that situationist critiques of virtue epistemology pose no significant threat to this proposal. Studies by social psychologists of belief in conspiracy theories suggest it is sometimes appropriate to explain questionable beliefs by reference to intellectual character vices. Neither regulative nor analytic epistemology has any good reason to question the epistemological significance of such vices.
00:12:48
Speaker
So yeah, I mean, in terms of this paper in and of itself, it seems to be his main thing is proving A, the existence of intellectual vices and B, the worth of looking at them, and conspiracy theories are just the lens that he's choosing to do it through, but we'll see shortly, I think, how much he ends up talking about them.
00:13:09
Speaker
So yeah, I mean, as you say, there's an introductory section and there isn't really much in it for us. So at the beginning he says,
00:13:21
Speaker
suppose you think that human beings have character, I say character trait, but I have, I know a lot of people do say tray because of this. And it's largely because I was trained by American anthropologists. And when American anthropologists talks about traits, they talk about trays. And so somehow I've continued the anthropological stuff I learned at uni. Yes, I've heard it both ways. But let's, I'll say it my way. And you say it your way. And it'll just keep things fun and interesting.
00:13:48
Speaker
You say potato. I'll say potato. We both say potato. Yeah. Potato. Potato.
00:13:56
Speaker
Tomato? Potato, yeah. Let's call the whole thing on. Indeed. Let's. And we'll start with, suppose we think that human beings have character traits and that some of these traits are intellectual character traits such as open-mindedness, thoroughness, attentiveness, dogmatism, carelessness and gullibility. Some of these character traits, the first three, tend to get classified as intellectual virtues and others, the last three, as intellectual vices.
00:14:21
Speaker
Such intellectual virtues and vices have attracted the attention of virtue epistemologists, though it's fair to say that virtue epistemologists have by and large been more interested in intellectual virtues than in intellectual vices. My aim here is to convince you, if you need convincing, that epistemologists should pay more attention to the intellectual vices.
00:14:39
Speaker
And so then the first bit is basically setting out what he intends to do for the rest of the paper, which we'll be going through. Finishing up by saying, I'll be suggesting that some of the factors that explain why intellectual character traits such as closed-mindedness, gullibility and dogmatism are intellectual vices also help to explain why processes such as wishful thinking and ignoring contrary evidence are intellectual vices.
00:15:03
Speaker
But we'll jump straight then into section two, where he starts, what then is an intellectual character vice? Rather than tackling this question head on, I think it might help to look at a concrete example. And then we meet Oliver.
00:15:18
Speaker
Do you know if there's someone he doesn't like called Oliver or is it really just a name chosen at random? Yeah, so here in lies the issue, and we'll talk about this at length once we talk about what Oliver believes, but it is interesting. We meet a hypothetical character called Oliver.
00:15:36
Speaker
which Kasam calls a concrete example. Now to my mind, when you're talking about a concrete example, you're usually talking about a real example. And yet in this case, we're given a hypothetical person with a whole bunch of hypothetical trays
00:15:52
Speaker
And then we're told, well, look, if this hypothetical person with these hypothetical trays is a bad thinker, then ipso facto, all people like this person will be bad thinkers as well. And he might go, well, fair enough, but you haven't actually shown us that this person even exists. And yet you said they're a concrete example, which means that maybe you actually don't know what you're talking about. So yes, let's meet Oliver.
00:16:19
Speaker
Oliver has an unhealthy obsession with 9-11. He spends much of his spare time reading about what he calls the 9-11 conspiracy. I'm going to interject to myself here. 9-11 was a conspiracy. It's just a matter of which conspiracy you think it was, whether it's the outside job of Al Qaeda or the inside job of, say, the American establishment, whatever you believe about 9-11, it was a conspiracy.
00:16:45
Speaker
I think he actually means conspiracy theory there. Let me return back to Kasar. And Oliver regards himself as something of an expert in the field of 9-11 studies. He believes that P, the 9-11 attacks were not carried out by Al-Qaeda and the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on the 11th September 2001 was caused by explosives planted in the buildings in advance by government agents
00:17:12
Speaker
rather than by aircraft impacts and the resulting fires. As far as Oliver is concerned, the collapse of the Twin Towers was an inside job, and specifically the result of a controlled demolition. You might not be aware, but that sound effect is in the article. Yeah, I know, it's quite amazing how he actually managed to spell it out phonetically.
00:17:38
Speaker
Right, so here's this picture of this person called Oliver who, as you say, does appear to be completely imaginary and not at all a concrete example. Now, if there are any non-philosophers in our audience anymore,
00:17:53
Speaker
That P that you mentioned is a thing where philosophy, P usually stands for proposition. And so that's sort of the label you give to the proposition that a person believes. And so then he goes on to ask, one question you might ask about Oliver is, why does he believe that P, given that P is, I take it not just false, but demonstrably false.
00:18:17
Speaker
Yeah, I kind of felt as soon as as soon as I said that expected Curtis Hagen to burst through the wall like the Kool-Aid man in those American television commercials and say demonstrably false, because he certainly didn't react well when Sunstein and familiar said that. Well, are you aware that at the moment, the of the Kool-Aid challenge
00:18:36
Speaker
No, I hope it doesn't have to do with Jones' cult. Well, yes, many, many people have made that joke. So apparently in Idaho, particularly in Boise at the moment, due to the pandemic, there are a lot of houses that are being renovated. And so people are putting up plastic sheets around the
00:18:57
Speaker
properties as they do renovation inside. So people are doing the Kool-Aid challenge of bursting through the plastic sheets like the Kool-Aid man in that ad that neither of us have ever seen because we don't live in America. No, nevertheless, it's such a part of American popular culture and therefore worldwide popular culture that we all know about it. And a part of the critic. Oh, exactly. Just about. I think pretty much every cartoon out of America by this time.
00:19:25
Speaker
Anyway, so yes, this paper, as you've probably worked out by now, just simply takes it as read that 9-11 truth conspiracy theories are just plain nonsense, completely false, and kind of by extension that all the sorts of conspiracy theories that we're talking about are complete nonsense and completely false.
00:19:50
Speaker
But he, so at this point, like I said, why does Oliver believe this? Well, if you ask him, he'll give a whole lot of reasons. He'll say, you know, he'll say jet fuel can't melt steel beams. He'll talk about, you know, there's no buildings ever collapsed by fire and blah, blah, blah, blah. And if you say, why do you believe that? And then he'll say, well, I've read, gone to these websites, I've read these articles and so on and so on and so forth.
00:20:16
Speaker
And he'll have a reason in terms of evidence and explanation for everything, but that only gets you so far. And Kasam sort of wants to say what he's saying is wrong, but why he's wrong, we possibly can't get to by simply asking, like he's not going to trip himself up by not being able to provide evidence that's unsatisfactory to himself.
Critique of Kasam's Paper
00:20:47
Speaker
So we need to look elsewhere to these character traits, I guess, is what he's getting at. Yeah, and there's something really interesting about this, because as you point out, Kasab admits that Oliver, who we have to remember, is a made-up person.
00:21:00
Speaker
presumably has arguments and reasons for believing the conspiracy theories that he does. So later on in the article it turns out that Oliver isn't just a 9-11 truther. He also denies the thesis that HIV causes AIDS and also believes that the moon landings were hooked.
00:21:18
Speaker
He's not just a conspiracy theorist around 9-11. He's a conspiracy theorist around a lot of things. He's an archetypical conspiracy theorist, at least in Kasem's view. But he seems to go, Kasem that is, that Oliver does seem to be able to provide reasons and arguments for the views that he has. But as you also point out, Kasem has said these are demonstrably false theories. So obviously, Oliver can't believe them on the basis of the evidence.
00:21:47
Speaker
there must be something intellectual about his character, which gives us a better explanation as to why Oliver believes the things he does. So yes, Kasam says, it's hard to get away from the feeling that merely outlining Oliver's defective reasons for believing that P is only scratching the surface. There's still a clear sense in which, despite knowing his reasons, we still haven't satisfactorily explained why Oliver believes that P.
00:22:14
Speaker
And then moving down a bit, a different kind of explanation is called for, and this creates an opening for the notion of an intellectual vice. Oliver explains his beliefs by reference to his reasons, but we might prefer an explanation in terms of his character, including his intellectual character.
00:22:29
Speaker
And so Cassama wanted to say that Oliver believes in these false conspiracy theories. Really the reason why he believes in them is because of his intellectual vices, because he's gullible, because he's cynical, and because he's prejudiced in his thinking. But what's problematic here, from the point of a philosophical argument, is that Cassama defines Oliver who has bad reasons to think 9-11 was an inside job. So prima facie, Oliver is just wrong.
00:22:59
Speaker
So Oliver can't be used as the conclusion of an argument which says conspiracy theorists have intellectual vices, because built into the premise, Oliver himself, is the idea that he never has good reasons to believe those theories in the first place. This is literally a case of begging the question.
00:23:19
Speaker
And it does kind of seem like he's saying evidence doesn't matter, because I feel like you could do this the opposite direction. Someone who does believe in the official theory, which I assume Cassan believes is completely correct, would also be able to appeal to a whole bunch of evidence for it, which certainly wouldn't convince Oliver, say,
00:23:45
Speaker
So it kind of feels like, you know, and so there you can say, oh, but he's right because the person who believes the official theory is right because of their intellectual virtues in coming to it. But then, of course, you can, there are situations where people have been called crazy conspiracy theorists who then turned out to be right. You know, the example you've talked about plenty in the past is people, anyone who said the NSA is spying on all our communications prior to Edward Snowden,
00:24:13
Speaker
would have been called a tin foil hat weirdo. And then Snowden releases all of his stuff and you realize, oh, actually, that that was kind of true all along. So was this person intellectually virtuous or intellectually vicious at all?
00:24:30
Speaker
Let's play a game to quote the Saw franchise. And actually, I'm borrowing this from a paper that we're going to look at in the future. So this is not my idea. This is actually the idea of another philosopher, and I'm simply getting in first in our conspiracy theory masterpiece theater. So it seems like I'm much cleverer than I am.
00:24:49
Speaker
Here is a slice of Cassam's paper where he talks about Oliver, and I'm going to read it in the first sentence with Oliver as the subject, and I'm going to read the same piece with Cassam as the subject. So the Oliver case.
00:25:07
Speaker
Oliver is certainly an inquirer. He tries on his own way to find things out and to extend his knowledge by carrying out investigations directed at answering certain questions. His questions include who was responsible for the 9-11 attacks, who planned the attacks and why were they carried out, could aircraft impacts and resulting fires have brought down the Twin Towers, if not, what actually caused them to collapse, and so on.
00:25:29
Speaker
His investigations are aimed at answering these questions, and his methods include searching the web, reading books about 9-11, and studying the video footage of the planes flying into the WTC towers. So far so good, but his investigations are blighted by his intellectual vices. Now, let's read that out about Cassat.
00:25:50
Speaker
Cassam is certainly an inquirer. He tries in his own way to find things out and to extend his knowledge by carrying out investigations directed at answering certain questions. Cassam's questions include who was responsible for the nine level attacks? Who planned the attacks and why were they carried out? Could aircraft impacts and the resulting fires have brought down the Twin Towers? If not, what actually caused them to collapse? And so on. Cassam's investigations aimed at answering these questions
00:26:17
Speaker
and his methods include searching the web, reading books about 9-11, and studying video footage of the planes flying into the WTC towers. So far so good, but Cassam's investigations are blighted by his intellectual vices. It kind of feels like you could say that about anyone, or even you could turn it around and say, you know, but
00:26:40
Speaker
But fortunately for Kasam, his efforts were bolstered by his intellectual virtues. But now we're just turning it into a... we're just shifting the grounds as to...
00:26:54
Speaker
how to know which of them is right and which is wrong. It's still... Yeah, and this is the worry here that we've got goalpost shifting going on here, that because Cassam has defined Oliver as being irrational and believing demonstrably false theories, of course it turns out any investigation he does, which is directed in the wrong direction.
00:27:16
Speaker
is going to be something blighted by an intellectual vice. But that's not the product of an argument that is built into the definition of who Oliver, the hypothetical conspiracy theorist, turns out to be. In the same respect, you might go, well, the fact that you are saying that Oliver is demonstrably wrong
00:27:34
Speaker
and that we should just ignore the arguments and evidence he puts forward for his theory. It means that you're engaging in an intellectual vice of dogmatism. You're being dogmatic about Oliver being wrong. Rather than going, let's look at what Oliver has to say and analyze whether his arguments are any good. But no, rather than do that, we say, oh, Oliver's got the wrong kind of character.
00:27:59
Speaker
And thus he can't possibly be correct in this case because his character vices mean that we should just dismiss him in cases like this. And that seems like the intellectual vice of being dogmatic. So at this point, he sort of
00:28:16
Speaker
And again, this is why I'm a little bit unsure about looking into this paper because he'll talk about conspiracy theories, but then he'll go into what to me seems to be the main point of the paper, which is that intellectual vices are a real thing and we should look at them more seriously.
00:28:32
Speaker
He quotes Linda Zagzewski, who wrote Virtues of the Mind, where she lists a whole bunch of epistemic vices, intellectual pride, negligence, idleness, cowardice, conformity, carelessness, rigidity, prejudice, wishful thinking, closed-mindedness, insensitivity to detail, obtuseness and lack of thoroughness.
00:28:50
Speaker
to which Kasan suggests we could very easily add gullibility and cynicism, and indeed possibly dogmatism. So I'm actually not quite sure why cynicism is an intellectual vice there. I think gullibility can be. Yeah, but as the opposite of gullibility, you can go too far the other way, but a healthy cynicism
00:29:12
Speaker
Needn't be a vice, yeah. Precisely. I mean, being gullible is by and large wrong, although I suppose you might also go, it might be useful political virtue to have a certain amount of gullibility in the population to allow the population to be easy to govern. But at the same time, yeah, cynicism doesn't seem like it's necessarily a vice unless, as you say, it's excessive cynicism.
00:29:38
Speaker
Yeah, I suppose you have trustworthiness as a virtue and then gullibility as the vice of being too trusting. So I think there's the virtue which is being a bit cynical and the vice which is being too cynical. I think there must be a word. There must be a word we're missing that would go there. But anyway, that's not
00:29:57
Speaker
That's not overly relevant to the point of the paper at least. He talks about, oh yeah, here's the Galileo and Schmellaleo, which I do, I like to say, not quite sure what he's getting in about that, he's talking about you have a Galileo who's
00:30:17
Speaker
not so good at attaining the truth, but Schmellaleo is close-minded, lazy and negligent, but nevertheless is better at getting at the truth. I think he wants to say that
00:30:29
Speaker
intellectual virtues don't guarantee that you're right, that everything you say is true, and that an intellectually vicious person is guaranteed to be wrong about everything. I think that's what he was getting at with that. And I mean, one of the standard criticisms against virtue epistemology, which probably also relates to vice epistemology is often, often it seems to be a kind of a kind of back
00:30:55
Speaker
So you actually already work out whether a viewer is good or bad, warranted or unwarranted to believe. And you go, oh, the people who believe the right things have the right kind of epistemic virtues. And the people who believe the wrong things have epistemic vices.
00:31:11
Speaker
And the criticism goes, yeah, but you've already done the epistemology to work out whether the views are good or bad. And then you talk about whether people have the vices or the virtues to believe them afterwards, which seems that that's something you do after the fact, not something that leads you towards that fact. And so there's a piece in the article where KSM goes, even if you are dismissive of conspiracist websites, as Oliver is of the report of the 9-11 Commission, you aren't in the same boat as Oliver epistemologically speaking.
00:31:41
Speaker
The difference is that you are giving conspiracy sources precisely the credit they rationally deserve, whereas Oliver's sense of what deserves epistemic credit and what does not is totally skewed. That once again seems to be a case of, look, I've done some research here and I know that these websites are good and the ones that Oliver refers to, Oliver the hypothetical example once again, are bad, which means that I've got the intellectual virtues because I've done the work.
00:32:08
Speaker
And you end up going, yeah, but once again, that seems to be something you're doing after the fact of having done the epistemology of looking at the evidence here. And yes, I think the Galileo Schmellalayo bit was where he says, my inquiry based approach is broadly speaking, a form of epistemic consequentialism.
00:32:26
Speaker
But not standard epistemic consequentialism. The standard consequentialist position in this area says that character virtues are truth-conducive character traits, while character vices are truth-obstructive. The former reliably produce true beliefs, the latter reliably produce false beliefs. On my account, intellectual versus vices are still delineated as such by reference to their consequences, but the consequences that matter are consequences for effective and responsible inquiry, rather than the consequences for the ratio of true to false beliefs. So yeah, he does.
00:32:56
Speaker
He's, again, wanting to say that means that you get the situation that you just, in a second ago, where you end up just saying, well, this person's intellectually virtuous, so their line of inquiry is good, and this person isn't, and so their inquiry is bad, but I still don't have any sense for why that actually is other than he says so. Yes, and once again, Oliver, for a concrete example, is fictional.
Psychological Studies and Intellectual Vices
00:33:26
Speaker
Now, I believe in section three, he acknowledges this and gets into the psychological literature. He starts by talking about
00:33:42
Speaker
The idea that skeptics of this kind of epistemology that he's putting forward would argue against the existence of intellectual character traits and go for a more situationist approach. He says, what writers in this tradition criticizes the tendency to exaggerate the extent to which such traits can be used to explain and predict how people behave in new situations while failing to recognize the importance of situational factors in affecting behavior.
00:34:09
Speaker
This is the so-called fundamental attribution error, and one question is whether virtual epistemology makes a version of this error in its account of epistemic conduct, which we think, oh, I assume Steve Clark has something to say about this as well. That's his thing, the fundamental attribution error.
00:34:24
Speaker
situational versus dispositional stuff. You compared this to the Sunstein and Vermeule paper, which has got a lot of pushback from people. Is this one that multiple people have criticized? Steve Clark has some forthcoming stuff on conspiracy theory, but he had a kind of fellow period where he wrote some papers
00:34:47
Speaker
didn't do any work in the field is now coming back to it. So I'm not entirely sure what Steve thinks about Cassham's work but I'm sure we'll find out in print very soon. So in the paper he talks about these questions around situationism and whether you should go for that or whether it's okay to believe in these
00:35:13
Speaker
intellectual virtues and vices. And at one point he does say, as far as epistemic situationism is concerned, the merits of situationism and vice epistemology have to be settled empirically by looking at actual cases of question of beliefs and trying to work out why real people have such beliefs. What we should be trying to understand, that is to say, is the epistemic conduct of real world Olivers rather than fictional Olivers.
00:35:39
Speaker
And then he basically says, and lucky for us, there's a whole bunch of psychological literature on this. And in honor of Oliver, does the empirical evidence support vice epistemology, situationism, or some mixture of the two? In honor of Oliver, I will concentrate on the psychological literature on conspiracist beliefs.
00:36:03
Speaker
Which, so again, this whole section from then on really did seem to be looking at what do psychologists say about people who believe in conspiracy theories, which does seem to be very much a generalist and take it as read that conspiracy theories are irrational. I don't know if they're doing a thing
00:36:24
Speaker
a little bit like um possibly what what Brian Keeley did with the um uh unwarranted uh sorry unwarranted mature conspiracy theory stuff where there
00:36:38
Speaker
without explicitly saying so, they've just identified a subset of conspiracies as the wacky ones, the ones that are obviously false, and that's what they're talking about now. Or whether they do actually mean that these conspiracy theorists, they're just all nonsense or not. I mean, even if they do mean the former, that's still a problem because they haven't given anything, any indication of how you might work out what's a good one and what's an obviously false one.
00:37:07
Speaker
But from here on, it also seems very, very generalist and fairly just sort of dismissive, I guess, of conspiracy theories. This is a recurrent criticism I've had of a large amount of the psychological literature on conspiracy theory, is that some psychologists just define conspiracy theories as being prima facie false.
00:37:31
Speaker
There aren't that many who make that explicit claim, in part because they're obviously wrong, because if you show one example of a conspiracy theory that turned out to be warranted, then they're in a bit of trouble, if they say, but all such things are
00:37:47
Speaker
irrational to believe, then there are the ones who go, well, they're mostly irrational to believe. And that's kind of where Kassam is getting his work from. The psychologists go, well, you know, by and large, conspiracy theories are mad, bad, and dangerous. Sure, sometimes conspiracies turn out to have occurred, but by and large, if it's labeled as being a conspiracy theory, it must be mad, bad, and dangerous to believe. And of course, that suffers from the labeling issue.
00:38:15
Speaker
which is yes the label conspiracy theories often used particularly by people in positions of power to refer to bad theories they don't like and sometimes those bad theories they don't like are indeed false but occasionally people label things as conspiracy theories even though they turn out to be warranted
00:38:35
Speaker
Allah, Bush and Blair talking about conspiracy theories about the real rationale for the invasion of Iraq back in 2003. So, Kassam is using work which defines belief in conspiracy theories as prima facie bad. So, he's not really, he's finding evidence to fit his hypothesis rather than finding evidence that supports his hypothesis.
00:39:03
Speaker
But yeah, nevertheless, this was the section where it really kind of lost me, to be honest, because here...
00:39:12
Speaker
he really is trying all the argumentation here seems to be that vice epistemology is a good idea and that looking at intellectual vices is good and what have you and it just so happens that he's chosen to talk about conspiracy theories in a dodgy questionable way to illustrate his point but is there as you suggested before that
00:39:36
Speaker
this should possibly be seen in the context of him being disparaging of specifically towards conspiracy theories in his earlier work? Well, yeah, I mean, one of the problems is, and we'll get to this in a latter episode of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre, is that his subsequent work
00:39:54
Speaker
has given up on a character-based assassination. I meant to say assessment, but assassination seems to work just as well of conspiracy theorists, and instead he uses a political lens instead to say that, look, conspiracy theories are examples of right-wing propaganda, and that's the reason why we should be skeptical of them. An argument, I think, which is just as bad as the one he's presenting here, but for completely different reasons.
00:40:22
Speaker
But this is all published work and it's going to see a lot of criticism in subsequent papers so we need to kind of look at it now to make sense of the fact that people will be talking about Kasam an awful lot in the future. And also for the sheer fact that
00:40:37
Speaker
The latter part of the paper kind of relies on us agreeing with the case study he produces of Oliver the conspiracy theorist because this is the example he uses to launch his entire boat on why we should take Oliver's gullibility to be a central vice we need to be concerned of and add it to our lexicon of vices in our vice epistemology. But if we think that Cassam's case study is fundamentally flawed
00:41:07
Speaker
in part because as a concrete example it's made up and it's packed in. So you're not just 9-11 truther. Oliver is also an HIV causes AIDS denier and you know he's a moon landing bird. He probably believes that the earth is flat and things like that.
00:41:24
Speaker
Kasam has kind of over-egged or over-salted the pot. And this is a problem here, because if you end up going, yeah, but your case example is bad, doesn't really support the conclusions you're trying to argue for here. It really does seem that he's using this to independently show that the social psychologists are right. But it looks
00:41:50
Speaker
when you actually drill down into it. Like he's assumed that they're right, and he's rigged a case study in the form of Oliver to provide support for that particular project. Yeah, I mean, this is sort of the opposite of some of the papers we've looked at before, where I agree with their general conclusion, but I'm not so, wasn't so sure about how they got there. And this one, I definitely disagree with what he's saying, but it felt a little bit like,
00:42:20
Speaker
Having read only this paper and not being familiar with anything else he said, the negative reaction to it kind of felt a bit like just the fact that he was stepping on people's toes that he was talking about. He had ventured into our region and didn't really know what he was talking about. He should go stick in his lane, which isn't
00:42:41
Speaker
the same as a different kind of a criticism. I mean, certainly when we get to the conclusion, he finishes up by saying, to sum up, I've argued that intellectual vices are clearly of epistemological interest if you conceive of epistemology as inquiry epistemology. The case for analytic epistemology to be interested in intellectual vices is less strong, but can still be made.
00:43:04
Speaker
My own sympathies are very much with inquiry epistemology and for my purposes the important point is that the epistemological significance of intellectual vices is not, or should not, be in question as far as inquiry epistemology is concerned. The interesting question is not whether, if intellectual vices exist, epistemology should be interested in them, should, but whether such vices exist as genuine character traits which affect our inquiries. My contention in this paper has been that they do.
00:43:30
Speaker
With skepticism about intellectual character out of the way, vice-epistemology can get down to the serious business of identifying and studying specific intellectual vices. Vice-epistemology is the epistemology of real human beings, and a failure to engage with the intellectual vices by which our cognitive lives are blighted represents a failure to engage with the human epistemological predicament.
00:43:50
Speaker
a conclusion which I notice does not mention conspiracies or conspiracy theories at all. Initially I said neither does the abstract, but then I looked back and there's no, he does actually say at the end of it, that's the, that's the example I'm going to be using. My theory about this is the conspiracy theory stuff was added in to the article two, to use the academic terminology, sex it up.
00:44:14
Speaker
So I think he needed an example that would be, you know, of pith and moment. Oh, actually, conspiracy theories are all the rage at the moment. I'll talk about conspiracy theorists we put in the example. And I just don't think it's a very well thought through example. And indeed, he kind of has to make the example as extreme as possible. So as hypothetical conspiracy theorists, Oliver believes an awful lot of interesting conspiracy theories.
00:44:43
Speaker
And he kind of views it, everyone's going to agree with me that conspiracy theory is a mad, bad and dangerous. And then he got the pushback against it where people are going, I don't think you're actually characterizing conspiracy theory belief particularly well here.
00:44:59
Speaker
So it is interesting that he moves away from this character-based assessment in subsequent work, although if we end up reading the book he wrote, which is quite short as well within the remit of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre to cover that book, he's very defensive about the criticism he got. Very, very defensive. Yes, I think I'll take your word for it that in context
00:45:26
Speaker
there's a bit more significance to it. I mean, it feels like he still could have made all the same points and reached the same conclusion and had the same argument with a completely different example, say, I don't know, religious extremism or something. And then we wouldn't be talking about it at all. And he might have pissed off a whole bunch of theists or something instead.
00:45:44
Speaker
I mean, I'm, I'm not necessarily again virtue or vice epistemology as an approach I mean there are, there are some legit criticisms of virtue vice epistemological stance, some of which we've talked about here means a section where
00:46:01
Speaker
Kasam is replying to Marc Alfano, who takes a much more situationalist idea about how we should talk about these things. There's a big debate in epistemology as to whether virtue epistemology and now the new field of vice-epistemology
00:46:16
Speaker
is good or bad, but I'm not necessarily a Ginnit. I think there is something interesting about character traits with respect to our epistemic status. I suspect I do this because I'm actually very sympathetic towards virtue ethics and the idea that you train the child through inculcation of virtue. I think that's actually how we bring children up.
00:46:39
Speaker
And I think that it also explains how our ethics works in a lot of day-to-day activities. Historically, virtue ethics has had an awful lot of criticism because it's a really great idea. Actually cashing out how it works, incredibly difficult. I think the same thing is true with virtue epistemology as well. But I'm not a ginnit. I keep repeating it. I'm not a ginn the idea of a virtue or vice epistemology.
00:47:05
Speaker
I just don't think this paper is very good. No, no, I would definitely agree there. And yes, if, as you say, it's going to get referred to a lot, then it's a good thing that we've looked at it now. Yes, because not not every masterpiece is a great paper.
Philosophical Merits of Virtue and Vice Epistemologies
00:47:22
Speaker
Sometimes they're important, which is why they're a masterpiece, but that doesn't mean it's an endorsement when we put it into our list.
00:47:29
Speaker
Indeed. So I think that's all we need to say about vice epistemology for now. Until such time as we come up with a decent, some sort of a Miami Vice kind of a reference, which of us would be Crockett and which would be Tubbs? Because whoever's in Tubbs has to do blackface and we'll immediately get canceled and we'll have to kill the podcast. Right. So have you ever watched the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode where they make a new Lethal Weapon film?
00:47:57
Speaker
I have not. So in that, and because it's always sunny, and Philadelphia likes to tackle complex problems like this, and actually usually tackles them quite well, because the Lisa Weapon Films, of course, have a Caucasian and African-American co-leads,
00:48:16
Speaker
and the two characters in the show who want to be the stars are both Caucasian. They had to keep on swapping between which one's Mel Gibson and which one is Denny Glover. And so one of them decides to do Denny Glover in Blackface and the other when they're playing the Denny Glover character does it in Black Voice and they have huge debates
00:48:39
Speaker
in the episode itself as to which is actually a worse racist caricature, putting on blackface or putting on black voice. And it's actually quite an interesting debate because you're not meant to think there's a right answer, you're meant to think they're both horrifically wrong.
00:48:58
Speaker
But it's interesting seeing people debating the merits of whether they are slightly less racist in the caricature than the other person. Also, I see that Mel Gibson is going to direct another lethal weapon film. So I hear, yes. He's the reason why I won't be watching the John Wick TV series. There's only in that as well.
00:49:17
Speaker
Yeah and I have decided I'm just not going to watch anything that Mel Gibson is in so I'm sorry the John Wick TV series is dead to me. I'm a little bit over John Wick to be honest. I did like the analysis of it that says it's a fairy story. Like people say it's an action film, it's a crying film and then people say no, it's closest to a fairy story. John Wick is one of the fairy folk. He lives in this
00:49:44
Speaker
this other world that seems completely invisible to the rest of us. He's paid in gold coins. He can be bound by a blood pact. All the elements of it make it more like a character from a fairy tale than any other genre.
00:50:03
Speaker
And I don't really need any more of it, to be honest. And like most decent fairy tales, it's probably going to end quite horrifically. I know that the director of the latest set of films is going, you do realise the final film will not end well for John Wick. I mean, it's not a world you can just walk away from. He's probably going to die.
00:50:26
Speaker
Well, I mean, other people have talked about the whole thing as being sort of a metaphor for alcoholism or some other sort of addiction where, as I pointed out, every decision John Wick makes is the wrong one. Everything he does just makes his life worse and more complicated and leads to more suffering for him.
00:50:44
Speaker
Anyway, welcome to the podcaster's guide to the John Wick series of films. Yes, so our descent into pop culture analysis means that we've reached the end of the episode. So before we wrap things up here, of course, we have to introduce the bonus episode that we'll be recording immediately after we stop this one. We've got Alex Jones updates, we've got Salvatore Monday updates, we've got COVID-19 stuff.
00:51:11
Speaker
It'll be a laugh riot, I'm sure. Probably not, but yeah, let's try and make it. It'll be a thing, yes. Anyway, if you want to hear about Alex Jones' Salvatore Monday and more COVID-19 stuff, and you're a patron, then you're in luck. That's what's going to be showing up in your podcast feed immediately after this episode. If you'd like to become a patron, just go to patreon.com and search for the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy.
00:51:35
Speaker
And that, I believe, is all we need to say for this week. Indeed. I think it's only one thing to say to close out this episode. Well, the only thing I can possibly think of would be goodbye. Salvatore Mundi. All the lonely people. But anyway, goodbye. Thank you, Jenny, everybody.
00:52:03
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy is Josh Addison and me, Dr. M. R. X. Denterth. You can contact us at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please do consider supporting the podcast via our Patreon. And remember, Soylent Green is meeples.