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Applied Epistemology with Aaron Rabinowitz
33 Plays2 years ago
Josh looks at M and Brian's jointly-authored "The Applied Epistemology of Conspiracy Theories", accompanied by Aaron Rabinowitz of the "Embrace the Void" podcast.
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On Twitter, Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism
On Mastodon, M is @conspiracism@scholar.social and Josh is @monkeyfluids@mstdn.social
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Biography
00:00:05
Speaker
The Podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy featuring Josh Addison and Em Dent. Hello, you're listening to The Podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy. I am Josh Addison coming to you from Auckland, New Zealand. And with me today is Aaron Rabinowitz, Professor of Moral Philosophy and host of the Embrace the Void podcast. How are you, Aaron? I'm doing all right. Thank you so much for having me on.
00:00:33
Speaker
Yeah, well, thank you for taking the time to come here because this obviously is a slightly different episode.
Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre
00:00:39
Speaker
We have a Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre episode to get through. Now, in the past, when we've had a paper that M has written, then we'd do a thing where Brian Kelly would come in and Brian and I would look at the paper
00:00:56
Speaker
And so we thought of it. This is a tricky one because the thing we're looking at today was joint written by Em and Brian. So that's why we've had to go further afield to get another one. Quite the conspiracy. It is, it is. So I think when we do the Brian ones, we sort of have this conceit where Brian and I are calling in from some sort of alternate dimension where we've been posting the podcast all this time. I think Em wanted us to do a similar thing.
00:01:22
Speaker
to suggest that we are from yet a third alternate dimension, but Ian's not here.
Evolving Views on Conspiracies
00:01:27
Speaker
And what I'm interested in is what is basically your take on this sort of thing, because you have probably a fresher set of eyes to all of this than I do. Well, yeah, I'm thinking from another dimension. It's obviously got an outsider's perspective here.
00:01:43
Speaker
Yeah, no. And I don't know what you're going to do when it inevitably happens that Em and I publish something together, who you're going to drag in. I don't even know. That's a problem for the future. But yes, no, that'll be something.
00:01:59
Speaker
future and or alternative reality you yeah exactly someone else yeah so it's been funny because I've been doing sort of work on conspiracism for a little while and recently got in touch with em via
00:02:15
Speaker
them messaging me after seeing some articles of mine and send me some articles of theirs with some pushback. And while I still stand by my original articles, I've certainly had my approach shifted by discussing things with Em.
Reality and Irrationality of Conspiracies
00:02:29
Speaker
So I guess I feel like the headline of my approach at this point is that like,
00:02:36
Speaker
It does seem like particularism is true with regard to conspiracy theories and that sucks for everybody and that things are just going to continue to kind of get worse as a result of that fact. So that's that's where I'm at. How about you?
00:02:48
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. The thing I see people say a lot is there's this desire to say, we're talking about conspiracy theories and they're obviously nonsense. And then people say, well, actually, hang on. There are plenty that are true. And we look at
00:03:08
Speaker
the Volkswagen emissions scandal or the Tuskegee experiment, point to all these things and say this happened, and then people will say, okay, yes, fine, sure. But we don't even know those ones. You know the ones we mean. We're talking about, quote unquote, those conspiracy theories that are the wacky ones.
00:03:23
Speaker
And when you come and try to define or come up with a set of sort of properties that say, this is the kind of conspiracy theories that we can write off as being irrational, whatever, have you, I'm yet to see an approach that's worked. Yeah. And I'm sympathetic to that pushback, though I think at the end of the day, the conclusion there then has to be that we don't really have a way to
00:03:47
Speaker
undermine fully any conspiracy theories.
Harm and Complexity of Conspiracy Theories
00:03:50
Speaker
And I'm not sure what that should mean for us in terms of what we actually end up believing about any of these subjects. But like I also simultaneously think that it does seem clear to me that there are a variety of conspiracy theories that you ought not to believe that you have, I would say good reason not to believe, and that are harmful to believe. So squaring all of those things is definitely challenging.
00:04:14
Speaker
Yeah, a lot of the time it seems it just sort of shifts the problem a little bit. If you say you shouldn't believe conspiracy theories that are, I don't know, implausible, then the question just becomes, well, how, how plausible is plausible and how do we define that? And we've just changed one problem of definition for another one. But anyway, let's, let's, let's start looking at this paper.
Applied Epistemology in Conspiracy Theories
00:04:35
Speaker
Great.
00:04:40
Speaker
So we have the applied epistemology of conspiracy theories and overview. This is chapter 21 of the Routledge Handbook of Applied Epistemology that Em and Brian worked on together. And I find sort of
00:04:55
Speaker
We've been looking, Em and I have been looking at the various papers that have come out in the philosophy of conspiracy theories for a while, and it's got to the point that we've got far long enough that most of the papers we look at will contain within them sort of an overview of everything that's come before, sort of a summary of the whole off.
00:05:17
Speaker
which can be handy, which does mean we're looking at these ones. I tend to skip over things fairly quickly because there's stuff we've looked at before, but you might have some newer insights in them. But this certainly is an overview.
00:05:30
Speaker
Yeah I mean I think this introduction is valuable because it sort of highlights the concerns that like there's really good reasons for us to I think want some way to undermine belief in harmful conspiracy theories like the protocols of the elders of Zion there are
00:05:48
Speaker
you know, well-established connections between these conspiracy theories and things like the Holocaust. So we know that, or you know, January 6th, like we know that belief in conspiracy theories can motivate harmful behavior. And that some of these at least, I think we have reason to believe are false.
00:06:05
Speaker
And so at the same time, we have this sort of series of failed attempts to try to come up with a functional kind of generalism with reference to things like vice epistemology. And I do think that's really interesting as like a virtue theorist, which is my background in moral psychology and moral philosophy. I'm sympathetic to a virtue theory approach. I'm sympathetic to habituating people to believe
00:06:34
Speaker
in ways that are helpful, healthy, beneficial, stuff like that. But I also am sympathetic to the pushback from folks like Em, that there's not anything fundamentally vicious about believing in conspiracy theories in the modern age.
00:06:50
Speaker
Hmm. So this chapter begins, in some sense, conspiracy theories have been around as long as people have plotted secretly in the attempts to bring about ends and situations where doing so publicly and individually would seem less likely to succeed. In other words, conspiracy theories have likely been around as long as humans have conspired, probably since Homo became sapiens.
00:07:11
Speaker
However, with the coming of the 21st century, especially in a political context, concern over conspiracy theories has seemingly taken on an urgent tone. There have always been concerns over conspiracies, whether it be the Freemasons of the 18th century, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the 19th century, or the red scare and the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in the 20th century. But now some feel the need to talk of conspiracy theories and the conspiracy theorists who hold them as a social problem in need of a solution.
00:07:37
Speaker
which I think gets to what you were just saying. There are different problems, different social ills that we can identify coming back to these. I don't even know looking down if it comes up in this particular paper, but I think one of the pushbacks is the social ills of being too quick to write off conspiracy theories as a way that then can allow people in power to get away with stuff and write off their detractors. But we might come to that later.
00:08:07
Speaker
And I think there's a couple of good points to bring up in here, which is that psychologically, as social creatures, we are predisposed to be looking out for conspiracies amongst our fellow social creatures. That's not necessarily a maladaptive approach.
Political Influence on Conspiracies
00:08:25
Speaker
And I also that there is
00:08:26
Speaker
it does seem to me a modern problem of conspiracism. And my interpretation of it at this point is that when you start to see really radical social upheaval and progress in the modern period, the overthrowing of aristocratic systems, you see conservatives in particular
00:08:49
Speaker
turning to conspiracy theories about Jews and things as a way to explain what seems impossible to them, which is the idea that people just want equal rights, and that seems crazy. So it must be the Jews. So I think, you know, broadly speaking, a lot of conspiracism that we are worried about in the modern world is conspiracism on the political right because of the way that it fuels fascist backlash like World War II, like the Holocaust, and
00:09:18
Speaker
January 6th, and that that conspiracism is a reaction to genuine social progress, that they're looking for an explanation for why things are getting worse as far as they can tell in a system that they believe is theoretically a just universe.
00:09:33
Speaker
Yes, I think papers like this take a very theoretical approach, I guess, when, as you say, and we seem to be seeing more and more, although I don't know if that's just a sort of recency bias, that there are tangible and wide-ranging effects to some of these things.
00:09:52
Speaker
right there's there's debates about whether it's a moral panic and I you know like I do think that there is some amount of panicky discussion of conspiratorial thinking I don't think it's you know part of the reason I've been persuaded by Emma's work is I do think there is a very lazy approach to generalism and the writing off of conspiratorial thinking but I also think
00:10:12
Speaker
you know, Contra studies that suggest that there hasn't been a rise. I think there's been a sea change in the way that conspiracism plays a role
Historical Comparisons
00:10:21
Speaker
in right-wing American politics that's been growing since the 60s, but that has really peaked in the modern age in a way that I think should be genuinely unnerving. And that could be intensity, that could be elite usage, you know, there's lots of ways that could show up.
00:10:35
Speaker
Yeah, it's definitely the case that something feels different. People say that a lot. I know when Em's talked to Joe Ucinski, who has been surveying people on sort of conspiracy beliefs, I've heard Joe say when people say, things are a lot more conspired now, he'll reply, really? More conspired than the Red Scare? I mean, when you had an actual House Un-American Activities Committee fueled by these sort of conspiracies, but I've done it yet.
00:11:03
Speaker
There's the whole social aspect, I think, that you see. There's the internet and everything mixing in there does seem to give it a different quality these days.
00:11:12
Speaker
I don't think we've left the Red Scare. I think if you look at the CRT queer theory moral panics, they are the continuation of the Red Scare. Again, the Red Scare is heavily driven alongside fear of civil rights. I think the fear of communism and the fear of racial equality went hand in hand in America.
00:11:37
Speaker
and there was a violent backlash against both that was often conspiratorially minded, anti-Semitic, etc. So, returning to the paper, they essentially, having given this introduction, say that when you look at the history of how people have analyzed conspiracy theories, there tends to be this assumption that there's something wrong with them, there's something wrong with conspiracy theories, or there's something wrong with conspiracy theorists.
00:12:02
Speaker
But the problem with that, of course, is that conspiracies do occur. There have been things, the likes of your Watergates, which were initially written off as conspiracy theories, but turned out to be true. So we know from the start, we can't make a blanket statement that every single conspiracy theory is wrong. So then the job becomes, how do we sort the good ones from the bad ones?
00:12:24
Speaker
This chapter suggests that the phrase they use is that's a mug's game. I don't know if that's a transatlantic expression, a mug's game. It comes across, I understand.
00:12:35
Speaker
So they say, more significant, though, is our belief that the question of which theories to accept and which to reject is, in an important sense, ill-formed, to see why one must reflect on the observation that perhaps unlike theories in the sciences, if there is knowledge of conspiracy theories, it's largely improvised knowledge. And that's a phrase that will be coming up a little bit later on.
00:12:56
Speaker
But first, like all good philosophers, they start with a bunch of defining terms. So section two is conspiracy theories defined, where they come up with a definition that will be familiar to listeners of this podcast, at least the very general minimalist one, they just give it as
00:13:13
Speaker
There exists or existed some set of agents with a plan. Steps have been taken by the agents to minimize public awareness of what they're up to. And some end is or was desired by the agents. So there's a very, very, very wide ranging and all encompassing definition, which I think is where a lot of people, it's something people have a problem with. How would you define conspiracy theory?
00:13:38
Speaker
Yeah, I'm actually sympathetic to the very broad definition. I want to mention, I think it's totally fair and to their credit to highlight the kind of pathologizing of the conspiratorial mindset. This is something that I see both in the education work that I do in the like post truth
00:13:58
Speaker
theorizing and also in, like, skeptic circles. It's implicit in the idea you often see in, like, even, like, well-meaning skeptics who don't think that they're pathologizing, when you ask them, like, what's the solution to conspiracy, they'll often say, well, teach more critical thinking when people are younger, which implies that the fault, right, in the conspiratorial mindset is a lack of critical thinking, that if you get that in there, then you won't have this problem. And so it is this kind of deficit
00:14:27
Speaker
approach to thinking about conspiratorial reasoning that I think is questionable, that is probably unjustified in certain cases. I think there's good reason to think that people with a lot of critical thinking can also end up in a conspiratorial place, especially in a society where it's increasingly plausible that there are
00:14:46
Speaker
actually conspiracies out there. As to this definition, I like it. I like the idea of stripping out the attempts to build a negative feature into a conspiracy.
00:15:03
Speaker
that, like, what we literally mean by a conspiracy is just some people doing some stuff together in secret towards a goal. I have certainly harassed Em a little bit about pieces of this, like, is really, is all three of these actually essential, right? You know, what about this edge case? What about that edge case? But if anything, those are attempts to broaden the definition even more, not to narrow it.
00:15:25
Speaker
So
Defining Conspiracy Theories
00:15:26
Speaker
yeah, I don't have any problem with a very broad definition. I'm fine with calling a birthday party a conspiracy theory, for example. I think that's a useful way to push back on assumptions about what is and isn't a conspiracy theory.
00:15:41
Speaker
Yeah, and I think once again, the more you try to qualify it, the more it shifts the problem or the more it introduces new problems as you have to try and say what you mean about these extra conditions that you try to put on it. So, yes, that's the... I mean, this is M's standard definition and Brian's, I guess, so it's no real surprise that they come up with that one. But they then go on to, in the next section, introduce the idea of the generalist versus the particularist approach.
00:16:07
Speaker
Yeah. One thing we should say, I think it's interesting about the number two on this particular definition. Steps have been taken by the agents to minimize public awareness of what they are up to. That's softer than I've seen it put sometimes, which is that the thing is kept secret. Minimize public awareness could be
00:16:28
Speaker
It's like, for example, I guess the Rwandan genocide, right? You have sort of a mix of secret behaviors, but also like broadcasts about who to attack and when and that sort of thing. So you could argue that that's, that still counts as a conspiracy theory, even though it's a conspiracy, even though it's not completely kept secret.
00:16:51
Speaker
Yeah, we see that a bit in the corporate world as well sometimes. Companies are doing things that technically aren't secret or sort of the webs of ownership between different, you know, who actually owns what, policies like planned obsolescence and so on, which are not actually kept secret, but they're certainly not, they're not promoted, they're not put out there. And they would shed no tears if nobody actually found out about this stuff. So yes, it can be a little more murky in that area.
00:17:21
Speaker
I also wonder about one, there exists or existed some set of agents with a plan. Is some set of agents including a set of one? Could you have a conspiracy? That's the thing you and I talked about a long time ago when we were first coming up with this stuff that it does feel strange sometimes to
00:17:39
Speaker
If the idea that you could have a person plotting this particular sort of action, and that's not a conspiracy, but two people doing the exact same thing now it is, it does seem a little bit odd. And then you get into those weird edge cases. If they've mentioned it to someone else, is it a conspiracy? Do they have to be actively involved? Yeah, there is room for a little bit of wiggle room there.
00:18:02
Speaker
if you had a person with split brain and half their brains were conspiring with each other. If you had an artificial intelligence, if it's by itself versus if it makes a copy of itself and conspires with that copy. Yeah, that's a good philosophy for talk there.
00:18:20
Speaker
Just call them problems. Yep. So they move on to introduce the idea of the generous versus the particularist approach, mentioning the paper by Joel Bunting and Jason Taylor that introduced the terms.
Generalists vs. Particularists
00:18:33
Speaker
As they put it, by they, I mean, Eamonn Bryan put it, according to the generalist, the rationality of conspiracy theories can be assessed without considering particular conspiracy theories. On this view, conspiratorial thinking, choir conspiracy thinking is itself irrational.
00:18:48
Speaker
The Particularist, however, denies that the rationality of conspiracy theories can be assessed without first considering particular conspiracy theories. That is to say, the Particularist claims that no matter our views about conspiracy theories generally, we cannot dismiss particular conspiracy theories. Rather, we must evaluate them on their individual merits, which is, I think, the definitions we're both familiar with.
00:19:11
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like I want to maybe tweak a little bit the generalist definition there because I feel like there's a that's kind of like a very, very strong generalist position, which just says the mere positing of a conspiracy theory of any sort can be dismissed.
00:19:28
Speaker
you know, merely being a conspiracy theory. Maybe there are some people who buy that, but I think if we're being generous to the generalist position, right, what most of them are going to say are,
00:19:43
Speaker
There are certain features that we can notice that are red flags that should give us a very high burden of proof or high levels of skepticism with regard to a particular theory. So classic examples would be things like if the theory involves thousands of people being in on it without it ever leaking out. That seems highly implausible. I know that Emma and other folks have talked about
00:20:11
Speaker
features that we might think that make a conspiracy theory look in this kind of general sense unlikely or something.
00:20:18
Speaker
Yeah, I think possibly you could say that a generalist who uses that particular definition, that conspiracy thinking is itself irrational, is probably not using the kind of definition of conspiracy theory that Em and Brian just introduced above. They're probably of the sort that, when they say conspiracy theories are irrational, they specifically mean those kinds that we have trouble defining, which is why we go for the general one, but yes.
00:20:46
Speaker
And so then the final section, I think, of term definitions is section four, conspiracy theory theorists and conspiracists, where they bring up those two particular terms. They say that conspiracy theory theorists exist in philosophy, but also in political science, mentioning Joe Youcinski and Joseph Parent, Karen Douglas from the field of social psychology, Jaxi Bratich from media studies and so on.
00:21:12
Speaker
and then divides the conspiracy theory theorists into conspiracy theory skeptics. Sorry, it doesn't divide. It says that among the conspiracy theory theorists, some of the varieties are conspiracy theory skeptics, who they define as generalists, who believe there is
00:21:33
Speaker
not sufficient rationality underlying conspiracy theories such that any theory of them is worth pursuing. And then also conspiracists, which is the label they use for the contemporary, the more contemporary sort of more colloquial pejorative sense of conspiracy theorists. The, I think, as they put it, people who have a pathological belief in a conspiracy without any sort of evidence, which
00:21:59
Speaker
What do you think it takes on these distinctions in this section? Yeah, I'm not sure. I think it's possibly because they want to talk about the pathologizing, I think perhaps. They talk about the charge of conspiracism, the idea that it's something you can accuse a person of.
00:22:19
Speaker
And I think they just want to—they want to have the terminology to be able to talk about conspiracy theorists and not have that immediately be assumed to be a pejorative term. But they still want to have the term conspiracists so that they—to make it clear when they're specifically talking about this negative sort of pejorative view of it.
00:22:40
Speaker
Yeah, I remember I think them saying that they didn't necessarily want to abandon the term conspiracy theorist itself because that would reinforce the cultural norms that it was pathological. I tend to use the term conspiracism but not in a pejorative sense just because I find it to be more
00:22:58
Speaker
like, smooth linguistically than saying the word conspiracy theory or conspiracy theorists over and over again, just talking about conspiracism just being the kind of proliferating belief in conspiracies, whether that's reasonable or unreasonable.
00:23:12
Speaker
Yes, I wonder if a little bit, it's because I do know that the very first paper Brian wrote on this topic, I think, as Em and I saw as we sort of looked at the papers that came after it and the reactions to it, a bunch of the reactions seem to sort of get Brian wrong a little bit in some cases, and part of it was because
00:23:30
Speaker
In the paper, Brian would switch between using the term conspiracy theory as a general term and then also talking about a particular kind of conspiracy theory that he had a problem with in that early paper. I think maybe he learned his lesson there, and they really want to be absolutely certain when they're talking about conspiracy theories in general versus ones that people might think are suspect, or conspiracy theorists in general, and ones that people might think are getting something wrong.
00:23:56
Speaker
But so, now we move into section five, how likely are conspiracy theories?
Investigating Conspiracies
00:24:02
Speaker
My first reaction was sort of who cares? If we are taking a particularist position, then surely whether or not conspiracy theories are common, that's more of a general fact that doesn't really
00:24:15
Speaker
matter. That was my first thought, but then I see they get into the idea of their issues around burden of proof, for instance, and how it might color your approach, I guess.
00:24:28
Speaker
Yeah I mean this is for me where things start to really get off the rails in a big way I feel like because I don't think we have an ability like you know it used to be when I would talk about conspiracy theories I would say look we do not want to get into a particular place where we have to like assess the
00:24:45
Speaker
plausibility of individual conspiracy theories because A, you're going to be chasing down rabbit holes forever, and B, you may not have an ability to assess the likelihood of alien life being covered up by the government. I don't even know how you would start to begin to assess the likelihood of something like that, but given that I do think we are stuck in that particular place now, I think
00:25:10
Speaker
I don't see that we have a clear answer to this question. I think it means, you know, similar to what you're saying, that like, once you've abandoned generalism, you're fucked on answering the question of like, how likely are these conspiracy theories? And what does that mean is an interesting question. Yes, I, I'm guessing I think possibly just the main purpose of this, this section is to get into the sorts of stuff that Lee Basham has talked about in terms of sort of the
00:25:40
Speaker
the societies and the world we live in and what that says about our attitudes towards conspiracy theories. Because obviously, I mean, there's a sort of a cultural, social context when it comes to these sorts of things. There are times and places that it's sort of been well known are more conspired
00:26:00
Speaker
than they are now. Having spent time in Romania talks about there's a period there where there was, you know, the secret police disappearing people and stuff like that. You knew full well if you lived in that society, that conspiracies were going on all the time. And there's been talk about sort of the African American attitudes towards COVID vaccines and so on, because these are people coming from a place that the Tuskegee happened, the Tuskegee experiments happened to that sort of
00:26:28
Speaker
section of society so that it does cover what you think about these things.
00:26:33
Speaker
Yeah. And that's why I particularly say that we're fucked these days is because I do feel like colonialism, for starters, is a, you know, centuries long massive conspiracy that is right there, you know, often out in the open, but often secret in various ways, too. And, you know, makes a reasonable sort of case for distrust. You know, I think capitalism is often, you know, like
00:27:00
Speaker
resplendent with various conspiracies. You certainly have racial conspiracies in America up through probably the present. You could argue that there's racial elements to things like the Proud Boys at January 6th and stuff like that. So yeah, I do think your context matters and the modern context is bad, not just because of the internet, but because
00:27:26
Speaker
we actually have more knowledge of the history of real conspiracies. So I watched the Better Way anti-vaxxer conference recently for the skeptic writing articles for them. And they referenced the story, which is a true story about America using a polio vaccine drive to do DNA testing secretly to catch Osama bin Laden. And that's a real thing that happened.
00:27:48
Speaker
And it's horrible that it happened, and it's terrible that it's now public, and that it undermines belief in vaccinations, it undermines trust in governments. Watergate is one version of this, but I think we just have so many of them now. And then you add in social media and it becomes plausible that there's lots of this stuff happening out there.
00:28:11
Speaker
Yeah, so as Eamonn Bryan put it, in a world where people conspire all the time, it would be inappropriate to dismiss talk of conspiracy theories generally. In such a world, the evidence and incidence of past conspiratorial activity should inform our judgments about the possibility of a conspiracy occurring here and now.
00:28:28
Speaker
This in turn means we should take any claim of conspiracy, a conspiracy theory, in such a world seriously. Nothing about this story tells us that the conspiracy theory in question will be warranted, because even in a highly-conspired world, some, if not many, conspiracy theories may still turn out to be false.
00:28:45
Speaker
Which leads him into the talk of Lee Basham, who I remember one of his earliest papers sort of making the point. We can imagine what it would look like to live in a world where we're certain that no conspiracies are happening and it doesn't look like the world we're living in right now.
00:29:02
Speaker
Right. I struggle to imagine what that world would look like. Well, exactly, yeah. They say, Lee Basham-Fon has explored how our idea of the prior probability of conspiracy affects our belief of whether theories about conspiracies are worth investigating, which
00:29:19
Speaker
This seems to be changing tack a little bit, talking about which theories are worth investigating is different, whereas up until now it's kind of been which theories are rational to believe in. This seems to be taking a step back to what we should bother looking at at all.
00:29:37
Speaker
Or maybe a step forward in the particular sense, right? We've accepted that like, we have to explore, we have to investigate these theories. So the question is, which ones are worth investigating? The worst case scenario would be all of them, right? If we have to investigate all of them, we're in a bad way, it seems like. I don't know how particularists avoid that problem. Like it seems to me that, you know, there isn't a solution there, but yeah.
00:30:01
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. Em does seem to bite the bullet on that one. I mean, Em has said in the past that look if
00:30:08
Speaker
If it really was true that shape-shifting reptilians are controlling the planet, we would want to know about that. But from there, I don't know where you go. And I don't know. I haven't really seen much talk about when we talk about investigating how much investigation is required. If you have a theory that magical pixies are responsible for something, will we have no reason to believe that
00:30:32
Speaker
magical pixies exist, so is that it? Can we stop our investigation right there or do we have to go further?
00:30:39
Speaker
Yeah, I struggle to understand what investigate means in this context, right? Like, let's say I'm trying to answer the question of whether there's aliens being hidden by the American government. Like, it seems like a nonstarter as an investigation topic for me as an individual, right? I can go online, I can read a bunch of stuff, you know, most of it's going to be unreliable, right? I can try to physically track down evidence that's going to be unreliable, right? I can
00:31:04
Speaker
And I also I think it seems like have a reasonable inference that if there is this conspiracy and it has been maintained for this period of time, I'm not going to be able to crack it. I'm not an expert in any of the things that would make me able to crack it. So I'm not sure what's meant by we should investigate it here.
00:31:25
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. That isn't really a direction that they explore in this particular paper. I think in this section there, I think they're more just talking about this whole idea of prior probabilities and what that says about things. And also, I'm never quite sure when I read through, because I've only been exposed really to the philosophy side of things when there's a lot of work going on in social psychology and stuff like that.
00:31:50
Speaker
And some of that are things that the likes of Emma are reacting to here. So in particular, because they say things like in this section, why is it important to make claims about the prior probability of conspiratorial activity? Well, a notable feature of the academic debate about the supposed irrationality of belief in conspiracy theories
00:32:09
Speaker
is how various theorists account for cases of warranted conspiratorial activity in the historical record. Turns out that whatever your definition of conspiracy, you might have to explain away how examples of known conspiratorial activity and theories about that activity are either not really conspiracies or not the proper subject of conspiracy theories.
Historical Impact on Modern Perceptions
00:32:27
Speaker
So I wonder if that's, I wonder if this section is aimed a little bit more perhaps at the, some of the other disciplines where they do tend to take a much more
00:32:37
Speaker
generalist view, and they're trying to sort of gently poke some holes and point out some of the problems in that. Yeah, I mean, I think it's an interesting question. Before this, I was prepping for another chat that I'm going to be doing with an ancient aliens podcast. And I was watching an ancient aliens episode that happens to talk about the founders and their connections to the ancient aliens, you know, and all the usual stuff via the Freemasons and things like that. And right, we
00:33:02
Speaker
we all accept that the conspiracy of the Boston Tea Party happened. That was a conspiracy and it was aimed at achieving a specific goal. I think we all probably accept that a lot of the founders or some amount of the founders were Freemasons, that they were involved in these kind of secret societies, quote unquote, which had varying degrees of
00:33:23
Speaker
you know, significance in terms of social connections, if nothing else, right? And then, like, how do we know to then draw the line between that and the reason they did those things was because they were in contact with ancient aliens, right? Like, that seems an intuitive bridge too far, but if, you know, we're taking seriously this idea that, like, what seems a bridge too far is societally constructed, why should we actually treat it as a bridge too far?
00:33:50
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that might come into some of the next section that they go into because the next section is called conspiracy theories as improvised knowledge. And they, I think, are trying to sort of compare conspiracy theories to scientific theories and perhaps give us some idea about how we could get into investigating them when compared to how we investigate scientific theories.
00:34:15
Speaker
So they say, in some sense, conspiracy theories are theories like any other. Yet there's something special about the term conspiracy theory. Take, for example, scientific theories. There are an awful lot of scientific theories being generated on a daily basis, many of which, in the fullness of time, will turn out to be false. The process of assessing scientific theories is one of sorting out the wheat from the chaff.
00:34:35
Speaker
Yet we do not think of scientific theories as inherently prima facie unwarranted. Rather, we realize that the process of discovering scientific truths requires postulating new theories, testing said theories, and abandoning bad theories for good ones. So there's a little bit, and I know there was an earlier paper where I did a similar thing about religious theories suggesting that the way we treat them is different from how, from sort of the limitations of whatever we put on
00:35:00
Speaker
conspiracy theories, but they go on to say that where conspiracy theories are different from scientific theories are in terms of what calls for investigation or perhaps even merits a skeptical response.
Comparison to Scientific Theories
00:35:13
Speaker
So they say this points to the, quote unquote, improvised element of the epistemology of conspiracy theories. In the case of science and medicine, there's a clearly defined group of experts as well as a means of disseminating knowledge, and the rest of us non-experts are supposed to ingest and trust those results.
00:35:29
Speaker
But this is not the case when it comes to those phenomena conspiracy theories tend to be about. Yet there are investigative reporters and official agents, sorry, yes, there are investigative reporters and official agencies, but it is a much more haphazard epistemic system because there are no recognized experts in these things we call conspiracy theories. Not really sure what such an expert would look like, though.
00:35:49
Speaker
Yeah, like am I an expert because I've read a lot about anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and know the tropes and know some of the lines of arguments or something like that? And does that help me at all in telling whether a theory is true or false, right? Like because I can point out that QAnon is like blood libel, does that mean that I can argue that QAnon is less plausible as a result or just more dangerous? I would say only more in the more dangerous camp, I think.
00:36:15
Speaker
Yes, I know we have. This is something that we've looked at in the past. These conspiracy theories that come up that are clearly just a repackaging of an old one. And when it gets to that point, can we just say, okay, well, look, this theory here, it's just the satanic panic in a different disguise, or it is just blood libel in a different disguise. So can we then just say, okay, well, unless you've got anything new to say, we can write this one off because we've already looked into the other ones and decided that there's nothing to them.
00:36:45
Speaker
Yeah, but I'm not sure if we can even do that on the particular view, right? Like, can I really say because the concerns about gender affirming care being promoted for young people is tied to like for-profit medical industry, you know, that looks like anti-pharma conspiracy theories, but can I actually assess it based on that, you know, family resemblance or do I need to
00:37:13
Speaker
dig into the particulars here. One other thing I want to mention here before I forget about like, one disanalogy I think is worth mentioning with science versus conspiracy theories. Generally, I think we we don't think when we're doing science that there's an entity out there that's actively trying to confound us.
00:37:30
Speaker
right, the universe is a pain in the ass, but like not a conscious, you know, like deliberate hiding itself pain in the ass, right? Whereas on the conspiracy theory view, part of the conspiracy is that they are actively trying to prevent you from exposing them. So in theory,
00:37:48
Speaker
you're shooting for a harder epistemic target, which makes it more likely that even if you don't find evidence, you might still think that there's reason to think that there's more evidence out there or something like that. So I do think at least like
00:38:03
Speaker
There's a disanalogy here and I don't know what the actual implications are for it, but you know, this to me contributes to the problem of can we assess the plausibility of any conspiracy no matter how much data we acquire against it
Challenges in Investigating
00:38:19
Speaker
or something.
00:38:19
Speaker
Yes, yeah, that's a point. That's a point that's come up before. I don't recall it off my head. I think it was one of Brian's papers, especially talking about falsifiability, where they'll say, the problem with conspiracy theories is that it can be the case that they're unfalsifiable when you say, yeah, I think this conspiracy has occurred. And someone says, well, there's no evidence for that. And then the person says, aha, well, that just proves it's happening. But the fact that there's no evidence is evidence because that shows how well they're covering it up.
00:38:49
Speaker
I've seen the reply that's basically, exactly as you just said, the difference between falsification and, say, scientific theories and conspiracy theories is that, yes, the object of your study in a scientific theory isn't actively hiding itself from you. And yet in the case of conspiracy theories, part of it can be that there is this active attempt to hide the evidence. And so in cases like that, possibly a different standard applies.
00:39:18
Speaker
And if you're taking a conspiracy like the aliens where you have possibly technology that looks magic-like to us, even the basic criteria of, well, this conspiracy involves so many people that it's highly implausible that it would be pulled off without being revealed. Well, if you have a technology that's like mind control or something like that,
00:39:41
Speaker
Does that undercut the idea that maybe you have a hive mind of individuals all working in such synchronicity that you don't have a high risk of exposure even when lots of people are involved?
00:39:53
Speaker
So, as they say, actually, of this whole sort of discussion, the result of this situation is that there is a significantly higher degree of uncertainty in theories about the presence or absence of conspiracies in the social worlds of politics, business and other social domains that, as we described above, are not uncommonly chockablock with opportunities, means and motive for collective clandestine activity.
00:40:16
Speaker
As one of us has argued elsewhere, referring to Bryan's 2007 paper, agnosticism about a claim is not necessarily called for when one has investigated, and corroborating evidence is not forthcoming. However, in situations where investigation has not been carried out, or where the process of investigation is in fact more haphazard and fraught with inadequacies and challenges, agnosticism is concomitly more merited.
00:40:38
Speaker
So, I mean, they do seem to be going for that attitude of withholding judgment unless and until an investigation has been done, whatever that means. I mean, I get the impression, I can't speak for him specifically, but I get the impression that they're willing to bite a bunch of these bullets that you seem to have problems with, but... Yeah. Well, it's funny, it reminds me a lot of discussions about atheism and belief in God.
00:41:06
Speaker
And I also happen to think that belief in Satan is one of the classic conspiracy theories. I'm skeptical of the idea that you can be agnostic about certain questions like these and have such a profound impact on how you understand and see the world. I'm skeptical that you could be agnostic about these conspiracies.
00:41:25
Speaker
in a way that like, doesn't feel to me essentially a kind of psychological cope where you just don't think hard, you don't think too hard about the fact that you don't know, because that could sort of let loose, you know, an avalanche of paranoia or something like that, right? Like, to me, you know, if you take seriously this argument,
00:41:46
Speaker
we have reason to think that like there's a lot of mundane conspiracies happening on a regular basis and we don't know that there aren't the sort of less mundane conspiracies also kind of happening and yeah I think that should produce anxiety probably to some extent I don't know if that's you know where they end up with this kind of with these kinds of arguments but I think they certainly point out that like
00:42:12
Speaker
a lot of the generalist positions are a kind of cope, right? And attempt to sort of avoid this slide while also not, while also being able to kind of accept the history of actual conspiracies and things like that in very ad hoc ways. And I think once you clear out those ad hoc solutions, I think you're in a pretty scary place.
00:42:33
Speaker
Yeah, I think agnosticism can sometimes be a bit of a, I don't know, a theoretical position to take in that you'll say, you know, people, people say they're an agnostic, they behave as though God doesn't exist. They don't go to church, they don't worship, they don't pray. And saying they're an agnostic will essentially means like I'm not completely ruling out the idea that God exists. If I were to
00:42:58
Speaker
find proof that he does, I'd be kind of surprised, but I'd accept it. So I wonder if it can be just a bit of a hedge, I guess, more than anything. I don't know.
00:43:10
Speaker
I guess it comes down to whether the the conspiracy is tied to something pressing in terms of your behavior. Right. So whether or not Jeffrey Epstein was murdered might not affect my day to day behavior, but whether or not I believe that like climate change is a conspiracy theory would write. And I think most of us go around like people who really see your podcast more likely to go around acting like climate change is real and not just a conspiracy meant to slowly depopulate parts of the planet or something like that.
00:43:37
Speaker
So I don't think agnosticism is livable in those cases, but I have to think we have to acknowledge if agnosticism is the reasonable position, we're all to some extent adopting irrational positions when we just sort of behave as if the door has been closed on certain conspiracy theories.
00:43:57
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I think that's probably true. Now, the next part is what about 20 minutes ago, I said I can't remember if they talk about this at all, they do talk about investigating conspiracy theories, because chapter a section seven is called investigating conspiracy theories should have really hit my notes.
Approaches to Investigation
00:44:15
Speaker
But this
00:44:16
Speaker
The whole section, this is the last section before the conclusion, it does read a little bit disjointed. I think the more academic papers I've read and discussed with him, the more I sort of get a feeling for how things work. We've had cases in the past where
00:44:31
Speaker
there'll be a little section of a paper where we're not quite sure what that's doing there. And almost always the answer is to shut up Reviewer B, essentially. And this section here, there seem to be a bunch of points that are in here, which seem to be a case of, here are all of these other things we wanted to discuss.
00:44:53
Speaker
Let's stick them in here because we need to mention them. But they do start by saying, how would one then go about investigating some conspiracy theory? Surely a great many of them are going to turn out to be unwarranted. So they start to look at what we might
00:45:09
Speaker
do about this again still in fairly theoretical terms. But they say, now there's a tendency among generalists to claim that if a conspiracy were going on, then we'd know about it, presumably because conspiracies always leak, or that there are sufficient checks and balances in place to ensure that by and large, those who hold power in Western societies will not get away with acting conspiratorially. Yet there's another approach to the issue we should consider. One philosopher such as Charles Bigdon and Lee Basham have long challenged us to acknowledge
00:45:36
Speaker
a point to which we really should be basic to anyone's understanding of politics and business. Conspiracies are everywhere and not just that, they're normal. And again, I wonder if you can get, this seems to be the point where a person who wants to make the point that conspiracy theories are irrational say, well, yes, yes, again, sure, those conspiracies are everywhere, but those aren't the ones we mean. You know the ones we mean.
00:46:00
Speaker
which we've seen can be a lot harder to define when you talk about, when you start to think about it. Yeah, like, I mean, maybe you could try to say like, well, any any conspiracy theory that violates the laws of nature or posits, you know, something that we is, you know, incomprehensible to us, given our current science or something like that has a higher degree of unlikelihood or something, but all of that feels like it falls apart.
00:46:27
Speaker
And even still, there's a vast number of potentially really harmful conspiracy theories to believe that are perfectly plausible, that involve military coups and assassinations and geopolitics and stuff like that.
00:46:42
Speaker
Yes, I think anyone who's looked into the history of what the CIA has been up to over the time of its existence, probably can't find implausible a lot of conspiracy theories about. In fact, I've said this before, I knew someone, I worked with a guy
00:46:59
Speaker
who said he believed that 9-11 was an inside job, and his specific reason for it was because that's the sort of thing they'd do. It was his opinion was that, you know, the government would be quite happy to kill off a bunch of its civilians to enact a bunch of laws thereafter.
00:47:17
Speaker
My final project of high school for my IB Theory of Knowledge course was accounting. We had read House of the Spirits, which is by Isabel Allende, Salvador Allende's daughter, and talks about the overthrow of the government there by the military-backed Junta, by the CIA and the military.
00:47:39
Speaker
And so I did a report on like all of the domino effect based sort of anti cold war tactics in South America, Iran, Contra and stuff like that. And it's like, you know, if your conspiracy is the most recent fall of a socialist, you know, government in South America is backed by the CIA, like I think you have good reason to think that's plausible, right? Like they've done that a lot.
00:48:04
Speaker
So yeah, I do think that it's hard to, as they say in this chapter, right? Why people believe weird things is the implicit understanding of conspiracy theories, but it's not weird to think that the CIA would be overthrowing communists. That's their job. So then, what do you do then? How do you investigate these kinds of questions? That's where I think things get a little bit trickier here.
00:48:30
Speaker
Yeah, they say the why do people believe weird things thing, which I think is the characterization of what social psychologists and others tend to end up asking. And the problem is that again, how do you define weird, it gets back to all that problem of definitions, but they go on to talk about
00:48:49
Speaker
Again, this idea of what should you investigate, I guess, referring to things that have happened in the past, such as Operation U-Tree in the UK, the Moscow show trials, Watergate, things like that, we know that
00:49:05
Speaker
There have been instances in the past of the establishment of the powers that be of whatever you want to call them, getting up to nefarious things and trying to hide it. So as they say, if some claim about the existence of a conspiracy, say, involving members of an influential public institution turned out to be true, then we'd be obliged to take action. The existence of conspiracies does not just threaten our trust in the influential institutions that make up our societies. They can also pose a direct threat to members of the public.
00:49:35
Speaker
I worry that can lead you down a whole bunch of rabbit holes there in terms of the bigger and the more wide ranging and the more almost fantastical you make your conspiracy theory. That kind of says the more obliged you are to investigate it.
00:49:53
Speaker
Yeah, and like, I worry that if they got the world so the world there's so instead of saying like, here's how you as an individual should go about investigating what this section ends up doing, it seems to me is saying, you know, we would be more reasonably inclined not to believe a particular conspiracy. If we lived in a world where there wasn't a stigma about investigating conspiracies, and we reasonably believe that like,
00:50:21
Speaker
journalists were out there investigating these things so that there was a kind of expertise that we could rely on but I also imagine I have to imagine in that world you'd still have this problem that I think folks like Emma are concerned about which is a lot of journalism reporting on conspiracies
00:50:41
Speaker
And you'd have to somehow solve the problem of journalism where they wouldn't be sensationalistic about it because otherwise you're just going to get a lot of sensationalistic debunking of conspiracy theories. And I'm not sure that's actually going to increase trust. I worry that this idea of trust in journalists is
00:51:01
Speaker
a bit of an upstream problem that ties into the way that, especially in America, the right has destabilized the idea of reliable journalism entirely, and thereby, I would argue, created a space where conspiracies have really heavily festered.
00:51:21
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it seems to be, at least if we go by where they end up in this section, that they seem to be arguing for the idea, essentially, that you shouldn't not investigate conspiracy theories, I think is where they're going. So that
00:51:39
Speaker
Yes, it's difficult to find out which ones should be investigated, what's worth investigating. Those are difficult questions to answer. But what you don't want to do is say, okay, so let's never look into conspiracy theories, because then people can get away with this stuff. Because they sum up the section by saying, the risks are real. In an environment in which people take a dim view of conspiracy theories, conspiracies may multiply and prosper.
Consequences of Ignoring Conspiracies
00:52:05
Speaker
Conversely, in an environment in which conspiracy theories are taken seriously and investigated by journalists, police and the like, conspiracies should be much more likely to fail. Thus, influential institutions and the people who run them are more likely to be trustworthy if they are not automatically trusted, but rather are subject to the vigilance of, say, an investigative press which does not think at a mark of intellectual sophistication to dismiss conspiracy theories out of hand, and a public who know not just when they are obliged to ask questions, but when they can expect others to do likewise.
00:52:34
Speaker
Which, uh, yeah, quick, kind of a, I'm sympathetic to it, but like, and I don't mean this as a cheap shot, but like, I can hear this coming out of the mouth of Alex Jones, no problem. And right. He can just say, you know, what I want is to be that sort of investigative check on journalism. And I
00:52:56
Speaker
like this first these first couple of lines about in an environment where people take a dim view of conspiracy theories, conspiracies may multiply and prosper. I get that I'm sympathetic. You know, at the same time, I think conversely, it's also true that an environment in which conspiracies are taken seriously, they can multiply and prosper. Like I'm not convinced that taking them seriously, as suggested here would make them more likely to fail, I think.
00:53:24
Speaker
You know, I think there's always going to be some amount of people who are taking them seriously and a lot of people who are potentially dismissive of them. But I'm not sure that the trust in journalism here is so directly tied to belief about the nature of conspiracy theories themselves.
00:53:43
Speaker
um and then like there's one other thing here let's see um you know this idea that like if we don't automatically trust people um there's less likely to be conspiracy theories i mean it's an interesting question it kind of cuts across the argument that like we have a rise in conspiratorial thinking because of things like Watergate the idea of that is that like
00:54:04
Speaker
There was a widespread trust in officials prior to Watergate that kind of gets dynamited by Watergate. And once you open that floodgate, people start to like be much more conspiratorial in general about the federal government. So in that situation, you have a rise in distrust caused by the exposure of an actual conspiracy, and it doesn't lead to more trustworthiness. It leads to less, it seems like.
00:54:30
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I do wonder if they're thinking of the scenario, or if he specifically is thinking of the scenario of the term conspiracy theory or conspiracy theorist being used as a weapon, as a tactic to deflect criticism. I know we specifically had the one case here in New Zealand a while ago, back when the national government, our major right wing party was in power. A journalist called Nicky Hager wrote a book
00:55:00
Speaker
off the top of my head, the hollow men, I think it was, where he basically pointed out how the national government had been sort of conspiring with local bloggers and the like to sort of launder sort of cheap shots and dirty tactics through what were supposedly third party and unconnected third parties. And it was all true.
00:55:21
Speaker
It was never refuted. It was all backed up and shown to be accurate. But at the time, the prime minister at the time, John Key, his only response to it was like, oh, Nicky Hager, he's just a conspiracy theorist. And that was literally the end of the conversation. So I think that's one particular scenario that they certainly want to look to avoid, the idea that you can just use conspiracy theory as a magical word to get rid of criticism.
00:55:49
Speaker
But there are, of course, a whole lot of other scenarios. And like you say, you bring up a conspiracy like Watergate and suddenly that has does enormous damage to trust in institutions. I also do think there's something I'm not sure that I want to abandon the idea that there's a sense in which you can say Alex Jones is a conspiracy theorist in the pejorative sense. And anything that he says should be dismissed as such, like,
00:56:14
Speaker
Do you know what I mean? There's no reason to chase after every conspiracy theory that comes out of Alex Jones' mouth. So, you know, maybe part of the move here needs to be a move away from discussing generalism with regard to actual specific conspiracies.
00:56:33
Speaker
and towards, you know, an expertise approach where we acknowledge that like this person is a reliable expert who consistently debunks conspiracies. This person is an unreliable, you know, conspiracy monger who consistently promotes conspiracy theories, you know, assess your probability of their claims accordingly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that always seems to be a version of the
00:56:59
Speaker
the prior probability, how common are conspiracy theories in society approach, but relating to individuals? How on the money are they? What's the history of? It has been interesting to look at the history of the literature and philosophy at least. You do get those different approaches. Some people look at the theories themselves. Some people look at the theorists themselves. Some people look at the society in which these things occur.
00:57:23
Speaker
And we don't need to, I think, make a jump like some generalists do from Alex Jones is a dangerous and unreliable conspiracy theorist to all conspiracy theorists are as dangerous and unreliable as Alex Jones or something like that. Right. That like.
00:57:39
Speaker
we can talk about these extreme cases while acknowledging that probably the majority of cases fall into a grayer area. I think that those two things are reconcilable, you know, I think there has to be a point at which you've thoroughly debunked a source or concept enough that like, you know, the next time a rewrite of the protocols of Zion comes along where they replace Jews with
00:58:04
Speaker
you know, whatever new Freemason thing we have, like, you can just say that it's still wrong. Yes, I mean, using the analogy with science again, surely there are there are theories that
00:58:16
Speaker
that we can just say, yeah, no, we've looked into that and no, thank you. We don't need to bring back Phlogiston. We don't need to, you know. Right. The worst versions of like the science ones is when things do come back. So I was just talking with the ancient alien guy about this and he, you know, I was mentioning that there's been a move away from the unified origin theory of humans and back towards a multi-origin
00:58:43
Speaker
theory of evolution of homo sapiens sapiens which the multi origin theory is one that's commonly associated with various kinds of like Atlantean ancient alien stuff and so I'm like from my perspective I hear about normal scientists following the evidence back towards another theory and I think oh good the conspiracy theorists will be like see we were right all along and jump on that kind of thing and yeah
00:59:09
Speaker
Anyway, we've reached the conclusion of this paper, which I think is short enough that I can read the whole thing.
Philosophical Examination and Open Questions
00:59:15
Speaker
As we have seen, a lot depends on how we define conspiracy, conspiracy theory, and conspiracy theorists, with much of the academic debate over the warrant of belief in conspiracy theories being very much produced
00:59:26
Speaker
predicated on which side of the definitional coin you take. This speaks very much to the improvised nature of conspiracy theories in general. There are no accredited experts, no institutions of learning devoted to studying such things, and as such there's little consensus on these things called conspiracy theories. This has led some scholars, such as David Cody and Lance de Haven Smith, to argue that we should drop the terms conspiracy theory and conspiracy theorist.
00:59:48
Speaker
Rather, they suggest that we should focus on conspiratorial explanations and the evidence for and against them. We advise against such a move. While it's tempting to wipe the slate clean and approach talk of conspiracies in a fresh, less pejoratively labelled light, all such a move does is further cement the pejorative take on these things called conspiracy theories and public discourse. Indeed, while there might be some debate over how we define both conspiracies and conspiracy theories, there's much interesting work to be done with them.
01:00:14
Speaker
The improvised nature of such theories and belief in them is fertile soil for the applied epistemologist. From the analysis of issues such as how a definition of what counts as a conspiracy informs how conspired we think society is, to talk about how we should appraise the merits of theories concerning conspiracies, the philosophical discussion of these things called conspiracy theories raises interesting and, we argue, essential questions.
01:00:36
Speaker
For example, what obligations of any do we have when we find out about some putative conspiracy, or how exactly should we proceed when investigating conspiracy theories? While conspiracy theories might sometimes be thought of as an unfortunate and undesirable epiphenomenon of political culture, an examination of issues such as these is of great interest to the applied epistemologist.
01:00:56
Speaker
which I think right at the end there, I think they raise some of those issues that we've discussed already. So this is very much, I think, an overview of the theory, but there's a lot of practice involved, especially as you say, when there are these real, tangible, real world effects happening in part because of the spread of conspiracy theories.
01:01:18
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it's a there's a very to be continued vibe to it. I don't I'm struggling with personally right now. I think I would really prefer that it was easier for us to help people understand why they shouldn't believe a particular conspiracy.
01:01:36
Speaker
theory and I'm struggling to find things to readily point to and it feels like every week there's you know a new conspiracy revealed that like makes it that much harder right like we you know how are you supposed to feel about the January 6 hearings right now for example is it good that like they are revealing that the president and the secret service were involved in an attempt to overthrow the government is it
01:02:00
Speaker
bad like it seems like Watergate times a lot um and it makes me makes me really nervous especially in American politics I think other countries have this problem to a slightly less degree for a couple of reasons that maybe we could talk about some other time but I think one of the main ones is the religious connection to conservatism here makes people more susceptible to belief in a large unjust conspiracy in this way but yeah I think it's going to continue to cause problems for us
01:02:27
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I do wonder sometimes a little bit when we're talking about the epistemology of conspiracy theories, it sounds like they want to come up with some sort of a framework, some sort of a theoretical idea of what
01:02:43
Speaker
that could then be applied to how do we look into these things. And it doesn't seem like we're there yet, but there seems to be more sort of point and direction. And I wonder if the particularism allows for the construction of any such framework or like any attempt to build a framework before it gets off the ground is going to just be disassembling itself because of the problem of particularism.
01:03:06
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess you want to say you need to, the particularist position would say you want to evaluate each conspiracy theory on its individual merits. And so if this particular conspiracy theory is not supported by its evidence, then okay, we can take that one off the list and say it's not warranted, but then that's already raised a whole lot of issues on, okay, what evidence, whose evidence? What's enough evidence to say this way or the other? Yes, it does get
01:03:36
Speaker
Well, it would be great. It would be great if we could just say, nope, all the theories like this, gone. But unfortunately, doesn't seem that way. Yeah. In philosophy, we talk about the problem of criteria sometimes. Chisel, I think, gives a good example of this. It's like, how do I distinguish good apples from bad apples, right? I can look at a bunch of individual apples and
01:03:59
Speaker
pull out the ones that I think are good and pull out the ones I think are bad and try to assess the properties of them. But I have this weird circularity problem where it seems like in order to separate out the good ones from the bad ones, I already have to have criteria of good and bad. But how could I have that criteria without first looking at good and bad apples? So I think with conspiracies, we have the similar problem of we want to be able to distinguish
01:04:22
Speaker
good conspiracy theories from bad conspiracy theories. And it doesn't seem like we're able to do that because we can't come up with a criteria without first having that criteria.
01:04:34
Speaker
Yes, yeah, I remember it was one of, I think, the Basham's older papers that, reacting to some of the earlier attempts to try and make these divisions come up with these criteria, and he sort of said that eventually all these things just come down to good conspiracy theories are good and bad, conspiracy theories are bad, and the real question is what makes one good and bad, and I don't think we're quite there yet.
01:04:59
Speaker
There was an interesting paper that attempted to do this using AI actually. And what they kind of came to was that there might be some markers of implausibility, such as that like a conspiracy forms, a theory forms very quickly. So what they find, for example, is that like,
01:05:16
Speaker
you know, Watergate, you take you have years of investigative journalism before the entire picture becomes clear, whereas QAnon Springs kind of or Pizzagate Springs like fully formed within six months of inception or something like that, right? Like,
01:05:32
Speaker
So those could be factors that could make you, like if you do feel like we need to adopt some kind of weak generalism and be looking for certain criteria, it could be things like that. I don't remember what other criteria they had, but even those, I was like, this feels like the right direction, but also like it's going to be a dead end.
01:05:55
Speaker
Well, I think we've come to the end of our time. So first of all, thank you very much for being on and helping out with this one. It's an interesting situation to have Brian and Em both together, not for the last time, I believe. My pleasure to come in and make things a little bit more confusing for the Jewish overlord conspiracies. No, that's what we always want. Do you have anything you'd like to plug before we leave?
01:06:23
Speaker
Sure, check out Embrace the Void, Philosophers in Space, at ETVPOD on Twitter and whatnot. Read the Skeptic Mag. They do a bunch of good stuff on conspiracy theories. I write there monthly and you can check out my recent stuff on the anti-vaxxers.
01:06:38
Speaker
Right, and I'll just say there will almost certainly be a bonus episode for our patrons to accompany this one. I expect we'll get him back to see what he thinks about what we think about what he said. So if you want to become a patron, you can just go to patreon.com and search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. And if you don't want to become a patron, well, you've just listened to about an hour and 10 minutes worth of discussion of applied epistemology. So that's all the things we need, I think.
01:07:05
Speaker
So, until next time, once again, thank you, Aaron, and to the rest of you, goodbye. Cheers.
01:07:14
Speaker
The podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy stars Josh Addison and myself, Associate Professor M. Artnick Stentors. Our show's cons... sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com, and please do consider joining our Patreon. And remember, keep watching the skis.