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What M did on their ”holiday”...
30 Plays1 year ago
M is back (actually back) and discusses what happened "on tour" in Italy and the Netherlands...
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Transcript
Reconnecting with Humorous Reflections
00:00:00
Speaker
Yes, yes, yes, yes. I guess you're another fan. Hand me over the book or whatever you've got and I'll sign it. Who do I make it out to? Josh. Your podcast co-host? I knew Josh once. We still podcast together back in the old days. Yes, that would be me. And the old days were a month ago. Of course, that was before I became famous. People flying me around the world. Adventures in Italy and the Netherlands. That name, Josh, brings me back.
00:00:29
Speaker
is because you are back. We're in your mother's apartment. We're going to record a podcast. Now that I'm kind of a big deal in philosophy, a rock star, if you will, it's hard to imagine life like it was before. You were literally cleaning out a cat litter tray when I walked in the door. So you said you were George? Here you go. So did you just sign your name with a permanent marker on my tablet screen? I wonder if my life will ever be normal again. Same as it ever was.
Zelda Obsession and Creative Ventures
00:01:01
Speaker
The Podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy featuring Josh Addison and Em Denteth. Hello, you're listening to the Podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy. I am Josh Addison and sitting next to me, so close they only count in horseshoes and hand grenades, it's Dr. Em R. X. Denteth. Hi, I'm no longer a philosopher nor a specialist in conspiracy theory theory. I am a devout player of Zelda, tears of the kingdom.
00:01:30
Speaker
Yes, I hear it's good. It is good. This is why I've devoted my entire life and the rest of my life and the life of my non-existent children to playing this game and only talking about this game. Any questions about Tears of the Kingdom you want to raise? I've got a lot of answers. I've spent a lot of time in this game. A lot of time in this game. Josh, you would not believe how much time I've spent in that game. All the weird physics of putting stuff together and making stuff stuff.
00:01:58
Speaker
Is that like something you just do for fun or is it an integral part of the game? Because all I see is people dicking around. I mean, you have to build things in some situations to solve particular puzzles, but sometimes you just build things because you want to build things. I built a death laser and killed a boss without ever using my weapons, only my death laser.
European Travels and Conspiracy Philosophy
00:02:22
Speaker
Yes, I've just seen people building giant flaming genitals and suicide machines and things like that.
00:02:27
Speaker
Death Laser. Actually, I should change my name. My name is now Death Laser. Well, Death Laser, I understand you've been overseas the last few weeks. And didn't play any Tears of the Kingdom at the time, which is my greatest regret. Yes, well, your sacrifice is our gain because now you can talk about what you've been up to. Are we going to do a What I Did on My Holidays episode? Well, I'll see you admit it was a holiday.
00:02:51
Speaker
Just you swanning off, swanning off around Europe. I admit that part of that was of concrete lions that didn't look much like lions. Look Josh, it's very important that people be aware that many Europeans think they know what a lion looks like. But actually they think they know what a lion looks like because someone else who thought they knew what a lion looked like described that lion to an artist who then made an impression of someone else's impression of an animal they had never seen.
00:03:18
Speaker
and apparently it is the emblematic animal of the Netherlands and I have to assume that no Dutch person has ever been in the vicinity of a lion at any point in Dutch history. Look at that, that sounds plausible.
00:03:34
Speaker
So that should be the content of this week's episode.
Workshop on Conspiracy Theories
00:03:38
Speaker
You're reporting giving a full account of yourself in your travels. I'm just going to talk about Tears of the Kingdom. You have to pry the data out to me. I just want to reach over to my screen and resume flying through the air. I'm just jumping from the water temple down to what I think is a very interesting set of zonai ruins.
00:04:00
Speaker
Right. Which is where you build the giant flaming genitals? No. I built those in the water temple. Right. Okay. I think they'd get doused. Okay. I'm getting distracted. Do we need to play a chime? We do. And we're going to put it right here.
00:04:18
Speaker
I mean, I suppose that makes it official that we are actually in the main part of the episode, which is going to be you talking about what you did for the last three weeks. Yes. Where do you want, where do you want, where in the world do you want me to start? Well, you were in Palma, which I understand is in... I know, but before then I was in Milan. Well, I was south of Milan in the last resting place of Mussolini.
00:04:47
Speaker
Did the trains run on time there? No. I remember a fat lot of use. He was there. No, no. So we were... I say we. So one of the patrons of this podcast and I, so over the course of my travails overseas, I met three patrons, the first of which I met in
00:05:09
Speaker
Lake Gada, a place called Gagnano, which I've just mispronounced, which was the final part of Italy to stop being fascist. So it's where Mussolini died. We're in the Palazzo where Mussolini actually died. For some reason, the University of Milan has decided that they need to keep in a fairly decrepit state the house in which Mussolini breathes his last breath.
00:05:38
Speaker
hmm and were you there just to to breathe in some I was there to ingest some fascism actually there was a running joke so we did a workshop on pathologizing belief in conspiracy theories which featured philosophers social psychologists historians art scholars and the like and a running joke was
00:06:01
Speaker
Are we becoming more fascist the longer we spend Mussolini's resting place? Are we being possessed by the ghost of Mussolini? I think I got away from the Palazzo with only a slight increase in fascist tendencies but
00:06:18
Speaker
When you're near Mussolini's resting place, you can't help but feel the fascism grow within your soul. So philosophy of conspiracy theories, I assume there was... When you weren't turning into fascists, you were talking about that?
00:06:34
Speaker
Yeah, so the workshop on pathologising belief in conspiracy theory was actually meant to run two years ago, and then the two organisers both got pregnant at around about the same time. I thought you were going to say both got Covid, but getting pregnant is worth all better. Well, it's longer lasting, certainly, but presumably happier.
00:06:55
Speaker
I mean, we actually don't know how long COVID actually is. So it actually might, pregnancy may not be as long as long COVID. And I'm assuming you're adding in the having the child, raising the child, disowning the child and then dying. Yes.
00:07:15
Speaker
There was a workshop on pathologizing belief in conspiracy theories. It was meant to run a while ago. It finally occurred in the end of May of this year and the end of May, I was in the Netherlands by the beginning of June. It was a day and a half and we had talks by philosophers on whether it is unfair to use a pejorative connotation
00:07:44
Speaker
with respect to the term conspiracy theory. That was a talk given by Juhar Reicher. He's of the opinion that there's nothing unfair about taking conspiracy theory to be a pejorative label. And then we had a talk by myself on how pathologizing projects in philosophy have a tendency to fail. Looking at recent work by Keith Harris, who was in the audience, I was not aware of that before I arrived,
00:08:09
Speaker
I did think about maybe changing my talk ever so slightly because I didn't really want to viciously attack someone who was sitting in the audience, but I decided not to, Kevin Rutter and Em Julian Napolitano, and of course fan favourite, Qasam Qasam, who was not in the...
00:08:29
Speaker
audience at all and yeah and we also had Melinda Sapos who's one of the patrons of this podcast and also co-organiser of the Second International Conference on the philosophy of conspiracy theory theory and she also gave a talk about
00:08:45
Speaker
kind of some of the different dimensions under which people talk about conspiracy theories and whether we can come up with a unitary framework for work that's going on say both in philosophy, social psychology, sociology, political science and the like by looking at kind of core features of what people are looking at and then trying to work out exactly what it is people are interested in investigating within their own particular research domain.
Conference Insights and Philosophical Debates
00:09:15
Speaker
So this was interdisciplinary. It is very interdisciplinary. I had more trouble with that word than I was expecting. So is there still sort of the impression I'd got in the past is that there's a bit of a divide between philosophy and some of the other social sciences? Is that more or less the case?
00:09:37
Speaker
So it was an interesting discussion had in Italy because, yes, most philosophers who work in conspiracy theory argue that the consensus within philosophy at the moment is particular, so we must assess conspiracy theories on their individual merits.
00:09:54
Speaker
And the consensus, say, in social psychology is much more generalist. They think of conspiracy theories as mad, bad or dangerous, and thus they want to work out why do people have beliefs which are mad, bad or dangerous. And certainly the kind of research coming out of social psychology certainly seems to fit a generalist tenor or milieu.
00:10:19
Speaker
It is interesting, though, that when you start talking to social psychologists, they all claim to be particularists. So they all go, well, no, no, no. I don't think that belief in conspiracy theories is necessarily bad. I'm only interested in those conspiracy theories which are pathological beliefs. And I want to explain why do people have pathological belief in conspiracy theories. And so Molina and I, in particular, were going to social psychologists
00:10:46
Speaker
So if you actually do think that belief in conspiracy theories can be rational in some situations, why do you not say that in your research work? And also, wouldn't it be really handy if from time to time when you're doing your surveys,
00:11:05
Speaker
you included some warranted conspiracy theories in those surveys to see what kind of results you might get. And one of the social psychologists, Alexandra Chukokka, was going, yeah, actually, we probably should. We probably should put.
00:11:20
Speaker
some warranted conspiracy theories into these surveys to see what kind of results we might get. And Daniel Jolly, who gave a talk on some of the precursors of pathological belief in conspiracy theories, I was going, well, look, maybe
00:11:38
Speaker
Maybe what we're looking at here is not that there's a pathology that leads to belief in conspiracy theories. It might be that there's a pathology which gets expressed as conspiracy theories and discourse. But the causation is pathology first, post-facto conspiracy theories justification rather than conspiracy theory resulting in a resultant pathological belief.
00:12:03
Speaker
So it was actually a really interesting weekend of talking with scholars in other disciplines and going, I mean, maybe we are just talking past each other a lot, because maybe we do actually agree on some essential features, which is i.e. belief in conspiracy theories is not necessarily bad. What we're failing to note is that our frame of interest
00:12:26
Speaker
is different. And maybe what some social scientists should do is just be much more explicit of, oh, we're only interested in conspiracy theories with these particular features. Those features license a suspicion of them because they make belief in them prima facie, irrational or unlikely or whatever.
00:12:49
Speaker
Were there any actual outcomes of this whole thing or was it just you've obviously come away with some interesting stuff and it hopefully left the others with others to think about but are there any sort of projects?
00:13:04
Speaker
So there is going to be a special issue of a journal of which all the people who were at the workshop have been encouraged to write up their papers for. So there is going to be a kind of research output of some kind. But no, it was very much a getting a small group of people together, having conversations to see whether we can nut out some of the nutty issues in the nutty field of conspiracy theory nuts.
00:13:34
Speaker
Nuts. Conspiracy theory nuts, that's what we're all about. So from then it was on to the conference? Well no, then I was off to Palma. Oh then it was Palma, right. And in that trip there was Palma, there was Rijo Emilia, there was Bologna. It was a lot of walking. My friend Timothy and I were walking on average about 23-24 kilometers per day.
00:13:56
Speaker
which meant that my shoes really, really did stink to high heaven by the end of that trip. Excellent. I know. Was this walking, seeing the sights, or... Wands. No, no, so we would catch the train to a particular location and then we would have a walk. It was great. So yeah, that was a fun few days in
00:14:19
Speaker
Italy catching up with Timothy who I did my postdoc with when I was the first time in Romania and that was a grand time and then then it was off to Bergamo and from Bergamo I flew to Eindhoven and from Eindhoven I caught a train and then I was in Amsterdam
00:14:37
Speaker
Right, and then there was the conference, or you just bought some legal marijuana and looked at a windmill, ate a tulip. I did one of those things. It was the, you bought some legal tulips and smoked a windmill.
00:14:53
Speaker
I smoked a lot of windmills in my time. I don't know what that means, but it means something. So then we had the second international conference on the philosophy of conspiracy theories, a sequel of sorts to the first international conference on conspiracy theories, which was held in March of last year.
00:15:14
Speaker
Last year's conference was an entirely online affair which ran for two and a bit days with very interesting time zone scheduling. So for the first conference I had a US centric day, an EU centric day and then a half day which was kind of in between because I was trying to fit people in from all parts of the globe.
00:15:37
Speaker
This was a in-person conference with online features, so hybrid conference. So we had, depending on the day, between 30 to 40 actual physical attendees at VU Amsterdam. And then we would have between 20 to 30 people attending the conference online, depending on when people woke up and
00:15:57
Speaker
you know kind of came in so most of our online attendees were people outside of the EU although there were a few people who weren't willing to travel for the conference who were in the boundary of the EU but no we had two and a half days of conferencing I gave a keynote
00:16:14
Speaker
I believe you may have engorged some of that keynote. I did. I did. I let it wash over me as I was doing my duties. Well, I mean, it's very soul cleansing. My keynote. So Josh, as someone who attended after the fact, the keynote for the second international conference on the philosophy of conspiracy theories, tell our audience what they
00:16:38
Speaker
missed out on. They missed out on you failing to come up with a way of investigating conspiracy theories. Yes. Largely. Yes, for 45 minutes. You spent 45 minutes to... I mean, to be fair, you said at the start that you were not going to be successful in doing what you were about to try to do. And you kept your word, so kudos to you. So it's your watchword.
00:17:02
Speaker
My keynote was when it was submitted to the conference, actually submitted, when I was asked to give a keynote. So there's a bit of fuzzy history here. So the two original co-organisers, Melina, aforementioned participant in the workshop on pathologizing belief in conspiracy theories in Italy,
00:17:24
Speaker
And Julia Dutz, who we heard from, and the last episode, they'd both gone, we want to do a sequel conference. And so they got in contact. Just by the way, if you're going to keep calling them sequels, they do need to have a subtitle. Conspire harder. Yeah, something like that. Just think about that for next year. Anyway.
00:17:44
Speaker
They were going, well, we can probably get funding to hold an in-person conference. So they got in contact with me to A, ask for my permission, given that I was the person who came up with the first conference, and also B, to ask me to be a keynote at the conference, at which point I volunteered my services, going, well, you know, did run the last conference. If you want any help or aid, I might be of use to you. So they brought me in as a co-organiser, which may or may not be a tradition.
Challenges in Conspiracy Theory Frameworks
00:18:14
Speaker
So Brian Keighley was a keynote at the previous conference and of course that conference was technically held by Pitzer in the US. That was done after I had asked Brian to be the keynote. So basically there's going to be some kind of weird tradition in these conferences where a keynote
00:18:35
Speaker
is also one of the organizers which looks suspicious because you probably shouldn't organize a conference and invite yourself to be a keynote but if you do the causality properly then it turns out that you can be invited as a keynote speaker and then become an organizer what you can't do is be an organizer and then invite yourself to be a keynote speaker yes that would be gauche
00:18:57
Speaker
It would be very gosh. So yes, I gave a talk called Investigating Conspiracy Theories. The original aim was to actually talk about a framework for the investigation of conspiracy theories that was the premise I came up with in November or December of last year. And then I spent the most of the last six months
00:19:17
Speaker
trying to work out how to develop this framework. And as I was writing the paper, I kept on going, first of all, we need to talk about this thing. And then there's this preliminary we need to talk about. And then when I was in about April of this year, I was going, so this is 8,000 words of getting to the point of investigating conspiracy theories, because there's so much you need to talk about.
00:19:41
Speaker
the held appeals to expertise work. What do we actually mean by appealing to evidence? What counts as good evidence or adequate evidence for the investigation of these theories? What do we actually mean by the claim to investigate? How thorough does an investigation need to be? How available is the evidence when you want to engage in this kind of investigation?
00:20:05
Speaker
And so I realised that actually I wasn't going to be able to give a talk on how to investigate conspiracy theories. What I was going to be able to do was give a talk of, look, there's been a lot of work in philosophy over the last two to three decades. And that work has very much focused on getting us to a point where at some point in the near future
00:20:27
Speaker
Someone's going to be able to put forward an investigative framework. I thought it was going to be me. It might still be me in the future. But for the time being, I've laid out what you need to take into account for that framework. And hopefully someone, maybe me, will pursue that in the future.
00:20:46
Speaker
Yes, I mean you refer to this framework as a nice to have as opposed to the more, I don't know, would you say fundamental project of working out whether or not conspiracy theories are warranted and all that sort of epistemological business you have been doing. But then as you also said, it's a nice, it would be a really nice to have though.
00:21:09
Speaker
Yeah, if we can actually get there. One of the reasons why it would be nice to have is that there's a kind of wonderful simplicity to generalism. And that with generalism, you know what your default view should be towards a conspiracy theory when you encounter it. As a generalist, you can simply go, well,
00:21:29
Speaker
It's probably bad, if so in fact though my default view is, it's probably bad. We'll say a particularist has to go, I mean, it might be bad or it might be warranted. I should investigate the suspicious claim of conspiracy. And there's a kind of historical problem here in that most particularists
00:21:47
Speaker
are particularists about historical conspiracies. So they'll say, look, look at Watergate, called a conspiracy theory turned out to be warranted. Look at the Moscow show trials. The Soviets coined the term disinformation, turned out to be a warranted conspiracy theory. Look at Elizabethan plots and intrigues, lots of conspiracies going on there. Very few particularists are particularists about contemporary conspiracy theories.
00:22:16
Speaker
And that's kind of interesting, that the examples we rest upon are typically historical examples. They're not examples of the day. So you don't get kind of particular critiques in print at this stage about COVID-19 conspiracy theories, so lab leaks and the like. There's probably a lot of suspicion by most philosophers working on conspiracy theory about QAnon.
00:22:45
Speaker
But we kind of just go, well, it just seems incomprehensible. There's no actual in-depth investigation there. Now, people like me who've sat through David Icke's talks, plural, can go, well, look, I kind of feel I've done enough investigation into this theory to be able to explain why, as a particularist, I don't think alien shape-shifting reptiles are
00:23:08
Speaker
taking over the earth, but at the same time that's not a particularly startling claim. No one outside of David Icke's small cadre of supporters thinks that alien shape-shifting reptiles are taking over the earth. So it would be really nice to have because it would allow us to kind of pin our flag to the mast. Do we pin flags to the mast?
00:23:30
Speaker
raise our flag, staple our mast to a variety of different flags and go look I'm going to go out on a limb and I'm going to say conspiracy theory X which only just appeared online is likely warranted or unwarranted
00:23:47
Speaker
Which is why it would be really, really nice to have.
Sharing Insights on Conspiracism YouTube
00:23:51
Speaker
Because we do have a bit of a problem in particularism. We are very reliant on historical cases. We're quite mum when it comes to contemporary cases. Now the reason why I was able to see your keynote despite not actually attending a conference was because you're a time traveller.
00:24:09
Speaker
that would be nice but as far as you know the reason why is that it was being put up on your youtube channel along with a bunch of recordings of a bunch of the other talks given there which i've not yet listened to yes so all of the talks have been recorded
00:24:24
Speaker
We are now going through the process of getting permission from the attendees for making the talks public. So we've loaded them all up into YouTube. Most of them are unlisted, so people are now looking at their talks and going, yes, I'm willing for that to go out, or no, I'm not willing for that to go out.
00:24:45
Speaker
So the number of talks in the Second International Conference on the Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories playlist on my YouTube channel Conspiracism is going to grow with time but at the moment just under half of the talks at the conference are available online in sometimes questionable video quality. So
00:25:10
Speaker
Some of the videos are not great, but you're not there for the visuals. You're there for the action. You're there for the ideas. And sometimes the audio also isn't great, but that's because you're recording in an auditorium and the mic placement is just never great in those places anyway.
00:25:29
Speaker
Well, yes, I mean, your one was perfectly audible, so... And it's because I'm a trained public speaker. Well, there's a bit of that as well. Yes. So, I mean, did any talks in particular stand out? I see you've, you've, you've noted here that there were no bad talks.
00:25:44
Speaker
Yeah, so Steve Clark, who's one of the other keynote speakers, he was saying to me afterwards, he was actually quite impressed by the fact that there were no dud talks, so there were no particularly bad talks. All the talks were, I think, of a reasonable, even superb quality. In part, that's down to excellent work by Melina, Julia and myself,
00:26:06
Speaker
in selecting good abstracts that kind of fit together as part of two and a half days of conspiracy theory. Theorising, although Steve's other point was there were also no crazy talks. There were no talks given by people who were trying to pursue a particular conspiracy theory or convince people that they should believe some particular weird clam.
Publishing and Future Conferences
00:26:28
Speaker
And I think Steve was disappointed in that. He wanted a crazy talk or two. Because, I mean, we've seen a few papers that seem to be
00:26:36
Speaker
advancing some view or other behind the scenes. I know within the culture of philosophers working on conspiracy theory theory, there are people who have heterodox views as opposed to orthodox views on a variety of different issues. So I know people who think that the official theory of 9-11
00:27:01
Speaker
is bogus. I know researchers who still have their suspicions about the death of JFK. There are quite a lot of people who go, that!
00:27:12
Speaker
That RFK assassination, that's a bit weird. And that's one of the ones I go, yeah, that was a bit weird. The Suhan Suhan stuff doesn't really make as much sense as people would like to make it out to be. But whether it's a conspiracy or a badly described event is another matter entirely. But if those people had those views, and some of them did at the conference, they weren't part of their talks. They were standard academic talks.
00:27:40
Speaker
And some of them were an absolute riot. There's a great talk by Rory Aard, which when it goes online, I would recommend people listen to. It's called a new account of conspiracy theories where he goes, look,
00:27:54
Speaker
Particularists are right about some things. Generalists are right about some other things. But particularists use a weird definition that doesn't match ordinary language. Generalists use a weird definition that makes it by default that conspiracy theories are mad, bad, or dangerous. And so Rory attempts to come up with a new definition of conspiracy theory.
00:28:18
Speaker
And he was quite bold in doing this in that the definition he attacked from the particular side was mine, and the definition he attacked from the generalist side was Keith Harris's. We were both in the audience when he was giving this talk.
00:28:35
Speaker
It was a great talk and his response to people asking questions afterwards were well considered and nuanced responses. I think he slightly mischaracterises my view but it's in part because he relies on a 2018 paper rather than the
00:28:53
Speaker
more fulsome description of the definition I provide in my 2016 book. And I think he also possibly gets Keith slightly wrong as well. But at the same time, Audacious Talk thoroughly enjoyed it and can't wait to see a written version of that paper. And the thing is, I could go through so many of the talks. Steve Clark,
00:29:15
Speaker
gave a talk which would be absolutely perfect for a what the conspiracy episode because it's a false flag theory involving Mormons and the American government. Nice. And it takes almost a hundred years
00:29:34
Speaker
for the official theory to be declared bunk and the conspiracy theory to be declared the orthodoxy. So there were some really, really great talks. I mean, actually most of them were exceptional and it seems almost unfair to just pick out two from the 21 talks we had. There was a lot of good work, a lot of good work, Charlie Good.
00:30:00
Speaker
Well, same question as last time then. Is anything coming out of this one, another special edition, or will there just be a flurry of papers being published? I know at least one of the papers presented at the conference is about to come out in print, so it's a forthcoming piece. We are hoping to work on a special issue, so negotiations with editors at a prestigious philosophy journal ongoing at this time, so we're hoping there'll be a special issue coming out.
00:30:29
Speaker
probably beginning of next year, knowing the way that the academic publishing market works.
00:30:37
Speaker
There's also, I think, just going to be generally papers from this particular conference coming out elsewhere. So at least one of the other papers that was presented was something that I reviewed about a year ago. It didn't make it through to the journal. It was reviewed out originally. But the version given at the conference was much improved. So I think it probably has a higher chance of being published in the near future. So there's going to be a lot of work coming out there, which is going to be good for my H&D.
00:31:06
Speaker
Good. You and your H-index. Always sounds like some sort of a disease. It is. And in a sense, yes. It's a disease of popularity. Well, it's the worst kind. So was that all you did on your trip, or was there more? Well, after that, I gave a talk for the Extreme Beliefs project run by Rick Peels at VU Amsterdam. This is beliefs on rollerblading and BMX biking, monster truck jumping, I assume.
00:31:36
Speaker
I mean, all of them. They're all pretty extreme. See, you've gone for extreme sports there. I thought you were going for some kind of rollerball conspiracy and analogy, but I don't think BMXs appear in the film Rollerball. No, not so much. James Caan appears in the film Rollerball. Does he ever? And Dean Cain appears in the Rollerball, what's it called? Rollerball 2000? There's a sequel and it's rubbish, is the point. So the thing is, I have a sequel or a remake?
00:32:04
Speaker
I think it's a remake. I think it's a remake. I've actually seen neither of them. No. From what I understand you're not missing much about the remake. And the original people say the rollerball scenes are great and the rest of the film is just episode slightly rubbish in part because James Khan is just mumbling the entire time. He's a mumbler. He likes to mumble. So no, after that I gave a talk at Rick Peale's Extreme Beliefs
00:32:31
Speaker
project on the I Know It When I See It standard operating in the social psychology of conspiracy theory. So there's a talk on the way that the kind of examples that social psychologists rely upon to do most of their work.
00:32:49
Speaker
tend to be things which are, I know a conspiracy theory when I see one which kind of ignores all of the issues around labelling practices and power dynamics existent in our world. So you can't just rely on the label conspiracy theory to be doing the conceptual work of telling you what is or isn't a conspiracy theory unless you're also willing to engage in a conversation about what
00:33:14
Speaker
So who gets to apply the labels? Because it's not just the public applying the labels. These are labels informed by the power structures in our society. So you can't rely on that standard unless you've got an argument as to why it's a good standard to begin with. And social psychologists don't. They're simply relying on an ordinary language intuition, which is something which is highly questionable.
00:33:40
Speaker
Yeah, it sounds like it would make it very easy to, whenever you encounter something that doesn't fit with your theory, just say, well, that's not a conspiracy theory. Which they do all the time. You're no true Scotsman, but for conspiracy theories. Yes, it's the fallacy of misrepresentation. It's not just about Scottish people. It could be. It can apply also to Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Americans, Canadians, Fijians, Samoans, Tahitians. Do you want me to go on?
00:34:10
Speaker
No. South Africans, Afrikaners, people from, actually so, in the old days, in the old days, in the old days, George, we used to call people from Zimbabwe, Rhodesians, but we call them Zimbabweans now. I see. Okay, so now that just sounds ever so slightly racist.
00:34:31
Speaker
Well, but I, you know, I see that having just returned from the Netherlands, the Netherlands is now having a very big, oh we made a lot of money from the old slavery discussion. Because of course they had their own version of the East India company. And they're now going, oh yeah we actually made a lot more money from slavery than we had admitted to in the past. This is a bit of a problem.
00:35:00
Speaker
So maybe I'm just picking out my racism from my time. Possibly. I'm sorry. Julia, I'm now claiming that my racism is entirely due to spending time in Amsterdam. She's one of the other patrons of the podcast. I say I've made at least three in person now. Totally good. Oh, sorry. The other one being, Alex? Alex, hello. Respond to my email. Cryptic.
00:35:26
Speaker
He knows what I'm talking about. Unless he hasn't checked his email yet. But you don't know what I'm talking about. At which point you should go find out what I'm talking about right now. This is a weird way to conduct my personal correspondence. Also Rachel I apologize because I wasn't able to go to Miami. I wasn't able to catch up with you in America.
00:35:45
Speaker
But I'm sure I'll be going back to Miami at some point when Joe Yusinski holds another conference on conspiracy theories. Unless, of course, Governor DeSantis makes it illegal to have discussions about conspiracy theories because he's doing it to critical theory and CT equals CT. Yes. Yeah, I don't fully know what's going on in Florida, but I don't approve. That's because we're not Florida men.
00:36:10
Speaker
No, we're not Floridians, I assume. That actually does appear to be how they refer to themselves, even though it sounds like they're characters from Galaxy Quest. So, what next then? Will there be a conference number three?
00:36:30
Speaker
So there might be. So I've already had one appeal from some researchers in Finland going, actually, we'd like to run a conference again. There was a bit of discussion about this after the conference because the Second International occurred just over a year after the first. And some people are going, that seems an awfully fast turnaround. But then we had so many paper submissions to the conference.
00:36:58
Speaker
that we could quite easily have added in an additional day and still had papers to spare. So there's a lot of work coming out in philosophy. So originally I was thinking maybe the next conference will be in two to three years. It's actually quite possible it may be a lot sooner than that. So I think there's going to be another conference within a year or so. And also I just think there's going to be a lot of papers coming out because it's a very fruitful time to be working on conspiracy theory theory in philosophy.
00:37:27
Speaker
Is that just because of COVID and QAnon and the greater interest in the wider world? It has to be part of it. So I was talking with one of the people at the conference and they got into thinking about conspiracy theories because they had family members who went down the rabbit hole. And so they go, well, actually, I should look into the literature on this. Has anyone, oh, there's a big literature in philosophy on this. What can I add?
00:37:57
Speaker
So COVID I think has made people more interested in conspiracy theory theory as an academic topic generally. It also made philosophers very interested in it and people are taking their own particular research interests and going what kind of theoretical lens can I take from say my work in metaphysics or Bayesian epistemology and to play that through the lens of particularism or sometimes generalism.
00:38:25
Speaker
There are still generals out there fighting the generalist fight. Bless them. So, is there any more to say about your journeys overseas? I will say one thing. I went to Maastricht
00:38:42
Speaker
And I spent two hours in a cave network and it may have been the best two hours of my life in the EU. What made it so good? So under Maastricht there is a series of limestone caves. So essentially up until about the middle of the last century.
00:39:01
Speaker
Farm owners during the summer would farm the land and at winter would go beneath the ground take out limestone blocks and then use them for building purposes or selling them off to people and then when they stopped doing that around about the 1950s or 1960s and then they opened up the cave network to tourists and they invited artists down to paint murals on the wall and
00:39:29
Speaker
So you get to walk through this amazingly large cave network that was originally about 200 kilometers in size. It's no longer as big because some of it's been turned into cement by local cement works. But also, if you go to the northern caves, you get to visit the art repository that was built during World War II to store all of the artwork to make sure it didn't get bombed or destroyed.
00:39:57
Speaker
And that was interesting, in part because you get to go into a vault where they kept famous artwork, and B, you got to hear incredulous American tourists go, what do you mean the Nazis built this vault? Because it turns out the Americans aren't aware the Netherlands was under the control of the Third Reich during World War II. The Nazis were hiding the art from Allied bombing runs, not allies hiding the art from Nazi bombing runs.
00:40:27
Speaker
Yes, World War II. Complicated. Not really. Nazis bad. That aspect of it is not complicated, but in terms of the who and the weir and who was in charge of what, who was bombing him at any particular time. And it is a fair setting part that you've got this cave network has been patrolled by Nazis.
00:40:49
Speaker
because they're guarding the artwork. This cave network is also being used to smuggle resistance fighters and Jewish people from the Netherlands into Belgium. And you're going, so they've got Nazi patrols in this cave network and a resistance network smuggling people through a hole to the Belgium side of the cave network. It's a complicated story.
00:41:16
Speaker
Oh well. There you go. So is that your recommendation for anyone who's holidaying? If you ever go to Maastricht, spend two hours in a cave. Very good. Any cave? Any cave. But those are particularly good ones? Yeah. I would recommend it. Five stars. Very good. Out of three. Even better. I know.
00:41:35
Speaker
So I think now, now actually, I have been saying to our listeners something that I don't know if it's actually true or not, which is that you have recorded a bunch of other interviews and talks with people. But I know you had technical issues. So I had taken the Tascam 40 DRX
00:41:57
Speaker
or no, sorry, the Tascam DR40X, which was our audio recorder that was bought less than a year ago using patron monies. Thank you patrons. And I took that to the EU to record talks with a variety of different speakers at the conference. Halfway through the first recording, the Tascam died. It just popped, so I'm assuming one of the capacitors went and became very dead in a permanent sense.
00:42:26
Speaker
So, because we have patrons and I had access to the patron monies, I was able to buy a new audio recorder in Amsterdam, which is a Zoom H6, which we're recording on right now.
00:42:43
Speaker
But there wasn't something I was expecting to have to spend our monies on. And also because the Tascam died just before the conference, I couldn't just pop out during the conference to go buy a new audio recorder. So by the time I got the replacement unit, the only person I was able to interview was Julia.
00:43:04
Speaker
Now I have recorded interviews with people subsequent to coming back from the EU, so those interviews are still going to occur, they just aren't backed up the way they thought they were going to be. Right on. So, something to look forward to in the coming weeks I guess. Indeedy. But I think that's just done for this week.
00:43:28
Speaker
Well done with the main episode because of course we now have to go and record a bonus. We don't have to. We choose to because we want to because our patrons deserve it. And because we've got some interesting news stories to cover. We do have some stuff to talk about. I don't think there's any reason to be talking about that submarine that's currently stuck at the bottom of the sea looking for botanicals. It's not very conspiratorial. It seems to be all everyone's talking about at the moment, but I don't think...
00:43:54
Speaker
The thing which makes it quasi-conspiratorial is if you look at the owner of the submarine and his views on health and safety and regulations, it does seem as if he thinks he's kind of a consortium of people out there who are stifling innovation for some malign reason. I mean sometimes he goes, they're stifling and they don't realise they're stifling innovation. Sometimes I'll know.
00:44:20
Speaker
No, it's basically manufacturers trying to keep people out of the system due to their ridiculous requirements. That holes have to be strong enough to withstand water of a particular country. Submarines need located these things. Submersibles are not a submarine. They're very different. Submarines can go in and out of port. A submersible has to be launched from a boat.
00:44:42
Speaker
Well there you go. Now all I know is that the submarines are referred to as boats and they're the only things that are boats in the Navy. Dust boat. Yeah, dust boot. But in all the other Navy boats aren't boats, they're ships. And only the U-boats are boats. Very confusing. Crazy.
00:44:59
Speaker
We're not actually going to be talking about submarines. The point I was making is that we're not going to be talking about the submarine. We're not going to be talking about it in the bonus episode. We are now apparently talking about the main episode. Apparently this podcast is devoted to submersibles of questionable quality. And tears of the kingdom. And tears of the kingdom, yes.
00:45:18
Speaker
But anyway, what we are going to do now is stop talking about this if we can force ourselves to finish this episode, start recording a bonus episode, give it to our patrons to say thank you patrons, you are our patrons. And if you want to be one of those patrons, you can go to patreon.com and look out the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy and you too can give us a dollar or more a month and get access to our backlog of patron bonus features.
00:45:48
Speaker
So do that. Or don't. I mean, you know, that's quite fair. You're under no obligation to whatsoever. I mean, there is a cost of living crisis going on. There really is. So, patron or not, thank you for listening to this episode. I have nothing more to say. Death of the Kingdom is very good. Yeah, you're going to get something in there. No, that's quite enough. Quite enough out of you. Thank you very much. I'm just going to say goodbye. Zonai charges.
00:46:42
Speaker
And remember, they're coming to get you, Barbara.