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Charles Pigden and the Conventional Wisdom
24 Plays3 years ago
Apologies for the levels at the beginning of this episode; it turns out M's pirate "accent" confused the system...
Josh and M discuss the 2007 article, "Conspriacy Theories and the Conventional Wisdom" by Charles Pigden.
—
Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
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Transcript
Comedic Sketch: Captain Corrin's Insurance Adventures
00:00:00
Speaker
We present once again the adventures of Captain Corrin, space pirate, and insurance salesman. And featuring myself as Quantum Jim. Tonight, Corrin counsels a client on accident compensation.
00:00:25
Speaker
It was Mortythirsty the day when pirates stopped mincing words and insurance salespeople prowled the streets looking for clients. My ship, that naughty nautilus, was in dry dock and I'd slipped off my poop dick and was hunting around me arth looking for an easy mark.
00:00:41
Speaker
Good morning, sir. You're not looking good. I beg your pardon? I apologize, sir. Maybe I was unclear. My name's Corin. I'm with Onion and Onion Financial Prudence and... Oh, an insurance agent. Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm not in need of your services. Ah, but perhaps you are, sir. You didn't let me finish. As I was going to say, I'm also a part-time pirate. I would explain the cutlass.
00:01:02
Speaker
And there I was, having forgotten I was carrying it. Sorry, didn't mean to brightness it so close to your face. Yes, yes, yes. Can I help you, Mr. Curran? It's Captain, sir, and I was more thinking I could be helping you. You have the error of a man who was about to be mugged. I do? Really? I take it from me, sir. I've seen that look before, especially when brightnessing a shiny... It's more rusty than shiny. Rusty, cutlass.
00:01:26
Speaker
Muggings are becoming more frequent nowadays, aren't they, sir? Are you covered in case of such accidents? I don't believe I am. What if I were to say that there was a potential for a mugging on your good person right now? Without cover, sir, how would you pay your bills? Well, luckily I'm quite flush at the moment. You wouldn't be after your mugging. If you're robbed, then you'll have no money to pay your hospital bill. Hospital bills? I'm thinking that this hypothetical mugging would be quite violent.
00:01:52
Speaker
So suffice it to say, your mugging me would leave me no money to pay my medical bills. Sir, you've hit the client on the head, so to speak. And if I mugged, it's going to be necessary to go to the hospital? Not in every case, sir, but this imminent possibility I'm talking about, it very much could be. And it would be sufficient to have some kind of accident insurance to cover for what you're about to do? Ah, let's not be talking in such concrete terms. But yes, yes it would.
00:02:22
Speaker
Would it be possible to get such cover before this mugging? I'm glad you are, sir. In me capacity as an insurance salesperson, I can offer you a policy right at this very moment. If you'd like to, sign here. But of course. And here. Excellent. Now you're covered. I'll just take your first payment now.
00:02:42
Speaker
Thank you, sir. Now, in me capacity as a pirate, could I get you to cower somewhat on the ground? Thank you. The mugging will commence shortly after some loud arring and a little light brandishing of me rusty cutlass.
Podcast Introduction and Creative Challenges
00:03:10
Speaker
the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. Brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denteth. Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison. They are Dr. M. Denteth. Neither of us is at sea, but you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise after that opening sketch.
00:03:29
Speaker
It's true, sir. It's absolutely true. Are we going piratical for a reason, or just because? Just because I've actually resurrected a series of sketches from my Phil 105 days, because, as was noted last week, I'm running a little bit dry on the old sketch juices, and so I thought, what better than to raid the past and re-vigorate the podcast by going back to the future? Marty! Marty! We've got to go back to the future!
00:03:59
Speaker
Not sure about the accent, but it'll do. Yes, our more recent listeners might not know that when you used to teach good philosophy lectures, you would often start with a sketch, you and your confederate at the time. It's true, we did, sir. It's a very true, sir. This is the carrying on of a grand tradition. Anyway, when you're not indulging your passion for amateur dramatics, you've been a panelist, you've been panelling,
Midwest Colloquium of Philosophy & Conspiracy Theory Literature
00:04:27
Speaker
Yes, so as of earlier this week, the part two of the 45th Midwest Colloquium of Philosophy has started. I do like a good colloquium. Don't we all, sir? Don't we all? So the first part was looking at the historic literature on conspiracy theory and philosophy.
00:04:47
Speaker
Part two, which is called State of the Art, deals with the new work, and apparently because I was mentioned so frequently in part one, I've been invited to be involved in part two. And so we had Brian Keeley this week talking about the public trust approach and laying out the general literature on conspiracy theory.
00:05:08
Speaker
for all in sundry who are listening to enjoy and then in about three weeks time I will be giving my little session on what it's like to be a conspiracy theory theorist in the age of COVID-19 aka conspiracy theorizing in the age of the novel coronavirus.
00:05:28
Speaker
Now we've also, this is an ongoing thing. I'm not sure how often we've mentioned it here and how often we've mentioned it in the bonus episodes, but our most popular episode on YouTube, the Uncle Sam Snuff Factory one, continues to get comments and this time around the comments themselves have been waxing conspiratorial.
00:05:49
Speaker
Yeah, so I have been accused of deleting comments from the video version of the podcast, which is actually slightly confusing. It turns out there are two video versions of our podcast. There's the video with actual visuals, which goes up on Josh's YouTube page.
00:06:06
Speaker
And then Podbean just also generates a player in YouTube so you can actually listen to podcasts on YouTube, which goes up on my YouTube page. And it seems that my YouTube page is the one where all the people find Uncle Sam's Snuff Factory material.
00:06:25
Speaker
Because are you getting any comments on that episode at all? I may have had one or two, I don't recall, but certainly it's the usual algorithm thing. Once your thing gets popular, your thing stays popular. Yeah, so it's there, it gets commented on, and then someone today said, why are you deleting comments? Because apparently there are 14 comments, and yet I can only see eight. And I went, well, I can see all 14.
00:06:52
Speaker
it's probably a problem on your end where either you've got top comments turned on or off, you're accessing YouTube from an area which has restrictions as to which comments are available or unavailable due to language involved. There's no conspiracy there, but I'm not entirely sure my interlocutor actually believes me. I think they think that we are covering up the fact that there are people pointing out that our reporting on Uncle Sam's Snuff Factory was bad.
00:07:22
Speaker
And I still think we're the only people who have really covered it, because I've done a cursory internet search. And apart from Lucy Groves herself, I think it might be themselves, I think they're non-binary. And us, we are the only people talking about it, apart from a Reddit thread of people going, well, that part of Texas is weird, but
00:07:48
Speaker
Anyway, to the day's topic, so we have another episode of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre, it's that time again. Is this the last paper from the 2007 issue of Episteme that we've been going through? We are at the end and we're ending, we're
00:08:07
Speaker
actually things kind of start with Charles Bigdon which is not the end of our discussion of classic papers and conspiracy theory from the philosophical perspective it's just it's the end of this episteme special issue which has been going on now for 14 weeks or so yes yes we made our way all the way through David Cody's book now we've made our way all the way through this um through this this special issue what's it by David Cody whatever will we do next
00:08:33
Speaker
You actually know, yeah. I actually do, I don't know. I appreciate the surprise. So, shall we play a chime and then get into it? Right, good old Charles Pigdon, man who started it all, more or less, unless you count Popper. Yes, but I mean, there's a huge gap between Popper and Pigdon. Well, they both start with P. They do. Ooh, significant. No. Right.
00:09:02
Speaker
Although, actually, kind of. So there's an interesting question which came out of the discussion at the Midwest Colloquium on philosophy, as why there are so many antipodean philosophers who are interested in conspiracy theory.
00:09:18
Speaker
I've got a theory about this which I'm going to expound upon in March, but Charles' hypothesis is that because Popper was a very influential philosopher here, in part because he spent time in the South Island, and also because he informed our approach towards the philosophy of science and things, that the reason why New Zealand and Australian philosophers are kind of overrepresented
00:09:41
Speaker
in the kind of sweepstakes of the philosophy of conspiracy theory is entirely Popper's fault. So maybe it's not a coincidence, although it probably is. Or maybe not. I mean, maybe it's a too late society conspiracy going back hundreds of years.
Main Topic: Charles Pigdon on Conspiracy Theories
00:10:00
Speaker
turtles all the way down. So today we are going to be looking at conspiracy theories and the conventional wisdom by Charles Pigdon from that issue of Epstein back in 2007. So yes, as you say, we've sort of come full circle where the guy who kicked all this off is rounding out this particular issue. As we will see, I think it's sort of a
00:10:26
Speaker
It feels more like a restatement, I think, in more detailed and possibly more forceful terms of stuff he's talked about in the past. But shall we get back into it? I think it's your turn for the abstract, I think. Hit me with an abstract. All right, so this is the abstract to Conspiracy Theories and the Conventional Wisdom by Charles Pigton, 2007, age unknown.
00:10:49
Speaker
Conspiracy theory should be neither believed nor investigated. That is the conventional wisdom. I argue that it is sometimes permissible both to investigate and to believe. Hence, this is a dispute in the ethics of belief. I defend epistemic ought that apply in the first instance to belief-forming strategies that are partly under our control.
00:11:14
Speaker
But the belief-forming strategy of not believing conspiracy theories would be a political disaster, and the epistemic equivalent of self-mutilation. I discuss several variations of the strategy, interpreting conspiracy theory in different ways, but conclude that on all these readings, the conventional wisdom is deeply unwise. Deeply unwise.
00:11:38
Speaker
So this paper is in three parts and part one is called political ploys and epistemic principles. So it begins by saying the conventional wisdom on conspiracy theories is that they ought not to be believed. To call something a conspiracy theory, quote unquote, is to suggest that it is intellectually suspect. To call someone, quote unquote, a conspiracy theorist is to suggest that he is irrational, paranoid or perverse.
00:12:06
Speaker
And there's a note here that refers to a paper by Husting and Or, that would be Jenna Husting and Martin Or, if I remember correctly. People who've showed up in this podcast, but not in the literature that we've been looking at yet.
00:12:18
Speaker
Are they going to or are they? Well, I mean, technically, our Masterpiece Theatre is focusing on papers in philosophy journals and hosting an awe, at least when it comes to that particular paper or publishing in a sociological journal.
00:12:37
Speaker
So technically, it doesn't really fit into the remit of this particular series. But I do think that once we kind of catch up with the philosophical literature, which actually might not be for a year or so, then we should actually start looking at classic papers outside of philosophy, at which point this particular paper, which I have referenced a lot in my own work, is definitely something we need to take care of.
00:13:02
Speaker
writer. But for the time being, so Charles is concerned about the fact that it's a common tactic for people to write things off as conspiracy theories. Writing in 2007, he talks a lot about Tony Blair dismissing criticisms as just conspiracy theories. Because to do this relies on, as he says,
00:13:23
Speaker
The epistemic principle that, in general, conspiracy theories ought not to be believed, that it is irrational to believe them, and indeed that they are mostly so irrational that they ought not to be discussed, except perhaps as symptoms of some ideological malaise.
00:13:37
Speaker
And he goes on to say that some conspiracy theories are sensible and some are silly. But if they are silly, this is not because they're conspiracy theories, but because they suffer from some specific defect. For instance, that the conspiracies they postulate are impossible or far fetched, which sounds a lot like what will eventually become called particularism.
00:13:56
Speaker
In fact, very soon we'll be called Particularisms. We'll be getting on to Joel Bunting and Jason Taylor's work, which actually brings this terminology to the forefront within a few episodes time. So yes, we're getting awfully close to the statement of Particularism versus Generalism. We just don't technically have the language being used at this point in time in the literature.
00:14:20
Speaker
But nevertheless here we have a statement that basically conspiracy theories aren't inherently bad and when they are bad it's due to problems specific to each one. And we're going to see Charles actually give a story as to what he thinks the defects of these particular conspiracy theories are.
00:14:41
Speaker
But we're not going to see that formally explained until 2018, when he writes a chapter for the edited volume that I produced taking conspiracy theories seriously, where he starts talking about the notion that some conspiracy theories suffer from defectability, which is the idea that if a conspiracy is set up in such a way that there should be obvious benefit to defecting from the conspiracy,
00:15:11
Speaker
and no particular problem with that defection so it's easy to get out and reveal all then those are the kind of conspiracy theories you might go well why hasn't someone blown the whistle on this surely they should be able to that's the kind of thing that makes us go hmm maybe that conspiracy theory isn't worth taking seriously after all but we'll get on to that
00:15:35
Speaker
in quite some time. Yes. So initially, in this paper at least, Charles is all about the ethics of belief. Because the idea is that people are saying that we ought not to believe conspiracy theories, that we are obliged not to believe in them. The word deontic shows up a lot in this paper, which is another one of those nice philosophy words that I don't get to use much anymore.
00:16:03
Speaker
No, you don't really get to talk about day ontology particularly much in your day-to-day life, do you? I don't, sadly.
00:16:09
Speaker
No, so the claim then is that in order for it to be true that you ought not to believe in conspiracy theories, that would need to be the case that ought implies can, as they say. So there's the claim in sort of ethical circles that if you're saying somebody ought to do something, it implies that they can do it. There's no point in saying that someone is morally obliged to do a thing that it's impossible for them to do.
00:16:38
Speaker
um so if we're saying you ought not believe in conspiracy theories that implies that it is possible to not believe in conspiracy theories which is going to come up again and again throughout this paper and that you can't choose your beliefs um that
00:16:55
Speaker
you can be presented with evidence for or against, you can be persuaded or not, but it's not really a matter of choice. He sort of gets into the sort of the Pascal's Way jury type sides of things and saying, is that actually a thing you can do? Can you choose not to believe or not to believe in God, or can you just sort of act that way? Or the Lewis Carroll line about believing five impossible things before breakfast. Yeah, is that a thing?
Evaluating Conspiracy Theories: Ethics and Evidence
00:17:21
Speaker
But at any rate, he argues that neither of these things are true, that it's not true that autumpliers can, and it's either not true or not quite relevant that you can't actually choose your beliefs. Now the reason why he disputes autumpliers can is not that he's necessarily rejecting the idea of autumpliers can, although given that Charles is an aerotherapist about morality. It's actually quite possible he has grave doubts about this within the ethical frameworks anyway.
00:17:50
Speaker
But he claims, look, the autumn place can thing is not a logical thesis, but rather it's a plausible ethical principle, which holds in some cases in some systems of ethical theories, but not in others. And so it's actually not entirely clear that it applies in the epistemology of belief when it comes to talking about the ethic of believing things.
00:18:16
Speaker
And then as to the second part of it, whether or not you can choose your beliefs, he says, well, maybe you can't. Maybe you can't actually choose to believe in something. But what you can do is choose your belief-forming strategy. So I mean, these days, a lot of people choose this strategy of looking up people on YouTube rather than listening to scientists presenting their expert opinion. And so in this context, he says,
00:18:44
Speaker
What the conventional wisdom, i.e. that we ought not believe in conspiracy theories, what the conventional wisdom demands is not so much that we disbelieve this conspiracy theory or that, but that we adopt the intellectual habit of discounting, dismissing and disbelieving conspiracy theories, indeed of dissing them generally, as the kids say. Indeed they do.
00:19:04
Speaker
Rather than running around trying to evaluate the evidence, the sensible strategy is to shut our eyes to their intellectual charms. I advocate the alternative strategy of not dismissing conspiracy theories out of hand simply because they are conspiracy theories, but of being prepared to investigate them and even to believe them if that is what the evidence indicates.
00:19:24
Speaker
Perhaps some conspiracy theories are too way out to be worthy of investigation, but this is not because they are conspiracy theories, but because the specific conspiracies that they postulate are absurd or improbable. For conspiracy theories as such are no less worthy of belief than theories of other kinds.
00:19:40
Speaker
Now, this idea of focusing on belief-forming strategies is a rather fruitful one, because it turns out that most of the beliefs that we inherit from our social contexts are things that we're kind of primed to believe, or if we don't believe them, primed to not believe them.
00:19:59
Speaker
due to our upbringing, our cultural situation and the like. And as Charles points out, you actually can fight against that. You can, as he points out, if you're going to be a philosopher, then you need to kind of adopt the habit of questioning views and looking for counter-evidence whenever possible, which might not be something you know to do when you first start, but you can train yourself into doing as time goes by.
00:20:26
Speaker
And indeed, what's actually interesting when you start looking at the psychological literature on how people form beliefs, it actually does turn out that you can adopt strategies to not only come to beliefs that you wouldn't normally hold through everyday life, but it also seems to be fairly good evidence that you can also change your memories if you put enough work into it.
00:20:53
Speaker
So it turns out that our mental states are much more malleable than possibly we actually think, and thus by adopting particular belief-forming strategies, we actually can change our epistemic situation.
00:21:10
Speaker
It sounds a little disturbing, quite frankly. It really does. I mean, I've read a few papers on the idea that you can, if you're really, really careful, basically change your memories about the past. And I mean, this shit comes up around the way you might want to suppress memories of bad events or replace memories of bad events with good ones.
00:21:34
Speaker
And it turns out there are mechanisms where it appears that people really can do it. The proviso seems to be that if you do do it, you need to make sure you're in a kind of environment where people can't then remind you of the thing you've sought to forget. So if people then remind you of it, then it reemerges in case of, oh, I've forgotten about that. I've replaced it with a better memory. Now I'm stuck with the bad memory. Woe is me.
00:22:03
Speaker
Interesting, but anyway, moving on, returning to the paper. So at the end of the section, Pigman is basically saying that this idea that we have an obligation not to believe in conspiracy theories, as he puts it, rests on the presumption that conspiracy theories are unlikely to be true, so unlikely that they're generally not worth discussing. Now, obviously, he doesn't agree with this. He thinks
00:22:28
Speaker
The fact that theories in general are more likely to be false than true does not mean that we should give up theorizing or inquiring into theories. By the same token, the fact that conspiracy theories are more likely to be false than true does not mean that we should give up conspiracy theorizing or inquiring into conspiracy theories. I mean, how many scientific theories turned out to be absolute nonsense? How many how many theories that we have right now are probably going to turn out to be false?
00:22:49
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, if you're a falliblist, you actually should go, well, most theories we've had in the past, we thought were good, have turned out to be bad. So it's highly likely that many of the theories we have today, we think are good, are going to turn out to be bad. And then to go back to your first point, there are more unwarranted scientific theories generated on any given day than there are theories which are going to turn out to be warranted.
00:23:17
Speaker
So there's actually a bit of a empirical issue here. If we're going to ping conspiracy theories on the notion that most of them turn out to be false, so it's irrational to believe in any of them, then you have to go, well, that's true for most theories. So when you hear a scientific theory, well, that's very unlikely to be true. So science is bunk and most people aren't willing to bite that board, even though it actually might turn out
00:23:45
Speaker
there are more bad scientific theories at any given time than there are bad conspiracy theories because conspiracy theories, I mean, they get postulated by amateurs all the time, but there isn't a concerted research effort of people going, right, let's investigate conspiracy theories. There is a concerted effort in the sciences to be generating new scientific theories constantly, and most of them won't survive testing.
00:24:13
Speaker
So frankly, from what we can tell, science is bad and conspiracy theories are good, or at least they're better than science. You heard it here first. Yup. Conspiracy theories are better than science. That's why I don't believe in gravity anymore. Exactly.
00:24:26
Speaker
So this moves, this takes us to section two, the conventional wisdom and its consequences. History is bunk. So some of the stuff we're going to be getting into here will be quite familiar if you recall the stuff that things like, say, Brian L. Keeley have talked about and indeed some of the stuff Pete Mandek's responses to Brian Keeley talked about.
00:24:46
Speaker
in our last edition of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theater. Now I thought the very first paragraph of this section was a very good sort of statement of the whole conspiracy theories are just theories thing. He starts off the segment by saying
00:25:03
Speaker
But if a conspiracy theory is simply a theory that posits a conspiracy, a secret plan on the part of some group to influence events by partly secret means, and if a conspiracy theorist is someone who subscribes to a conspiracy theory, then the conventional wisdom itself is not just suspect but obviously absurd. A theory, in my book, is a more or less organised body of propositions designed to explain some alleged facts.
00:25:26
Speaker
theories can be true or false, well or badly confirmed, and where they're sufficiently well confirmed, they can rise to the dignity of knowledge. Indeed, in common parlance, we can even talk about proving theories, although this is a usage that would shock true poperians. There's popper again. Thus, to call something a theory is not to suggest that it is tentative, speculative or unproven, though many theories are, of course, tentative, speculative or unproven.
00:25:50
Speaker
Now, if a conspiracy theory is simply a theory that posits a conspiracy, then every politically and historically literate person is a big-time conspiracy theorist, since every such person subscribes to a vast range of conspiracy theories. That is, historically literate people believe organised bodies of propositions that explain alleged facts by positing conspiracies, for there are many facts that admit of no non-conspiratorial explanation, and many conspiracy theories that are sufficiently well established to qualify as knowledge.
00:26:17
Speaker
And then, of course, he goes on to give a listener of examples of conspiracies which happen with regularity throughout history. So he points out, look, if you think that politicians engage in coups, whether it be regime change or simply changing their leader, then you pretty much believe that politicians are engaging in conspiracies, because if you're going to change a regime or change your leader,
00:26:47
Speaker
you better do it in secret to stop the regime or the leader from finding out about it. And if you want to assassinate their leader, you better keep that secret as well. It makes the point that, you know, if Brutus and co hadn't kept what they were doing secret from Julius Caesar, Julius Caesar would probably have arrested them before they mounted the assassination attempt because Julius Caesar presumably didn't want to be assassinated.
00:27:14
Speaker
You'd think so. I mean, he might be going, oh, you know, it's just one of those things. It's just one of those things. But Caesar does strike me as the kind of person who didn't like being killed at the best of times.
00:27:24
Speaker
And he talks about, you know, if you believe that disappearances occur, that's going to be conspiratorial. There's a long history of engaging in mass killings or genocide, which is often set up as a conspiracy to stop the target population from ever finding out what is going to happen. Kidnappings. I think at the point of the mass killings, at that point, he references Hannah Arendt and talking about how even... Oh, yeah, it's a very good point. Yeah, even the Holocaust, you know, was kept secret.
00:27:54
Speaker
There were these people who were aghast to discover what was going on well after the point where it had been established, because this was a thing that was conducted in secret. Even something of that scale. Even well-informed citizens around Germany were surprised by how effectively the Holocaust, the Shoah, had been covered up.
00:28:20
Speaker
Kidnappings that you mean once again like an assassination got to keep it secret from the target And then he talks about things like commercial conspiracies and like which are prosecuted through the courts all the time
00:28:36
Speaker
And so after his list of all the different ways that conspiracies pop up throughout history, he says, but I need not belabor a point that I've argued at length elsewhere, referring then to the conspiracy theories, the philosophical debate book where his Komplots of Mischief paper, the Shakespearean one, if you remember that one, was published.
00:28:55
Speaker
He goes on, history and the nightly news, not to mention common sense, all tell the same tale. People often conspire. Hence there's no reason to think that theories that postulate conspiracies are much more likely to be false than theories that explain the same events without the aid of conspiracies. Indeed there are many events for which there is no sane non-conspiratorial explanation.
00:29:16
Speaker
And again, things like assassinations and what have you, you can't come up with a theory whereby they loudly announced what they were going to do. I think you talked about sort of wanting to terrorise or intimidate. You could almost run a line of the sort of the Vladimir Putin style poisonings where
00:29:36
Speaker
Officially, it's not admitted, but they are, you know, these dissidents know that Putin's got it in for him and can probably get to him. But even then, the exact specifics of how those things happen would be planned and executed in secret.
00:29:50
Speaker
And of course the best example, especially since we're talking about 2007, is 9-11. Because unless you think the WTC 1 and 2 and Building 7 and the like just collapse naturally through some kind of geophysical event,
00:30:08
Speaker
then you have to think there's some conspiracy either by Al-Qaeda or by Al-Qaeda with the help of the American government or the American government or some other foreign power to bring about this event. The only options on the table turn out to be conspiracy theories.
00:30:28
Speaker
So with all of this in mind, Pigdon says that all of this suggests three conclusions, which he sort of lists each and then goes into detail, but I'm just going to run through the whole lot of them. Maybe we should take turns. I'll do number one. I'll do number twos.
00:30:47
Speaker
So, number one. If conspiracy theories are theories that posit conspiracies, then the epistemic principle that conspiracy theories as such ought not to be believed or even investigated is absurd. It only makes sense on the assumption that conspiracy theories are much more likely to be false than their non-conspiratorial rivals, and this assumption is false.
The Dangers of Dismissing Conspiracy Theories
00:31:07
Speaker
The ploy of dismissing critical allegations as conspiracy theories is not intellectually respectable, whatever the conventional wisdom may say.
00:31:14
Speaker
Point two, history as we know it, both from the documentary evidence and the best historians is chocka block with conspiracies. Thus, if conspiracy theories are theories that posit conspiracies, then to accept the conventional wisdom and adopt the principle that we ought not believe or investigate conspiracy theories would lead to the conclusion that history is bunk, that much of what we thought we knew is not only unbelievable, but not worth investigating.
00:31:44
Speaker
Much of recorded history would dissolve into a blur of inexplicable events, indeed events we should not even try to explicate. To adopt this principle would be to commit historical suicide or at the least self-mutilation, to make large chunks of history unbelievable and hence unknowable, since knowledge requires belief. It would maim, if not destroy, history as an intellectual discipline.
00:32:12
Speaker
But it is not rational to adopt an epistemic principle with such a catastrophic consequences. Therefore, it is not rational to suppose that we should not believe or even investigate conspiracy theories. That line about committing historical suicide, it was Brian who talked about committing epistemic suicide by believing that conspiracy theories are nonsense, wasn't it? I believe it was, yeah. Along similar lines of reasoning.
00:32:39
Speaker
So then the third, the third conclusion that Pigdon says all of this leads one to is that most political crimes from disappearances and illegal bobbing campaigns down to breaking peacenix noses or burglarising the campaign headquarters of the opposition party
00:32:54
Speaker
other products of conspiracy. Thus, if conspiracy theories are theories that posit conspiracies, then if we adopted the principle that we should not believe and should not investigate conspiracy theories, we could not hold anyone responsible for such crimes. For to do so would be to accept some conspiracy theory or other. This would be an epistemic disaster, since our understanding of the political scene would dissolve in a mist of scepticism broken by islands of obvious fact,
00:33:18
Speaker
We could believe in the dead bodies but not that anyone had conspired to kill them, believe in the missing money but not in the felonious theft. And it would be a political disaster since it would confer immunity on political criminals of all sorts from the perpetrators of genocide down to bribe-taking congressmen. We could not punish people for crimes that we were not entitled to believe in or investigate. Thus it would be both politically and epistemically irrational to adopt the strategy of not believing in and not investigating conspiracy theories.
00:33:46
Speaker
So their conventional wisdom is wrong, and it is not the case that we ought not to believe and ought not to investigate such theories. When it comes to conspiracy theories, we are within our rights as rational beings, not only to investigate them, but actually to believe them, if that is what the evidence suggests. Now, I want to point out that Flownew's theft is one of my favourite jazz musicians. Classic, true classic for the ages.
00:34:09
Speaker
So, I mean, when you get down to it, this is a much weirder way of basically restating his points from his comp lots of mischief paper, which if you recall, at the end of the end, he was saying how... I don't think you say...
00:34:25
Speaker
wordier way of saying when your chief complained about comp lots of mischief was the very very long Shakespearean dialogue at the beginning. So which one is it? Which is wordier comp lots of mischief or conspiracy theories and the conventional wisdom?
00:34:40
Speaker
I was choosing to ignore the great big faux Shakespearean dialogue. And I was just thinking of the argumentation that he puts afterwards. But yes, possibly there is wordiness in both cases. But I mean, his conclusions at the end of it, basically, were that, yeah, if you think that you shouldn't investigate conspiracy theories, well, history is full of them. So you're just on a hiding to nothing. And I think the interesting thing was, as we said at the time with complots of mischief,
00:35:06
Speaker
He made a bunch of good points, but he was directing them at Brian Elkely and Steve Clark who didn't really say what he seemed to think they were saying. And indeed, when we look at what especially what Brian Elkely said and what Pigdon says here, they are very similar. They are making a lot of lot of the same points here.
00:35:28
Speaker
And so he sort of he brings up his line, which will show up several times in which you said before that this idea that we shouldn't investigate conspiracy theories eventually just comes down to a superstition. Very superstitious. Wash your face and hands. Yes, indeed. When did you last wash your face and hands? This afternoon, I think it's been a hot, muggy day. I've been washing my face and hands like a maniac.
00:35:53
Speaker
No, like Stevie Wonder. No, like, are you calling Stevie Wonder a maniac? He's a maniac, maniac on the floor, and he's dancing like he's never danced before. That'll do. So at the end of this, though, we still have a bit of a disconnect with reality.
00:36:10
Speaker
If we really believed that we were obliged to not believe conspiracy theories, and if we defined conspiracy theories as simply theories that posit conspiracies, then yes, it would be impossible to act on any of these things that we actually know happen all the time, but
00:36:25
Speaker
There are lots of people out there who do seem to think that, quote-unquote, conspiracy theories are nonsense. And they do still talk about these things and investigate things and act on these things. So what's going on there? Well, it seems the only point of difference there could be is that they're not defining conspiracy theories simply as theories that posit conspiracies.
00:36:49
Speaker
They essentially end up defining, you know, if we think it's false, it's a conspiracy theory. If we believe in it, it's not a conspiracy theory. And that was one thing at the end of Komplots of Mischief. He sort of pointed out the hypocrisy, essentially, of people who are quite willing to label things as conspiracy theories when they are opposed to them, but are more than happy to endorse things that they would otherwise call conspiracy theories because they support their own case.
00:37:15
Speaker
And here we're going to get into the argument of what could be called Western chauvinism. Yes, which we'll get to shortly. Even last time when we looked at Pete Mandeck's paper where, although I don't know if he intended to, he essentially defined warranted conspiracy theories out of existence. And that one didn't work out too well either. So that brings us to section three, where Pigdon tries to spell out what these people really mean when they're talking about conspiracy theories.
00:37:43
Speaker
or specifically, what does Tony Blair mean when he goes around dismissing people who claim that those pesky weapons of mass destruction probably don't exist? So part three is called, what then does the conspiracy sceptic mean?
00:37:59
Speaker
And so he says, my conclusions only follow given an important proviso that conspiracy theories are theories that posit conspiracies, but perhaps this is not what the pundits mean. If Tony Blair aspires to consistency, it had better not be what he means. Since in recent years, again, writing 2007, the foreign policy of the United Kingdom was officially based on three distinct conspiracy theories in my sense, one true and two false. And so those three conspiracies, which you thought were significant with
00:38:29
Speaker
the UK's foreign policy were A, the conspiracy theory that Al Qaeda conspired to perform the September 11 attacks. Which he takes to be true. The conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein was secretly in cahoots with Al Qaeda. Which he takes to be false.
00:38:45
Speaker
That, who was it? Was it the Washington Post that had their case closed smoking gun paper thing at the time? I
Western Governments and Proven Conspiracies
00:38:52
Speaker
believe so, yeah. Which showed that one dude from Al-Qaeda had talked to one dude that was in the administration maybe one time, but anyway. And then the final theory is that Saddam Hussein had successfully acquired and hidden from inspectors those pesky weapons of mass destruction. Which he took to be false and we know to be false. And history I think has shown that, yes.
00:39:14
Speaker
So folks like Tony Blair obviously don't think that you ought not to believe in theories that posit conspiracies. Because they put them forward all the time. So what do they mean when they say you shouldn't believe in conspiracies? What do they actually mean by conspiracy theory?
00:39:31
Speaker
So Charles puts forward the idea, it seems to be something like the sort of conspiracy theory you shouldn't believe in is a conspiracy theory that contradicts the official view and suggests evil deeds on the part of government officials or government agencies.
00:39:47
Speaker
um but his argument here basically is if that's what they mean then we've got a problem because what counts as the official view changes from policy to polity and so it seems to be that what Blair and Co are kind of arguing for in situations of this type which is
00:40:09
Speaker
don't believe conspiracy theories about us, so don't believe it's a conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein has successfully acquired in hidden weapons of mass destruction in the pejorative sense. But you should believe that Al-Qaeda conspired to do 9-11 and they were in cahoots with Al-Qaeda, sorry, Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with Al-Qaeda because that's a conspiracy theory we've put forward about our enemies.
00:40:37
Speaker
So it's a conspiracy theory about us, don't believe it, but if it's the official pronouncement of our government, and it happens to be a conspiracy theory about a foreign power, then as a good Western citizen, you should be endorsing what I say.
00:40:53
Speaker
So yes, having talked about this idea of it's, you know, it needs to contradict the official view and it needs to suggest evil deeds on the part of some government, he then says, having talked about it a little, says, I need not spill any more ink, denouncing a strategy that nobody seriously advocates for the concept of a conspiracy theory, as it is commonly employed, is a chauvinist construct.
00:41:15
Speaker
And there I should point out that chauvinist, I don't know about you, I only ever encountered the word chauvinist in terms of sort of second wave feminism talking about male chauvinism. That was the term that we really used it. But chauvinism originally meant just excessive patriotism, named after a French guy called Mr Chauvin, I think, who was known for his displays of
00:41:37
Speaker
excessive jingoism but anyway so so what you're saying is that it's only chauvinism if it comes from the region of France that is correct otherwise it's just sparkly mansplaining yes um so
00:41:51
Speaker
For the concept of a conspiracy theory as it is commonly employed as a chauvinist construct, it is not to be understood in terms of governments generally, but in terms of Western governments and recent Western governments at that. When people say or imply that conspiracy theories ought not to be believed, what they actually mean, insofar as they have a coherent idea, is that we should not believe theories that postulate evil schemes on the part of recent or contemporary Western governments or government agencies, and that run counter to the current orthodoxy in the relevant Western countries.
00:42:19
Speaker
So this is a definition that is consistent with the sorts of things that Tony Blair has been saying then. Of course, it's total bollocks. Yes, it's, as he points out, it's chauvinism. Oh, we'll privilege what our government says about foreign governments, and we certainly aren't going to take what foreign governments say seriously about what our governments are up to, because patriotism
00:42:42
Speaker
this kind of Western chauvinism is something that good citizens are meant to adhere to, or at least that seems to be the way the rhetoric around conspiracy theory and political discourse by the like of Tony Blair's, that indicates what they think citizens should be doing.
00:43:00
Speaker
And so again, turning to history, basically, there have been plenty of conspiracy theories in recent history about Western governments that went against the official version at the time, but which have turned out to be true, as Charles puts it.
00:43:15
Speaker
For there are many theories that are not conspiracy theories now, though they were conspiracy theories in the past. The theory that the Kennedy administration conspired to overthrow DiEM, the theory that Crepe conspired to burglarize the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building, the theory that members of the Reagan administration conspired to sell weapons to Iran in order to fund the Contras. All these theories were once inconsistent with official opinion, though nowadays official opinion has managed to catch up with the facts.
00:43:42
Speaker
Also, I'm a creep. I'm a weirder. What the hell am I doing here? Breaking into the Watergate Hotel. That's what you're doing here.
00:43:51
Speaker
if we ever get the funding to do a musical version of Watergate, getting the members of Crepe to sing I'm a Crepe as they break out, what a scene that would be. It would. So basically the point of it is that if you use this chauvinistic definition of a conspiracy as the basis of your belief-forming strategy, or of a political philosophy in general,
00:44:20
Speaker
if you really believe that it would be impossible to investigate or even acknowledge the existence of these sorts of things like Watergate and Iran-Contra and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, because otherwise you'd be breaking the chauvinistic principle. That is the basis for political trust in your society. Yeah. Which brings us to the conclusion of the paper. You did the abstract. Do you want to do the final paragraph as well? Yes, let me conclude thusly. Please do.
00:44:46
Speaker
Thus, the conventional wisdom has proved to be unwise. On any of the readings of conspiracy theory that I've been able to come up with, it is not the case that we should neither believe nor investigate conspiracy theories. If you wish to vindicate the conventional wisdom, you must do two things.
00:45:03
Speaker
First, you must give an interpretation of the term conspiracy theory with roughly the right extension. Most of the theories castigated as conspiracy theories must qualify as such, and most of the conspiracy postulated theories that conspiracy skeptics believe in must not.
00:45:22
Speaker
You must then show that on this interpretation, the strategy of neither investigating nor believing in conspiracies makes epistemic sense. Until this is done, the idea that conspiracy theories as such are intellectually suspect is a superstition that can be safely dismissed.
00:45:43
Speaker
Full stop, indeed. Drop mic, walk away, building explodes, and that's how WT7 was destroyed. Precisely. Yeah, it was all Charles. Oh, him and his mic drops. So yeah, that was, I mean, reading through that, I thought it was a very good sort of summary of that kind of, a very strong statement of this sort of position. Reading through it, it didn't,
00:46:09
Speaker
It didn't seem to contain anything new to me. It seemed more sort of restatements of stuff we've seen elsewhere, although I don't know how much of that is just me with the benefit of hindsight. It all seemed very familiar to me because it's 2021, not 2007. At the time, did this come across as sort of new or was it just a good restatement and a more forceful arguing of points that had already been made?
00:46:36
Speaker
So it is to a certain extent a restatement of things that Charles has argued for in the past. But also it's kind of a synthesis paper of taking all of the arguments we've seen between 1995 and let's say 2006 when this was probably written for its publication in 2007.
00:46:56
Speaker
and he's presenting this is the best argument for why the commonplace superstition about conspiracy theories is bunk. Although I probably shouldn't have called it a superstition because then that just sounds like it's bunk automatically. The view that conspiracy theories is bad is a bad view. So yeah, in hindsight, it does seem, I don't want to say trite or trivial,
00:47:23
Speaker
but it's the kind of thing we're very used to now. But at this point in time, it very much is Charles restating forcefully things he said in the past, and then taking a whole bunch of threads in the emerging literature,
Impact of Pigdon's Work and Discourse Evolution
00:47:40
Speaker
and going, look, these are the only arguments I can think of which would be good for saying that we've got no good reason to believe conspiracy theories and pointing out one by one, this doesn't work. This doesn't work. This doesn't work. Actually, if these are the best arguments for that position, then it seems actually the position is bad.
00:48:03
Speaker
Well, there you go. We bring you to the end of another episode of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Studio. Any final thoughts? And the end of that episode special issue. Any final thoughts? I mean, I like it. It's classic Charles. It's very much in the vogue of the kind of thing I argue for now. What was interesting. So the version you got was the PDF, which I would have downloaded from the
00:48:31
Speaker
website back in 2007 and I then stripped all of my annotations out so not to affect your view but it is interesting looking at my views in 2007 versus now and going hmm
00:48:47
Speaker
I was largely in agreement with Charles then, but I thought there were some things I was going to object to and write papers on. And now I'm looking at the 2007 version of me going, you stupid child, you stupid, stupid child. Why did I even think that was going to be a fruitful avenue to go down? It doesn't work.
00:49:08
Speaker
which kind of indicates that at the time that the special issue comes out I'm in that point of working on the PhD trying to work out exactly what my view is going to be and obviously I started out slightly more skeptical towards conspiracy theories on the notion there was going to be some easy way to detect
00:49:29
Speaker
whether a conspiracy theory was good or bad. And as we now know, my view is theory definitely. No, we need to be investigating these theories to work out whether they're warranted or unwarranted, because there is, as Brian Kelly would say, no mark of the incredible. There's no easy way to identify a good versus a bad conspiracy theory just by a cursory glance.
Technical Issues and Personal Projects
00:49:53
Speaker
Well, there you go. So, we've come to the end of an episode. And if you've been watching this on YouTube, you'll notice it's been brightly lit as usual because... This time you actually brought the lights. This time I actually brought the lights, which was my minor stuff up last time. So if you happen to browse things on my YouTube channel... Hello, welcome to light again.
00:50:19
Speaker
Also, and if you heard a kind of weird clink or ticking sound in the earlier part of the recording, it turns out that my ponamu was hitting my livia mic, which is what was causing that weird tink sound from time to time. So that's the problem wearing jewellery. You and your ponamo. I know. Actually, speaking YouTube, I should plug myself, shouldn't I? Well, I was about to say, you need to talk about your adventures with the Amiga.
00:50:49
Speaker
I have so this is completely unrelated to the topic of this episode or indeed this podcast in general but since I'm here and I have an audience so I for the past sort of month or so I've been I've embarked on a little project I have had sitting in a plastic box
00:51:06
Speaker
for the last 30 years, discs from my old Amiga 500 that I had when I was a teenager containing games that I had written for myself. And at this stage, I was kind of just considering these things as keepsakes. They were just artefacts from my youth because there was no way I was ever actually going to be able to see what was on them ever again, or was there? Here I am, choking on my own enthusiasm.
00:51:31
Speaker
because it's like would have it in wanting to offload a bunch of stuff before heading overseas dug out none nothing other than an old Amiga 500 a perfectly functional Amiga 500 although
00:51:46
Speaker
without software. No, without software, but that's okay. So yeah, so now I had something... Now I should also point out, if you're going, but why do you need the hardware to read a computer disk? It's because Amiga disks are formatted in a very different way from PC disks, and they're also read by hardware in a different way. So you can't just put an Amiga disk into a PC and read it. No. Although you can do it the other way around. You can read a PC disk in an Amiga disk drive, but...
00:52:16
Speaker
So you need the hardware. Yeah, that's why they've been sitting there for 30 years and I haven't been able to do anything with them. So now we had the hardware. I had something I could actually plug a disk into. I was quite surprised to find that the audio and video out ports on an Amiga will still plug into a modern television. They have the old, the whole red, yellow, white ones that most modern TVs still accept. So I had an Amiga.
00:52:45
Speaker
that I could plug into a TV and look at my disks on, but of course what I really wanted was to be able to somehow get the data off those disks onto a modern computer where I could convert them into a disk image that could be run on a modern Amiga emulator and I could actually upload them somewhere on the internet and so then they'll be there forever.
00:53:04
Speaker
So I've been having adventures in finding out what cables you need to plug an old Amiga into a modern computer and a little bit of fun because yes, it turned out you needed actual Amiga operating system disks to be able to run the software that you need. Good old workbench.
00:53:27
Speaker
And M's ones had degraded and were dead. I never kept my ones. I sort of had a bit of a saga. There was a one month gap in the middle of it while I tried to actually source some copies. But then I got that. And then just recently, everything worked.
00:53:42
Speaker
I got the content of these discs off my Amiga onto my computer and I've recently been uploading to YouTube a bunch of videos about the process of it and now I've started putting up videos of me essentially playing through my old games that I made as a teenager. So it's been great fun for me for sort of nostalgia purposes. These games of course having been made by a teenager in New Zealand with no real know-how or much in the way of resources.
00:54:12
Speaker
could not be called good games by any stretch of the imagination, could almost not be called games in several cases by any stretch of the imagination. But if you're interested to see what a young Josh was up to back in the early to mid-90s, go look at my YouTube channel, Monkey Fluids, where as well as all the episodes of the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, you can find my Amiga disc project. And of course, you've been making games recently.
00:54:40
Speaker
Well, I have been making games recently, yes, and I've been putting demos up there. My more recent project has stalled because A, I've got a bit bored with it, and B, I started having fun with Amiga games. I almost have a mind to now synthesise the two and start making modern games based on my plans for Amiga games that I started and never completed. We'll see how that goes. I still think you need to finish the game just because I want you to produce a Mac port so I can play it.
00:55:03
Speaker
I don't know if I have the wherewithal to do that. You've got Anna's laptop. It'll be fine. I'll see. Maybe. Anyway, all I'm saying is check out my YouTube channel. My username is monkeyfluids because of course it is. Maybe you'll enjoy it. Maybe you won't. And that's all I have to say about that.
Podcast Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:55:23
Speaker
Now, other things you may or may not enjoy is the bonus content. So if you're a patron of the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, then at the same time this episode is uploaded, there'll be bonus episodes uploaded where this week we are talking about how Tucker Carlson can't find a website.
00:55:41
Speaker
how the family of Malcolm X is demanding a new investigation into the death of Malcolm X, how we probably should have mentioned the death of Jim Morrison last week, given that Rush Limbaugh died, and then we're going to have a little talk about a recent solution to the mystery of the lost colony of Roanoke. Not really that lost.
00:56:04
Speaker
No, but it does mean we get to go Croaton. So if you'd like to hear about that sort of stuff, that's going to happen a lot. I'm thinking this episode. I actually sort of made it into a button I could press. So if you'd like to hear about that and you're not currently a patron, then just be one. Just do it. Just give us a dollar a month and the content is yours too.
00:56:31
Speaker
Listen to. Yeah, basically. I mean, we don't want to, we don't, we don't put any evaluative claims. You enjoy it. You enjoy it. If you don't enjoy it, well, you've still given us your money. No take back seats. No, no, indeed. So that's, I think, all we have to say. Stick around if you're, if you're hanging on for the bonus episode. Otherwise, we'll talk to you next week. In which case it's goodbye from me. And it's goodbye from Croaton. Croaton. Isn't it the crunchy things you have in soup?
00:57:02
Speaker
Yes, that's what happened to the lost colony. It was turned into a Campbell's soup mix. Good Lord. Crop it all. The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy is Josh Addison and me, Dr. M.R.X.Denteth. You can contact us at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please do consider supporting the podcast via our Patreon. And remember, they're coming to get you, Barbara.