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Brian L. Keeley's 'Of Conspiracy Theories'
34 Plays4 years ago
In the second of the "Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre" series, Josh and M discuss Brian L. Keeley's seminal 1999 paper, 'Of conspiracy theories' which was published in the Journal of Philosophy.
Special thanks to Joe Ulatowski (the judge), Simon McArthur (the bailiff), and our outraged and shocked audience members Aaron Wells, Angela C. Wells, and Mark Derricutt. The crowd noise was from Tomlija (https://freesound.org/people/Tomlija/sounds/101237/).
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
Why not support The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy by donating to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/podcastersguidetotheconspiracy
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Transcript
The Humorous Podcast Trial
00:00:04
Speaker
Order, order, order in court. The Honorable Judge Joe Ulatofsky presiding. Thank you, Mr. Belaf.
00:00:12
Speaker
The Chargers, if you will. Your Honor, one Mr. Josh Addison of Onihonga, New Zealand, charges one Dr. M. Denteth of either Milford or Hillcrest, with statements unbecoming of a podcaster, of being drunk whilst recording, and of accusing someone of drinking from Hitler's milky teat. A serious matter, Mr. Bailiff, a most serious matter.
00:00:37
Speaker
How does the defendant plea? Not guilty, Your Honor. You realize, Dr. Denton, that if convicted of these crimes, your podcast license shall hereforth be revoked. And you shall suffer no less than six weeks in the content factories producing ads for mattresses. I do, Your Honor. Well then, I believe you are both representing yourself in these matters. So if the complainant would please present their case to the court.
00:01:02
Speaker
Your Honour, Mr. Josh Addison. Well, Your Honour, I think it's clear from Exhibit A, a copy of last week's podcast, that the charges are honest and true. As such, I rest my case and demand speedy justice, and that the defendant be spanked for wasting the court's time. Mr. Bailiff, we have reviewed Exhibit A, have we not? We have, Your Honour.
00:01:20
Speaker
The recording speaks for itself. Indeed it does, Mr. Bailiff. It seems, Dr. Denteth, that the charters are true. I am willing to accept the change of plea at this time. Know your honor, I maintain my innocence for three simple reasons.
00:01:36
Speaker
The first is that I have no memory of saying any of those things. Point of order, Dr. Denthith. These comments of yours are not up for dispute. They appear in the recording, Dr. Denthith. A recording, I might add, that you both edited and uploaded to... Mr. Bailiff, where did they upload these podcast things to? I believe it is called the Internet, me lord.
00:01:59
Speaker
Uh, yes, the internet. Right, so Dr. Denteth, the evidence is clear and in your own voice. It is true, Your Honor, that I did upload a podcast to the internet, which I also edited. However, it is not true that I listened back to the podcast as I was editing it, making me blissfully unaware of its content. That you cannot say that. But I never.
00:02:25
Speaker
Well, that just drips my nightie. Order! Order! Order in court!
00:02:30
Speaker
Dr. Denteth, ignorance is no defense. I expect better of someone who's been engaged to teach a course on social and moral philosophy. This is true, my lord. Which brings me to the crux of my defense. I put it to you that I am not guilty because I did not say any of those things. It was, in fact, a past version of myself who said these things. A past version of myself that I have no knowledge of.
00:03:00
Speaker
Really? What? Are you invoking the personal identity defense, Dr. Denteth? I am.
00:03:08
Speaker
Given I have no memory of the events which the complainant is complaining about, and I feel no attachment to them as they were obviously committed by a past version of myself that I have no knowledge of, I humbly suggest to this court that not only am I not guilty of all charges, but that the complainant has brought false charges against me, presumably as he is unable or unwilling to charge the actual perpetrator.
00:03:37
Speaker
No, that's not right. Excuse me, Mr. Addison, but if I want your comment on this matter, I will ask for it. So, Dr. Denteth, you're claiming that the version of yourself who recorded... Mr. Billiff, what was that said? The compliant incline's Dr. Denteth accused him of drinking from Hitler's milky teat, Your Honour. Ah, yes. You're claiming it was a past version of yourself and not your current self who made these claims.
00:04:05
Speaker
I must admit that whilst this defense is certainly novel, I'm not convinced that a matter of one week is sufficient to show that your past self and your current self are not co-extensive. Your honor, would it help to clarify matters if I told you I used a teleporter to come to court today, one which scanned my old body, destroyed it,
00:04:26
Speaker
and then recreated me from new material in the courthouse foyer. Well, that does seem to cinch it. I find the defendant not guilty, and the complainant charges malicious. Mr. Bailiff, take Ms. Radisson away. Yes, my lord. Come with me, you rep's scallion. It's time to face the Paddle of Justice.
Introduction to 'Guide to the Conspiracy' Podcast
00:04:47
Speaker
What the- ah, would- ah, honest, could- could your Edelman eat it?
00:05:00
Speaker
The podcast is Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:05:10
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Joshua De Sinanda actually sitting next to me at a socially distant appropriate spacing. Is Dr. M. Dentith far enough away that I could not reach over and slap you roundly about the face, but I could stand up and do that with no difficulty, but I won't for reasons of hygiene.
00:05:32
Speaker
And not because Josh is not able to get revenge on me for last week's fiasco of an episode, due to that court case we just went through. If by fiasco you mean comedy gold, someone did mention to me that you're very long suffering. There was just one or two spots where I was trying to get a point out, and you had a very funny thing to say.
00:05:57
Speaker
That was mostly funny to you. I don't really remember much of that podcast at all. Well, you didn't remember bits of it as we were recording. So I haven't watched the video version of the podcast, but the fact that we do the
00:06:14
Speaker
the preamble bit twice. I put that in again at the end. I think that's actually the better take. I probably should have put that one in and left the other one out. Although it would make no sense since you keep on talking about it. We have talked about this. I don't care whether we've talked about it. I'm talking about it again. Anyway, we're going to revisit it anyway. Because in the preamble of last episode, I made a little bit of a mistake, an embarrassing mistake.
00:06:42
Speaker
And you weren't drunk at all. I don't even have that excuse.
Josh's Podcast Naming Mishap
00:06:46
Speaker
No. Last week I talked about how for the first time ever, I was the one being a guest on someone else's podcast and not him. And wouldn't you know it, I got the name of the podcast wrong. All the way through, I kept calling it invalid argument. It is, of course, a legal argument. In my defense, as philosophers, I think we're most used to encountering invalid argumentation. And of course, the Fellas joke really only works with an invalid argument.
00:07:11
Speaker
It does, yes. An illegal argument in a philosophy sense, I don't know. Certainly, I'd be interested to see one, but I don't know if that actually exists. I'm actually now thinking about a whole critical thinking course about legal argumentation and then bringing in, of course, this argument's illegal. Thank you. I resigned three hours ago, so I'll just leave now. Yes.
00:07:36
Speaker
Anyway, so the podcast I was on was illegal argument featuring a bunch of wonderful people. Mark is the only one I actually knew beforehand and since I'm absolutely shit with names I haven't remembered anybody else's who I recorded with but they're all lovely people and you should go and listen to them. Now of course because we can't allow Josh to have any moment of fame I would like to point out in the last week I've done eight media interviews on COVID-19.
Dr. Denteth's Media Appearances on COVID-19
00:07:59
Speaker
Is that specifically because of the David Ferrier thing, or is it just because you're a New Zealand spokesperson? I think it's actually due to other experts in my field going, if you want to talk to someone local, talk to this particular person, and also a whole bunch of them are people that I've corresponded with in
00:08:17
Speaker
in in the past so i mean i've been on the panel before which is kind of ironic because i have spent a lot of time on twitter talking about how the panels are really really terrible staple on rnz and now i've been a guest on it twice so you know hypocrisy always wins out and yes i'm basically in people's phone books now
00:08:36
Speaker
And good people's phone books, not just the bad people. So does it radio, print, been on the telly? Not TV as of yet. Haven't had any inquiries from the world of TV.
00:08:55
Speaker
That's all I'm going to say. Then the side down. Of course Russell Brown doesn't have a TV show in any more, otherwise I'd definitely be on that one. Well, there you go, yes. Yeah, so you've been jet-setting around the country. Actually, no, I've kind of just... You've been sitting in one spot, I assume. I've been in my room. It's actually the downside when I did the detail, which is RNZ's podcast, which also gets broadcast on RNZ.
00:09:22
Speaker
they would like to have recorded in studio, given I'm in Auckland, they record in Auckland, but they're not allowing guests into studio at this particular point in time. Otherwise, I would have had an excuse to actually be in a recording booth. Instead, I recorded it on my phone. Although it does turn out that these lapel mics we use can actually be used with a phone quite effectively, and it does make it sound a whole lot better than spending your entire time kind of doing that weird dance with a big phone. Well, there we go.
Introduction of 'Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre'
00:09:53
Speaker
Now, to this week, it's the second in our instalment. We're going with Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre. I think we are, I like that. Yep. Second instalment of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre, where this week we'll be looking now. Now, we did Charles Pigdon last week, I think. So this week, I want you to hit me with a new paper, and it better be seminal. I'm expecting a huge amount of seminality from this paper. It better be so seminal that I just, I won't know what to do with myself.
00:10:23
Speaker
Well, believe me, Josh, when we think about the importance of this paper, it is one of the most erect monuments in the philosophical literature on conspiracy theory. It's produced a large amount of seminal work in its wake. So you could say it's kind of the font of seminal work coming out of the philosophy of conspiracy theory. And of course, it is none other than Brian Elkely's of conspiracy theories.
00:10:53
Speaker
Let's talk about it now.
Discussion on Brian Keeley's Paper on Conspiracy Theories
00:10:54
Speaker
Yes, let's.
00:11:02
Speaker
Now, I think we should start this conversation with a little bit of a provisor. I would like to point out two things. One, I have done work with Brian Keeley subsequent to the writing of his paper of conspiracy theories. And actually, I've also been invited to give a talk at Pitzer College, where he is located. So I know Brian quite well. But secondly, Brian's also one of our patrons.
00:11:28
Speaker
So we're not going to be mean about him, but then why would we? Well no, why would we? But at the same time you might go, oh I mean surely there's more to say about this paper, you know, where's the juicy stuff which he gets wrong? By and large actually I think Brian gets it mostly right. There's going to be one point at the end where I'm going to suggest that maybe
00:11:50
Speaker
a bad tangent was taken. But at the same time, I also think it's quite possible to interpret that tangent in the way where it isn't bad at all. And we'll talk more about my interpretation of Brian's work and maybe how I've got that wrong towards the end of our discussion of this paper. So this is of conspiracy theories. It was published in the Journal of Philosophy, which I should point out
00:12:13
Speaker
Kind of is the big journal in philosophy, so getting a paper on conspiracy theory into the journal of philosophy back in 1999 was a huge and monumental achievement. It appears in volume 96, number three, so that's March 1999. Like Charles,
00:12:35
Speaker
Brian did not have the foresight to predict 9-11 and thus talk about it in his papers, which we will chastise people for throughout this series for the sheer fact that really, why weren't you thinking ahead? He did at least have the wisdom to post-date the Oklahoma City bombing, as we will see. Which is quite convenient because he does use that as an example. And otherwise, if he had talked about it before it occurred, a little bit suspicious. If I were the FBI, I'd wish him.
00:13:04
Speaker
Now, the Journal of Philosophy doesn't normally have abstracts for papers, but Brian manages to sneak what I think the abstract is into footnote 1. So, Josh, take it away. Indeed. So, footnote 1 reads, conspiracy theory has not been given much attention by philosophers. In fact, I'm aware of only a handful of discussions, for example, Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, and Charles Pigdon, Popper Revisited, or What is Wrong with Conspiracy Theory. See previous episodes.
00:13:34
Speaker
I believe that the reason for this omission is that most academics simply find the conspiracy theories of popular culture to be silly and without merit. I believe, however, that it is incumbent on philosophers to provide analysis of the errors involved in common delusions if that indeed is what they are. I offer this paper in the spirit of Philip Kitchen's work on the philosophical difficulties of scientific creationism, abusing science the case against creationism.
00:13:59
Speaker
And that makes sense to me. That's basically weird. He actually, he also talks about Hegel as well, doesn't he? Hegel's work about miracles. He's a similar thing in that regard. Actually, before we start, just for those of us who don't know, Brian L. Keeley. Quick, quick. Who is he? Where does he work? So Brian L. Keeley is a philosopher of
00:14:18
Speaker
a philosopher of, no, a philosopher of profession at Pitzer College in Claremont, LA. He's a professor of philosophy at Pitzer College in Claremont, LA. I've been to Claremont. I gave an invited talk there on conspiracy theories back at the end of 2017.
00:14:40
Speaker
Brian does a lot of work basically around the philosophy of the brain. I should actually use the proper term here. But I also know it's not neurology or neuro linguistics. And I'm completely blanking on the actual way to talk about philosophy of neuroscience, which is probably actually the way to talk about it anyway, truth be told. And
00:15:02
Speaker
basically has a very, very good position at Pitzer College, writes excellent work. I know this because I co-wrote a piece with him in the Rutledge Handbook of Applied Epistemology, which came out at the end of 2018, which is a look at the current state of the philosophical literature on conspiracy theory. He is, as the British would say, a good egg. There we go.
00:15:25
Speaker
So, his paper begins. It's in six sections, section one basically being the introduction. And I must say, after reading that Charles Pigdon's one in our last instalment, I was sort of struck, oh, okay, right, this is the stuff that we've been talking about for the last five years. And after reading this one, it's like, this is exactly the stuff we've been talking about for the last five years, because it gets right into the epistemology of it.
00:15:52
Speaker
Yes, and arguably almost all the work in the philosophy of conspiracy theory that has come out after Charles and Brian's papers is basically footnotes on the work they've done. So Charles argues that we should all consider ourselves to be conspiracy theorists and there's nothing wrong with conspiracy theorising.
00:16:14
Speaker
Brian argues that there's nothing inherently wrong with something being a conspiracy theory. Can we analyze a class of conspiracy theory to which we can say there's a prima facie suspicion we can attach to it? So Charles says, look, there's nothing wrong with conspiracy theories generally.
00:16:33
Speaker
And Brian goes, but here's a set of conspiracy theories that when you hear them, you actually might have a rationale for going, maybe not. And basically all the work subsequently has been working through that particular idea of conspiracy theorising isn't bad. How do we work out when to believe them and also when not to believe them?
00:16:56
Speaker
Now, as a complete non sequitur, as I said that, I realised that yesterday was my wedding anniversary. Went out for dinner, had a lovely time. The thing about my wedding anniversary is that our very first episode of this podcast ended up getting uploaded on the date of my wedding anniversary. Which means that yesterday was the sixth episode, uh, sixth anniversary of the first episode of this podcast. And if I'd thought of that at the time, probably would have said something at the start of the episode.
00:17:21
Speaker
Well, six years. I just don't even track these things, so congratulations to us. Cheers, podcast. You're celebrating with the drink of your people. I celebrate with a drink of the Scottish people, which I'm not related to.
00:17:44
Speaker
So, right early on in the paper, do we call him Brian? Do we call him Professor Keeler? You can call him Brian. Should I call him Brian as well? I thought we were going to go into the, you can call me Eddie and Eddie, I can call you Al. Well, you can't. I think we can call him Brian. Okay. He's a patron, yes. Cheers, Brian.
00:18:05
Speaker
So right at the start, Brian introduces the idea of the unwarranted conspiracy theory. So a class of conspiracy theory that we don't actually have reason to believe, and given that it's a bit of a mouthful, it becomes UCT, and UCTs pop up all the way through the rest of the paper.
00:18:22
Speaker
Now, warrant is a way of kind of discussing whether there is evidence in support of a particular claim. So warranted claim is one where we've got adequate evidence to believe it, and unwarranted claim is one where you don't have enough evidence to believe it. So we can kind of think of warrant as being a way of talking about justification. It is quite interesting that because of Brian's work,
00:18:48
Speaker
When philosophers who talk about conspiracy theories talk about their believability, we have now adopted this notion of warranted or unwarranted as the terms we use, which basically goes all the way back to Keeley. Well, there you go.
00:19:05
Speaker
So yeah, chapter one, it's just the introduction. It makes it...
Criteria for Unwarranted Conspiracy Theories
00:19:10
Speaker
Section one, really. Yeah, it's not really long enough to be chapters, is it? And it basically introduces the idea of conspiracy theories and that we do know they happen, but there are certainly a species of them that we should perhaps be suspicious of. And by way of an example, section two is entirely devoted to the Oklahoma City bombing.
00:19:32
Speaker
which we did an episode on very recently.
00:19:36
Speaker
So you probably don't need us to go over it again. There was a bombing in Oklahoma City. There sure was. It was a big one. It was the biggest one at the time, was it? Prior to 9-11, it was the largest loss of life from any terrorist acts within the United States. It wasn't outside terrorism. No. It wasn't outside terrorism. It was your bog-standard white militia. Thoroughly domestic, yes.
00:20:04
Speaker
And so it sort of goes through the details of it, which we talked about just recently, and then of the conspiracy theories around it. And then, so having used that as a good example to show exactly the sort of thing he's talking about in a way that made sense, because obviously this was only three years later. The events were three years into the past when this paper was published. So section three goes on with a bit of the old definition. We like a definition.
00:20:34
Speaker
We do indeed, in fact, given the way that my database works, definitions get tagged all the time so I can go back and check them. And Brian's definition goes thusly. A conspiracy theory is a proposed explanation of some historical event or events in terms of the significant causal agency of a relatively small group of persons, the conspirators, acting in secret. Note a few things about this definition.
00:21:01
Speaker
First, a conspiracy theory deserves the Appalachian theory because it proffers an explanation of the event in question. It proposes reasons why the event occurred. Second, a conspiracy theory need not propose that the conspirators are all powerful, only that they've played some pivotal role in bringing about the event.
00:21:23
Speaker
They can be seen as merely setting events in motion. Indeed, it is because the conspirators are not omnipotent, but most people say omnipotent.
00:21:40
Speaker
It is because the conspirators are not omnipotent that they must act in secret, for if they acted in public, others would move to obstruct them. Third, the conspirators must be small, though the upper bound are necessarily vague. Technically speaking, a conspiracy of one is no conspiracy at all, but rather the actions of a lone agent. Josh, what do you take away from that definition? It sounds awfully familiar.
00:22:05
Speaker
given that it's kind of how we've been defining conspiracy theories all along, especially the whole proffering and explanation of an event in terms of a conspiracy and indeed some of the disclaimers that we've put on things in the past, especially about the fact that it need not be or it can simply be something that was set in motion by a conspiracy and that it doesn't have baked into it the idea that the conspiracy succeeded.
00:22:37
Speaker
which is something that we've brought up time and time again. He gets into his unwarranted conspiracy theories, which I didn't copy into the notes because we would have essentially ended up reading out the entirety of the section and then this episode would have become about an hour long.
00:22:54
Speaker
His criteria for what counts as an unwarranted conspiracy theory were quite numerous, I found. As I was reading through it, I was like, is he being a bit too strict with his definition here? It seems very, very, very, very prescriptive and a very narrow definition of this. I mean, obviously, in the past, we've had problems of saying
00:23:14
Speaker
conspiracy theories in general have these conditions attached to them, and we think that's wrong. And quite fair enough, he's specifically talking about the sorts that you should be suspicious of. But there are a bunch of the criteria that I thought, is he going a bit far? Is it almost?
00:23:29
Speaker
I mean, on one level, what Brian's doing is kind of groundbreaking, so he's carving up the conceptual landscape. It's one of those terms where I'm not entirely sure whether I approve of myself talking about carving up the conceptual landscape or whether it's the worst thing I could possibly say, because it does sound a bit pretentious, but at the same time, it also describes exactly what people do when they're doing conceptual analysis, which is working out extents and exclusions based upon the way that definitions work and applying them.
00:23:58
Speaker
So in doing that, given there's no prior work, it kind of does make sense. There's going to be an awful lot of detail trying to capture an idea when no one else has done it. And of course, what Brian is interested in is the types of evidence which get used in support or used to dismiss particular conspiracy theories. So he starts talking about things such as errant data.
00:24:25
Speaker
which is data which is errant, as to say it is not accounted for by one explanation, but is used by another. And a common argument about conspiracy theories is that they don't use the evidence the official theory relies upon,
00:24:43
Speaker
Instead, they use data which is errant to that particular theory. And you have data which is contrary. So it doesn't contradict it, but it is kind of awkward for the official theory or data which is actually contradictory. If you believe this particular bit of data, you can't believe the data that supports the official theory. And so it goes through that kind of minutiae, kind of cranking through things to point out
00:25:11
Speaker
how evidence is used and abused. Hmm, fair enough then. So season four, oh, season four, God, I can't even get my, I'm thinking too much television. Section four, need to lay off the Netflix. Section four, section four is the guts of it, a lot of it, I think. That's the philosophical, technical term, I believe, where he goes into two sort of aspects of these unwarranted conspiracy theories. One, the attractiveness of them, because he points out, you know, people,
00:25:41
Speaker
these don't just get dismissed, you know, some of them have a long history, some of them have a long following, they are very attractive things for people to believe, but also shows how some of the features of unwarranted conspiracy theories, which makes them attractive, actually explain why they're flawed in the first place. So that errant data was the first place he goes to. Yes, and then he talks about unfalsifyability, which
00:26:06
Speaker
is one of those things that people use against conspiracy theories all the time. But as Brian points out, the fact that conspiracy theory is unfalsifiable isn't necessarily a problem, is it? No. So, I mean, for the errant data,
00:26:23
Speaker
His main thing is that there's always going to be errant data. I forget where the quote comes from, but he talks about the phrase, not all data are true. The fact that he uses data as a plural and not a mass noun shows he's a proper academic. So good on him. So I just don't care about that kind of thing anymore. In the same respect, then sometimes I care about whether it's phenomenon or phenomena. And then I go, do, do, do, do, do. And nothing matters anymore. Doesn't matter anymore. So the fact is that
00:26:52
Speaker
for any set of data, some of it's probably actually not going to be right. Yeah, so it happens to be the case that President JFK
00:27:01
Speaker
Or even just John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I don't think it was even called Princeton Kennedy. Princeton Kennedy was wearing socks of a particular colour the day that he was shot in downtown Dallas. No explanation as far as I'm aware. Thinks that the colour of JFK's socks are important.
00:27:24
Speaker
But you could imagine someone going, well, normally the president wore a light blue sock when he went out, and yet when he arrived at the morgue, his socks were grey. Suspicious, I think so.
00:27:41
Speaker
That doesn't fit the official theory. And it turns out that, yeah, there's going to be lots of data which is errant to any particular explanation because, as I say, not all data is true and not all data is actually salient or relevant to the kind of explanation you're putting forward. As I've argued in various places, we tend to select the evidence.
00:28:04
Speaker
we think supports a particular explanatory hypothesis, which means that we go through a process of discarding bits of evidence we don't think is salient to the story. And that particular process will cause errancy issues of people who your your expectation doesn't take into account this really important factoid that my theory relies upon.
00:28:27
Speaker
Your theory must be wrong. So eventually he sort of comes to the point that you should actually be suspicious of a theory that accounts for every single bit of data because that shouldn't happen.
00:28:43
Speaker
Kind of shows that your explanation is probably post-factor. Most explanations are fuzzy around the edges. They don't take into account everything that happened that day. If your explanation of the assassination of JFK has to take into account how many coffee beans were at the coffee bar that Lee Harvey Oswald visited the morning before the assassination,
00:29:08
Speaker
then there's something wrong with your explanation, because it really shouldn't matter whether there were 513 beams in the jar or 514. Or even just things like... 513. The number of conspiracy theories that lean heavily on police reports changing or reports from reporters changing from one minute to the next and so on, when in fact some of them were just wrong. People get stuff wrong, yes.
00:29:37
Speaker
And indeed, in the heat of the moment, we tend to accept eyewitness testimonies as being true. And then we discover that maybe people didn't see the event properly. You're taking two reports and combining them into one. There's a whole bunch of data collection issues. That means you have to kind of revisit these things. Yeah, but then that sort of leads into the unfalsifiability thing because
00:30:04
Speaker
A feature of conspiracies is that they are secret, and so a conspiracy theory will often include the notion of a cover-up, as the conspirators don't want their conspiracy to be revealed. And so that does kind of cause the problems, well, the phenomenon sometimes, that a lack of evidence for a conspiracy theory is in itself taken to be evidence for a conspiracy theory. The fact that no evidence is there, that just shows they've covered the evidence up.
00:30:31
Speaker
And some people say that means they become unfalsifiable, and you say, well, that is actually what happens sometimes. If you are successfully covering up a conspiracy, then you can kind of predict that if the conspiracy is successful, there will be no evidence for it.
00:30:49
Speaker
The thing about unfalsifiability, actually the two things about unfalsifiability, unfalsifiability is used as a demarcation criterion between something being scientific and pseudoscientific. So it actually doesn't really apply to explanations in the social sciences because it's not, it's a theory used to demarcate between the hard sciences and bad scientific theories in that domain.
00:31:14
Speaker
But the second and more important part is, falsifiability is a stupid criteria for distinguishing between good theories and bads, as philosophers have discussed since the 1960s. And if you still think that falsifiability is a really good way to demarcate between good and bad theories, you've got
00:31:31
Speaker
60 years of data you need to read about to point out that falsificationism just doesn't work. This is a message from a philosopher of science who really really hates the fact that people think that falsificationism is a really good idea. It's outmoded and outdated. Give up now. Yes, you fool.
00:31:53
Speaker
I mean, it's probably more than one. But when we're talking to you specifically right now, you know who you are. And also, the kind of people who listen to this podcast, they know what's what. Exactly. They don't need me renting to them like an Alex Jones talking about falsicationalism. They're putting falsicationalism in the water and it's turning the frog straight. However, OK.
00:32:14
Speaker
Unfalsifiability might not be a problem, but the problem that Brian does identify with the whole lack of evidence as evidence, sort of everything's a cover-up, is that it ends up promoting a sort of skepticism which becomes much too wide. A global skepticism, yes.
00:32:35
Speaker
You start thinking this way and eventually you can't trust anything. You only need to look at the likes of your QAnons and all the anti-scientific COVID 5G type stuff, where if you want to believe in those, you kind of have to abandon all of science really to maintain a worldview that can include that conspiracy.
00:33:03
Speaker
And that seems to be the thing that he's much more concerned with. But what's important here is that Brian's concerned with a very specific type of unwarranted conspiracy theory, the mature conspiracy theory.
Appreciation of Keeley's Work and Its Skeptical Impact
00:33:19
Speaker
So Brian's worry about unwarranted conspiracy theories is,
00:33:25
Speaker
As these theories mature, you should expect evidence to start amounting, either showing the theory is good, or showing the theory is bad. So if your mature theory continues to be unwarranted, that is to say, evidence isn't amounting in its favour,
00:33:45
Speaker
and you continue to believe it, that's where that kind of global skepticism starts to creep in. It's a consequence of holding on to a theory where evidence hasn't actually piled up in support of it. So I kind of like to think of it as we talk about maturity with respect to cheeses. If your conspiracy theory stinks,
00:34:06
Speaker
because it's really old and no one wants to touch it, then maybe you should give up belief in it because maintaining belief in it may well lead you down that path of a skepticism of all kinds of data to maintain belief in your mature unwarranted conspiracy theory. You heard it here first, conspiracy theories are cheese. And as a vegan, I find that very, very disturbing. Now,
00:34:35
Speaker
I see in your notes here that you, perhaps, yourself have misinterpreted Brian on this point. Yes, in the past. I think that I, and I think to a certain extent, Lee Basham, although I know Lee does disagree with me on this, so I respect his opinion on this, but I think we have contributed to a misunderstanding of Brian's thesis about mature conspiracy theories.
00:35:00
Speaker
Because I think, and I think this because it's actually in my first book, I kind of attack Brian for putting forward this kind of global skepticism view as a consequence of his view on conspiracy theories generally. I should have recognized at the time that actually he is talking about a very specific class of unwarranted conspiracy theory, the mature one.
00:35:24
Speaker
I mean we can have a debate as to exactly when we measure maturity. It is interesting that Waco is only three Waco, actually Waco would be four years old. The Oklahoma City bombing is only three years old but Brian is kind of casting a spurt upon that particular thing. I don't think three years is actually long enough to get to that point of maturity but that's because maturity is a kind of vague metric
00:35:51
Speaker
I think to a certain extent, at least the reason why I read Brian as advocating that belief in conspiracy theories leads to global scepticism, and maybe the reason why Lee has done similar is because of what happens in the next section.
00:36:08
Speaker
Yeah, so the next section goes a bit more into the psychology of it, perhaps, and a bit more into the attractiveness of accounting for why people like to believe in conspiracies in general, and brings up the trope that we've seen a lot of the time, which is that
00:36:25
Speaker
conspiracy theories let people believe there is more order to the world than possibly there actually is. That there is, you know, these bad things happen because there's a plan. Big occurrences have big causes. And that does not really seem to be the case. So I think part of the issue here
00:36:49
Speaker
is that there might be a bit of a code switch that occurs between the early sections and the late sections. In the early sections, Brian's quite scrupulous about talking about conspiracy theories, unwarranted conspiracy theories, and mature conspiracy theories, which are long-standing unwarranted conspiracy theories. In this section, he starts talking about conspiracy theories more generally,
00:37:16
Speaker
I think the criticism is actually about the unwarranted conspiracy theories, a particular class. But at the same time, it does kind of read as being a general, well, conspiracy theories reflect this particular view upon things, which of course is inconsistent with his claims earlier on that conspiracies do occur and conspiracy theories are perfectly adequate explanations. So I think that last section is meant to be targeted at the UCTs.
00:37:45
Speaker
But maybe it reads a little bit too much like conspiracy theories about Mkay. Yes, yes. That being said, Brian and I have done work subsequently. So I very much doubt that that is a view that he would be a hardcore advocate of at this particular time. And of course, Brian, if you're listening and you want a right of reply, you've got it.
00:38:11
Speaker
And then section six is the conclusion of the paper. And I don't think either of us could say it any better than his final words. Do you want to do the honors this time? Indeed.
00:38:24
Speaker
So in the end, what do I think of conspiracy theories? My initial motivation was to present an analysis of conspiracy theories in the spirit of Hume's analysis of miracles. For Hume, miracles are by definition explanations that we are never warranted in believing.
00:38:44
Speaker
If my analysis here is correct, however, we cannot say the same thing about conspiracy theories. They are not by definition unwarranted, a good thing, given that we want to believe in at least some conspiracies, for example Watergate and Iran-Contra.
00:39:00
Speaker
Instead, I suggest there is nothing straightforwardly analytic that allows us to distinguish between good and bad conspiracy theories. We seem to be confronted with a spectrum of cases ranging from the believable to the highly implausible. The best we can do is track the evaluation of given theories over time, and come to some consensus as to when belief in the theory entails more skepticism than we can stomach.
00:39:27
Speaker
Also, I suspect that much of the intuitive problem with conspiracy theories is a problem with the theorists themselves and not a feature of the theories they produce. Perhaps the problem is a psychological one of not recognising when to stop searching for hidden causes.
00:39:45
Speaker
Nonetheless, I suggest that the study of conspiracy theories, even the crazy ones, is useful, if only because it forces us to clearly distinguish between our good explanations and their bad ones. Which I think sums up perfectly the sort of stuff we've been talking about here for now six years.
00:40:07
Speaker
Yes. Good Lord. Six years. Long, long years. Oh, the number of patrons we haven't got in that time. Ah, yes. No, so I think it's in proof of the fact that you can take the boy out of the philosophy department, but you can't take the philosophy department out of the boy. I thoroughly enjoyed reading that academic paper from a philosophical journal. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's incredibly well written paper and
00:40:34
Speaker
It perfectly tracks with the work which is going on today. There's nothing old about it, apart from the bizarre example, which is only bizarre because of 9-11. Has Brian's views evolved much in the intervening 20 odd years?
00:40:54
Speaker
Well, as I say, I mean, he's worked with me. So we've written stuff on conspiracy theory and the way that we should be particularists about how we assess conspiracy theories. He has written other papers which kind of continue this miracle and analysis style line and has been talking about writing another paper for quite some time. I'm going to remind you of that now, Brian. You need to get to work on that.
00:41:21
Speaker
But yeah, he's still continuing along and his views are certainly congruent with my own. And certainly whenever I write on conspiracy theory and point out the people in the literature which support my particular views, Brian's work is cited in amongst them.
00:41:43
Speaker
So they go, yes, no, I think if you were to summarise this paper in a single word with a straight face, that word would be seminal. It would be. I would give this 98% if I was marking it as an essay. I'd only dock 2% because you should have used 9-11 as an example if you were writing it for me today.
00:42:07
Speaker
I'd talk 2% because it didn't end with a Robocop reference like Charles Pigdon's. Oh, good point. I mean that actually you're sorry 94% lack of pop culture. No Robocop. Yep. So there we go.
Episode Wrap-up and Future Discussions
00:42:20
Speaker
That concludes this episode of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre. Well, next time in a fortnight's time, we'll be dealing with a paper by Lee Basham.
00:42:28
Speaker
as well we should. Indeed. But what happens when we get to my work? Well, yeah, that's what I was going to say. Eventually your works are going to be the
00:42:41
Speaker
relevant ones. We could do one where we get a ringer in to replace me for that particular episode. We could just sort of lock you in a box in the corner of the room as you try to shout your objections to the things we're saying about your paper. Yeah, don't know. Gaby Johnson is right. I don't know. A problem for another time. Indeed. But in the immediate future, of course, we have the Patreon bonus episode to follow this one, which will be newsy as usual. We got
00:43:08
Speaker
A bit of a barmagate. I think it looks like people have settled on what a barmagate actually is. Which turns out to be something which is quite old. Trump is hydroxychloroquine. Developments in the famous case of Roe versus Wade. Very, very interesting development.
00:43:30
Speaker
A UFO video from Brazil, which may or may not have been censored on the internet. And then the Hobby Lobby's Hammurabi Robbing Hobby. Reference. I so wish I had come up with the phrase Hobby Lobby's Hammurabi Robbing Hobby, but I did not. Someone on the internet did.
00:43:49
Speaker
But it's too good not to use. It's true. So then we'll be coming up for our patrons after we finish recording this episode. And frankly, I think we've finished recording this episode. So we are going to say, toodly pip, goodbye zee bye bye, and goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.
00:44:19
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:45:20
Speaker
And remember, the truth is out there, but not quite where you think you left it.