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An Interview with Matt Shields
31 Plays2 years ago
M interviews Matt Shields, an assistant professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Matt is the author of "Rethinking conspiracy theories" (Synthese, 2022) and "Conceptual Engineering, Conceptual Domination, and the Case of Conspiracy Theories" Social Epistemology, forthcoming).
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Transcript
Introduction: Meet the Hosts and Guest
00:00:05
Speaker
The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and Em Dint.
00:00:17
Speaker
My guest this week is Matt Shields, an assistant professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Matt is the author of, amongst other things, rethinking conspiracy theories, which appeared in synth days earlier this year, and conceptual engineering, conceptual domination, and the case of conspiracy theories, which will appear in a special issue of social epistemology that I'm editing.
00:00:39
Speaker
Matt was also a panelist at the first international conference on the philosophy of conspiracy theory, where I was showcasing new work by new philosophers.
Conspiracy Theories and Elections
00:00:48
Speaker
So it's great to welcome Matt to the show. Hello, how are things in North Carolina on this historic day in the Republic of America?
00:00:59
Speaker
Well, first off, thank you so much for having me. Yeah, waiting a bit with bated breath here about the outcome of the election today, and we'll see what happens, but I can't say I'm holding out much hope for a good outcome.
00:01:17
Speaker
I suspect there's been probably a preponderance of conspiracy theories around this particular election. Absolutely. Absolutely. A great deal of them. It does seem that the stolen election conspiracy theories are already being espoused by people who look like they're going to win.
00:01:37
Speaker
but are using it as an excuse for saying, well, if I don't win, it definitely isn't because people didn't vote for me. It's because Joe Biden went around and personally put extra ballots in the boxes. Yes, that's right. That's right. That's a very interesting kind of evolution of the stolen election conspiracy theories, that additional element where even though they're favored to win, they're still deploying that type of view. Yeah.
00:02:04
Speaker
Yeah, with Joe Biden as a kind of electoral Santa Claus, but only rewarding the bad kids and not.
Diving into Conspiracy Theory Literature
00:02:11
Speaker
Now that's a good way to actually get into the trivial question, like to ask all the academics who work on conspiracy theory, what actually got you into conspiracy theories in the first place?
00:02:21
Speaker
Yeah, we had a chance to talk about this a little bit at the Pitzer conference that you mentioned, which was kind of helpful for thinking about this question for me. How did I get into the conspiracy theory theory literature? For me, it was looking at a lot of both
00:02:42
Speaker
certain popular treatments, but also academic research around the 2016 period where there seemed to be emerging this increasingly influential and almost consensus type position that what we were seeing was this explosion of irrationality in the way in which ordinary citizens
00:03:05
Speaker
seem to have been some kind of deep distrust of mainstream political, economic, media, and so on institutions and that this represented kind of a very serious crisis. And so, for example, you would find kind of very familiar claims about the great threat of populism,
00:03:24
Speaker
You know from the right and the form so here in the US in the form of Donald Trump to the left in the form of Bernie Sanders are going to the UK and the campaigns of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party.
Populism and Political Distrust
00:03:38
Speaker
And I was really not a fan of this kind of entire way of looking at our.
00:03:45
Speaker
political lives and was very concerned about it, in particular, again, kind of the way it was becoming a sort of consensus position, because I think that in general, people have excellent reason to kind of be distrustful of a society's institutions when they've, you know, brought about massive economic inequality, haven't done anything about the existential threats of things like climate change,
00:04:07
Speaker
when they commit endless atrocities abroad, and when the very figures who are sort of promoting this kind of narrative about the unwashed masses and their unwarranted distrust and expertise in mainstream institutions, when those very institutions themselves are responsible for a great deal of
00:04:31
Speaker
so-called kind of misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda. So just to give kind of one example that I feel like really kind of stuck in my craw was I noticed that the editor in chief of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, was writing pieces about the perils of conspiracy theories when he himself had written this.
00:04:52
Speaker
kind of infamous, in my view, piece. It was in March 2002 in the lead up to the Iraq War in the New Yorker that was absolutely crucial for pushing
Institutional Conspiracy Theories
00:05:02
Speaker
the view. And some might say, and maybe we'll even talk about this, the conspiracy theory of a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. And I talk about this, I use this as a resource in one of my papers, but Robert Draper's book, How to Start a War, it's a pretty good overview for those who aren't familiar with that.
00:05:18
Speaker
the lead up to the Iraq war, but that piece became sort of received wisdom on the beltway and became crucial, something the Bush administration could point to, to say, look, it's not just sort of neocons in the right wing who are pushing this view. We've got this left of center publication that's taking that view. And yet at the same time, it was a figure like Goldberg who was talking about this great threat post 2016 of sort of distrust in the rise of conspiracy theories.
00:05:47
Speaker
So I was very concerned about sort of this emerging ideology. And that was, it was in that context that I came across Cassin Qassam's 2019 book, Conspiracy Theories. And I felt in some ways that it was kind of a microcosm of this tendency. And I thought this would be a way to engage with this, this type of worldview and to critique it. And then that became sort of my introduction to the world of conspiracy
00:06:16
Speaker
theory, theory. And I realised Kasam wasn't alone, but I was also very pleased to see that, you know, that wasn't the only position that was on offer. Yes, actually, that brings us quite nicely to the second obvious question. So Kasam's 2019 book, Conspiracy Theories, is rather light on talking about other philosophers engaging in conspiracy theory.
00:06:39
Speaker
There are two rather derogatory references to David Cody and Charles Pigdom. There's one speculative reference to Brian L. Keeley, but you would get from the impression of Kasam's book, there's virtually no literature on conspiracy theory theory in philosophy, other than the work he's done. It even goes to a certain extent to not mention his first piece in Aeon.
00:07:04
Speaker
talking about kind of the idea that conspiracy theorists are gullible. So when you started looking at the literature, were you surprised by the existing literature in Fosse? Were you pleased by its existence? Were you horrified by the work that your peers had already done?
00:07:20
Speaker
No, it was a pleasant surprise. And as you mentioned, you wouldn't necessarily leave Kasam's book with the impression that there was already substantial literature that was out there. And so that was great to come across and find, I think, some kindred spirits.
00:07:40
Speaker
And it was actually, it was also sort of helpful for clarifying the slightly different approach that I wanted to take, especially in that initial rethinking conspiracy theories piece. I think it's a piece that's very much aligned with, in fact, in its original version was maybe even more transparently aligned with
00:08:00
Speaker
the kind of literature that's out there, so-called particularism, the idea that, and I know you've discussed this quite a bit on the podcast and of course, or yourself, you know, one of the foremost kind of representatives and defenders of the view, but that we should evaluate the epistemic merits or lack thereof of conspiracy theories on a case-by-case basis,
Debating Generalism vs. Particularism
00:08:21
Speaker
um so it was helpful to encounter and interact with that literature to sharpen up kind of how I wanted to approach things from again I think a kindred perspective but also a slightly different one. And that brings us quite nicely to rethinking conspiracy theories in which you critique generalism in a rather novel way. So you focus on the kind of
00:08:42
Speaker
exemplar conspiracy theories that you claim generalists uncritically center in their analyses. So let's talk a little bit about domination and dominant versus non-dominant institutional conspiracy theories. So what is a dominant institutional conspiracy theory and what is a non-dominant institutional conspiracy theory?
00:09:05
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. Again, this kind of traces back to the paper doesn't end up just looking at Kasam, although he's one of the main figures that I'm critiquing. But maybe it would be helpful to say a little bit about how how the idea got off the ground. And then that'll that'll sort of bring us to the to the distinction.
00:09:26
Speaker
So in Qassam's book, you know, when you when you crack it open and get to that that first chapter, the very first example that he gives is what he dubs himself this outrageous conspiracy theory of the Bush administration linking Al Qaeda and Iraq.
00:09:42
Speaker
An example he never goes back to later on in the book. Exactly, exactly. And so, you know, when I'm when I'm reading it for the first time, I'm like, oh, I'm very pleasantly surprised. Maybe this is actually going to be a descent from that dominant narrative that I was discussing before, where the idea is that there we need this sort of unique epistemic vocabulary to censure and stigmatize individuals who are not part of
00:10:09
Speaker
mainstream and powerful, say, political institution. So I thought, oh, maybe it's going to be an exception. But exactly as you point out, he never returns to it. And in fact, for me, what's kind of particularly odd is that many of the conclusions and generalizations he goes on to make about conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists are directly at odds with that kind of example. And I noticed that, so as I started to dig into the literature further,
00:10:37
Speaker
Another paper I know you're, of course, very familiar with, Sunstein and Vermeule's 2009 paper, makes a very kind of similar move. In fact, they do it even more explicitly. So in the middle of the paper for listeners who aren't familiar with it, it's worth checking out. And they sort of say,
00:10:56
Speaker
very casually throughout, we assume, a well-motivated government. And then they also say, despite the fact that, of course, it's the case that governments themselves can be purveyors of conspiracy theories in the pejorative sense and give the example of the Bush administration's linking of Al-Qaeda and Iraq. And as with Qassam, that goes on to play no subsequent role in their analysis, in part because they're saying, right, we're marginalizing examples of that kind.
00:11:24
Speaker
And so what I argue in my paper, rethinking conspiracy theories is that
00:11:32
Speaker
In fact, what we have going on in these cases is that so-called or what I call in the paper dominant institutional conspiracy theories are ones that are clearly being sometimes explicitly so marginalized in the literature. And it's being done almost entirely without argument. So what do I mean by this distinction between dominant and non-dominant theorists and theories?
00:11:56
Speaker
Well, I should also say that, in part, I'm very skeptical of any kind of pejorative concept of conspiracy theories. I'm very sympathetic to the particular perspective. But part of what I'm doing in the paper is I'm saying, all right, generalists, let's take this concept seriously. How does it follow, then, if we take the concept seriously, that we ought to analyze it by your own lights, given the ways you tell us that the pejorative concept of conspiracy theories ought to be analyzed?
00:12:23
Speaker
And what I argue is that we should be centering or treating as paradigmatic these dominant institutional conspiracy theories. Okay, so finally, to kind of define what I have in mind there, I don't mean anything particularly controversial. I just mean cases of conspiracy theories and theorists
00:12:43
Speaker
again, in the generalist pejorative sense, that are fabricated, consumed, promoted by institutions that are broadly influential and powerful within the society in question. So, you know, to say if we were to take kind of a more sort of Western-centric or say US context, it would be sort of the US government or
00:13:07
Speaker
corporations like Exxon and Amazon for media outlets. It would be New York Times, Washington Post, Fox News, CNN. And the non-dominant institutional conspiracy theories would be conspiracy theories and theorists, again, in the pejorative generalist sense, that aren't part of those institutions.
00:13:27
Speaker
either because they're really not part of institutions at all. It's very diffuse individuals, for example, who have very informal relationships to one another in online communities, or they are part of more formal structures and organizations and institutions, but don't have anything like the power and influence of the kinds of examples I was just giving.
00:13:47
Speaker
And so, once you have that distinction in hand what you realize is you go through this literature that says you know conspiracy theories are by their very nature epistemically problematic is that all of their examples, their paradigm cases are non dominant institution.
00:14:03
Speaker
theories and theorists. For example, probably their go-to example is so-called 9-11 is inside job theories, but also JFK assassination conspiracy theories, Princess Diana, the moon landing was fake, Illuminati, Sandy Hook shooting conspiracy theories, and similar kinds of examples. Again, ones that are not fabricated and promoted by individuals within
00:14:30
Speaker
dominant political, economic, media, intelligence institutions within the societies in question. And so what I end up arguing in the paper is that in fact, the dominant institutional conspiracy theories by the generalists own lights, again, by the very way that they understand what conspiracy theories and theorists are, those should be our main examples. And what ends up happening is if you make that move, almost
00:14:57
Speaker
all of the generalist's main claims about who conspiracy theorists are, why they believe what they believe, and the harms that result from conspiracy theories on their view.
Global McCarthyism as a Dominant Theory
00:15:08
Speaker
All of those claims turn out to be either just just false or they need to be kind of radically revised.
00:15:15
Speaker
I mean, I quite like this particular approach, which is kind of hoisting generalists by their own petard, going, look, if we play your game, what is the consequence of playing it this way? And you talk in the paper about Kasam and his talk about conspiracy theories being examples of right-wing propaganda. So his argument is, if you point out to a conspiracy theorist that their conspiracy theories are a form of right-wing propaganda, most sensible people go, oh,
00:15:44
Speaker
I'll have no truck with that and they'll just leave it alone, which seems like one of those stunningly naive things that a former Oxbridge professor might believe, given the kind of community he has when he's taking tea during the day.
00:16:01
Speaker
who get M. Julia Napolitana and her claim that, well, look, conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists, they suffer from epistemic insulation. They're immune to evidence. They won't change their minds about things. And thus, when we recenter the kind of dominant institutional conspiracy theories, which seem to vacillate quite a lot in their storytelling, then we have a bit of a problem there. And then, of course, there's
00:16:30
Speaker
the actual societal harms. So it seems that dominant institutional conspiracy theories really are very harmful. Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as a theory did a massive amount of harm.
00:16:45
Speaker
to the people of Iraq and also not just the people of Iraq. The soldiers sent by the UK and the US to Iraq were also victims and harmed by this particular conspiracy theory. So maybe we should we should go through Qassam, Napolitano and the harms thing. Although first it might be useful to get a few more examples of
00:17:09
Speaker
dominant institutional conspiracy theory. So weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the example which gets used by Kassam gets used by Sunstein and Fermil. That seems like a really obvious one. Do you have other examples in mind as well?
00:17:24
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I'd be happy to talk about other ones, but I'll talk about the other sort of main case study that I have in the paper of dominant institutional conspiracy theory and theorists.
00:17:39
Speaker
is cases of domestic and particularly what I focus on are global McCarthyism. And that phrase global McCarthyism there I'm indebted to the journalist Vincent Bevins whose recent book I highly recommend called the Jakarta Method where he discusses global McCarthyism as kind of a concept. But the idea of whether it was on the domestic scene
00:18:04
Speaker
in the mid and earlier 20th century in the US, and then kind of throughout the latter half of the 20th century globally for the US. The idea was that wherever one found growing support for communism within a population, again, whether in the US or abroad, that in fact, these were people who were stooges of
00:18:33
Speaker
Soviet power and influence that were in fact controlling what was what was going on that it was kind of a as I have kind of an excerpt there from this amazing speech that Kennedy is giving to the press corps after just shortly after the Bay of Pigs.
00:18:50
Speaker
So, you know, somehow the irony of making these kinds of proclamations about a Soviet conspiracy to overthrow local governments and try and impose
00:19:05
Speaker
one's country's hegemony is just completely lost. But anyway, Kennedy talks about this kind of ruthless, monolithic Soviet conspiracy. And that, of course, was kind of the consensus view in Washington and approaching the Cold War across both parties. And this was used as kind of the pretext for unbelievable atrocities that the US perpetrated.
Harms of Conspiracy Theories Compared
00:19:29
Speaker
So just to give kind of a few examples that I talked about in the paper, it was
00:19:33
Speaker
It was this narrative that was crucial in the overthrow of Mosaddeck in Iran that led to the brutal dictatorship of the Shah, of the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala, of Sukarno in Indonesia. And so not only do you have the subverting and overthrowing of democratically elected leaders and governments, you have mass atrocities that are committed. It's estimated that in Indonesia about
00:20:01
Speaker
a million people were killed and that, you know, Washington helped directly help to facilitate that process, both in the overthrow and in the killing of, you know, perceived dissidents and communists. So yeah, on the question of harms,
00:20:17
Speaker
To me, both when we look at examples, but then once you just think about the category of what a dominant institutional conspiracy theory is, it isn't a coincidence that they're more harmful. In a sense, of course, they're more harmful because these are the dominant institutions, Ergo. They have more resources, power, influence in order to carry out these kinds of projects and harms.
00:20:41
Speaker
to contrast it right with the example that seems to be the go-to these days for more generalist style pictures. 9-11 is an inside job, right? So suppose you accept the way that that sort of view is presented by generalists. So grant them everything that they say about it. What precisely are the harms supposed to be of engaging in this
00:21:06
Speaker
in this kind of you know totally epistemically egregiously flawed speculation right again granting them that picture. It's to me it's totally mysterious and it's never really discussed and in fact often what you find I think in the literature both among generalists sometimes you find this in the social science literature I found too although you're sort of
00:21:26
Speaker
uh, more of an expert on it than- than I am. But I feel like you often find this kind of two-step that takes place where to motivate the idea that we should care about conspiracy theories, the claim is, well, you know, they pose this very serious harm. And the reason they pose this harm, right, often go to examples in that context to motivate the project are, um, you know, for example, references to the use of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories or about, uh, views about other kinds of,
00:21:53
Speaker
minority groups. And that's, yeah, again, used to motivate the idea that these are things we should be very worried about these conspiracy theories. But of course, those are almost always dominant institutional conspiracy theories, right, or at least they begin life there that they are
00:22:09
Speaker
again, fabricated and promoted by individuals within the relevant society who are targeting the minority group and dehumanizing them and stigmatizing them through these kinds of conspiracy theories. Those are part of the dominant political media economic matrix within that society. But then the examples that are analyzed
00:22:33
Speaker
Right. Whether it's in the social science literature often, not always, but often. And then in the generalist philosophical literature is the example like 9-11 is an inside job or JFK assassination or Princess Diana conspiracy theories. And to me, there are some cases like the Sandy Hook
00:22:50
Speaker
conspiracy theories where you can say there are direct harms to individuals, right? The relentless harassment of the families of Sandy Hook victims, which of course is terrible and one shouldn't trivialize those harms, but they simply don't compare. So that's the best case scenario. I don't even know what the harms are supposed to be in the other cases other than very abstract harms to our epistemic
00:23:16
Speaker
structural life in terms of distrust and experts. And we can talk about that. I don't think it's very compelling. The arguments are very compelling there either, but they're very speculative and
Social Science and Conspiracy Theories
00:23:25
Speaker
very vague. So I don't even know what the direct harms are, but even taking the case like the Sandy Hook case, which would seem to be the best one for the type of harms of non-dominant institutional theories, they just pale in comparison to the entire overthrow of a political system, the mass slaughter of civilians, and all of the knock on harms and effects,
00:23:44
Speaker
you know, as you were just talking about of these kinds of dominant institutional conspiracy theories. So that would be one major reason to center those kinds of conspiracy theories in our analysis. Yeah, this reminds me of a conversation I was having with David Robertson recently who's a religious studies scholar who looks at conspiracy theories and kind of the intersection between certain kinds of conspiracy belief and religious belief. And one of his perennial complaints about the work in the social sciences
00:24:13
Speaker
that often the way that conspiracy theory is defined makes it sound pretty close to religious belief. But they never criticise religious belief, because that's a sensible thing that sensible people have in sensible societies, was conspiracy theories are bad. And there's this kind of weird knock-on effect of going, well look,
00:24:33
Speaker
going to say this thing is bad and then backport our analysis to explain why it's bad, rather than go what are the actual deleterious social consequences of beliefs and what are the products of those beliefs, which is why you end up having the situation where these kind of
00:24:52
Speaker
dominant institutional conspiracy theories are often not even called conspiracy theories. The thing which is so interesting about the weapons of mass destruction narrative is that many of the people in the social sciences don't consider it to be a conspiracy theory. They go, well, you know, it's been admitted to. It's part of the official theory now. Well, 9-11 conspiracy theories, all those,
00:25:17
Speaker
they're called conspiracy theories. And we know conspiracy theories are bad. We don't necessarily know why they're bad, but we know they are bad. And now we've got to explain why they're bad. Absolutely. And note the very idea of sort of baking into the definition. I mean, there's some complicated kind of literature back and forth about this, but just to kind of zoom out at the most general register,
00:25:44
Speaker
The idea of baking into the definition of conspiracy theory is that they would be at odds with official stories. I mean, that's kind of the very move that going back to what we were talking about at the beginning is the kind of thing I'm very concerned about, which is developing or inheriting uncritically a unique epistemic vocabulary for critiquing people who are not part of the halls of power.
00:26:07
Speaker
So that these are flaws that the bewildered herd has, but the people who are members of dominant institutions, well, by implication, are exempt from these kinds of flaws. And it's that kind of way of thinking that I'm very concerned about and that, in large part, I'm trying to critique in the piece. So what happens to generalism?
00:26:35
Speaker
if we center non-dominant institutional conspiracy theories in the analysis, so we move the focus away from these non-dominant ones and we go, let's put the focus on the dominant ones, the ones that have actual harms, the ones which cause, you know, are propagandistic, the ones which are weirdly formed in an epistemic way.
00:26:57
Speaker
Is generalism tenable once we refocus our attention on dominant institutional conspiracy theories? So I sort of focus on these four claims that generalists have made once they say, okay, we're
00:27:16
Speaker
starting from the idea that conspiracy theories are necessarily bad. They're forms of political propaganda. They're hopelessly epistemically insulated in the sense of being insensitive to counter evidence. And the four claims that are often made are one, that conspiracy theories are the work of
00:27:35
Speaker
amateurs who are skeptical of those who are considered to be experts within the relevant field. We get the idea that they are the province of fringe political extremists rather than sort of sensible centrist mainstream ideology. We get the idea that they're promoted by individuals who have sort of negative life circumstances. They're downwardly mobile socioeconomically, that is they're poor, they're undereducated.
00:28:04
Speaker
and other claims that are made. And then the kind of social science or aspects of the social science are invoked there. And then finally, we get the idea that to combat conspiracy theories, what we need is, for example, better intellectual and moral education. And so what I argue is that you only get those conclusions when you treat non-dominant conspiracy theories and theorists as
00:28:28
Speaker
as the exemplars, as the main cases. But as I'm arguing throughout and as we've discussed, I don't think those are the best examples. I don't think they're the most obviously politically propagandistic, because often the political views and ideologies behind them are very messy, which accords with empirically what we know about ordinary citizens. People's beliefs are, political beliefs are all over the place. Whereas people within dominant institutions, there are all kinds of reasons why they have a more unified and clear political ideology.
00:28:55
Speaker
I also think that dominant institutional theories and theorists are more epistemically insulated, and the reason for that is there are major costs to dissenting from the conspiracy theory. If I'm not on board with domestic and global McCarthyism, I'm not getting a job at the CIA or at the State Department or whatever, and similar with
00:29:16
Speaker
if I'm not on board with claims that are being made about Iraq under the Bush administration and indeed both major American political parties. So what happens then is if I take cases like say global McCarthyism or Iraq conspiracy theories and I treat those as paradigmatic, those four claims I think all turn out to be false or just need to be completely revised. So the first one, conspiracy theories are amateurish and not advocated or
00:29:44
Speaker
fabricated by individuals who are deemed to be experts isn't the case, right? So obviously, and I go through this in kind of quite a bit of detail in the paper, but many of those who are considered experts in terms of especially the foreign policy class, both members of the administration, but academics,
00:30:02
Speaker
policymakers, members of intelligence services were the authors of these kinds of conspiracy theories and kind of consume them hook, line and sinker. So certainly not amateurs in the sense and whatever, whatever that might, whatever definition one wants to, one wants to work with there.
00:30:18
Speaker
It's also not the case that it's political extremists, right? These were consensus views, global McCarthyism, and many aspects of domestic McCarthyism, right? You know, obviously there's some important historical nuance very broadly speaking. These were consensus views among both mainstream American political parties, same with the
00:30:38
Speaker
with the Iraq war. And then these are among the most educated, best well off socioeconomically, best sort of most have the most kind of social prestige of anyone within their society in terms of the people who are the authors and consumers of dominant institutional conspiracy theories. And then it doesn't seem like improving education is the
00:31:01
Speaker
is the best or even apt antidote for dealing with the harms that result then from conspiracy theories. So construed, because again, these are individuals who have had sort of the best possible educations. It seems like what's needed instead is a complete restructuring of our dominant institutions, restructuring of our dominant political economic media and so on institutions so that they can't serve as
00:31:27
Speaker
vehicles for these kinds of projects. Basically, the whole analysis and the set of generalizations that you typically get from generalist positions and the popular counterparts, I think, that tends to be often at least in mainstream media outlets and
00:31:46
Speaker
popular media outlets or many popular media outlets, the picture you get is often a kind of generalist picture of conspiracy theories. Almost all of those claims turn out again to be false or they need to be completely overhauled. So is there room for generalism do you think or do we need to just bite the bullet and be particular when it comes to claims of conspiracy?
00:32:08
Speaker
Yeah, I think, and I know you know this, Em, but the original version of the paper was, in a way, it wasn't just kind of an imminent critique of generalism or kind of, as you said, sort of hoisted by their own petard.
00:32:23
Speaker
strategy which is the the form that the paper takes it also had it had more of a disjunctive conclusion, where it said you know either we do that so either we radically revise generalism or maybe then we have reason to just get rid of the concept because once you treat dominant institutional conspiracy theories as paradigmatic.
00:32:41
Speaker
you might think there isn't much need for this concept. We already have concepts like propaganda and lies and deception and analyses of power and influence and so on that do all the work that we would want this concept to do. So it becomes kind of a de facto argument for particularism, especially as I like to interpret particularism, which is as more of kind of a critical negative reactive project that's saying,
00:33:09
Speaker
Look, there is this concept that's out there, both among ordinary speakers, but also and most crucially, among speakers with various kinds of formal authority. This concept that conspiracy theories by their very nature, by definition, are flawed, problematic.
00:33:29
Speaker
And on the way I kind of interpret particularism as saying, well, we don't really need that concept and that we should be really scrupulous to keep that concept out of, in particular, our sort of academic research and attempts to understand the world more broadly.
00:33:46
Speaker
Instead, we just need the concepts that we have of a theory that posits a conspiracy, totally respectable
Conceptual Engineering in Philosophy
00:33:54
Speaker
concepts. We don't need to add this additional negatively valenced concept of conspiracy theory. So for me, the paper is very much, it's not just in spirit, kind of aligned with particularism. I think it is a de facto argument for particularism. Yes, and that gets us quite nicely, I think, to your
00:34:12
Speaker
forthcoming paper in social epistemology, because as you point out, there's a kind of move that generalists make where they appeal to what is often taken to be a kind of an ordinary language conception of conspiracy theory, which is, look, the folk and the folk are very wise, we have to always obey and respect what the folk say. The folk think
00:34:30
Speaker
conspiracy theories are mad, bad and dangerous. And so I think it's fair to say that there's a tension, particularly in the philosophical literature, between people who say that we should be using this ordinary language conception of what a conspiracy theory is.
00:34:46
Speaker
And then the particularists who go, well, for the study of conspiracy theories, to work out whether a conspiracy theory is warranted or unwarranted, we can actually just stipulate what we mean by the term, then run the analysis and then see whether those bad consequences naturally roll out or whether they don't.
00:35:08
Speaker
Now, in conceptual engineering, conceptual domination, and the case of conspiracy theories, you wade into this kind of debate. But I guess for non-philosophers, and there are a few who listen to this podcast, we should probably get clear on what conceptual engineering is. I mean, do you need a particular philosophical degree to engage in conceptual engineering?
00:35:33
Speaker
Not in my view, although it would be interesting. The health and safety for conceptual engineering is the scaffolding on that idea. Theory, rudimentary, better wear a helmet.
00:35:48
Speaker
That's right, that's right. Well, so it's this way of thinking about what we are doing as philosophers that's kind of exploded in popularity in recent years. And so I'll say a little bit about why I think it's, I'll say of course what it is and then I'll say, or how philosophers think about it and then, but I think it's helpful to start with the question of why is it so popular?
00:36:14
Speaker
So one thing you might think, and for anyone who's done even a little bit of philosophy, you might have this sort of nagging question in the back of your mind, which is, well, what are really philosophers up to anyway? When you take supposedly these standard philosophical questions, what is knowledge? What is mind? What is free will? And you might have this worry.
00:36:37
Speaker
Again, either explicitly or in the back of your mind and whether you're not someone who's taken a great deal of philosophy or who hasn't. You might have this worry that what even are those questions after? So is what the question is after, for example, what is free will, are we trying to represent some phenomenon in the outside world?
00:36:58
Speaker
this freewill thing in the way that I say, you know, this is what a table is, or this is what a chair is, well, then there's this freewill thing. And that seems a bit odd, right? It doesn't seem like there's this knowledge thing, mind thing maybe, or freewill thing that
00:37:13
Speaker
we can have those kinds of robust representations of or just sort of armchair access to that if I just think hard enough about it, I'm going to get the phenomenon right. So you might think then, oh, well, what we're doing instead is kind of analyzing our concept of knowledge or free will or mind. But then you might think, well, what is it to analyze a concept, right? So perhaps you think it's, well, I'm trying to make sense of
00:37:38
Speaker
trying to understand how we in fact use and understand the concept of free will, knowledge, justice, etc. But then you might think, well, what's the point of that? I mean, that just tells us if anything, that's like a little bit of bizarre armchair ethnography, right? It's just this is how we happen at this particular point in time in this historical and cultural location to understand these concepts.
00:38:00
Speaker
Instead, what you might think is, in fact, what we're doing as philosophers, and perhaps have always been doing without realizing it, is trying to assess and improve the concepts that we do find ourselves with, for example, free will, justice, mind, knowledge, etc., for certain purposes.
00:38:20
Speaker
for sometimes very rarefied theoretical purposes to solve a certain theoretical puzzle, or for certain practical purposes, right, to serve certain political or social ends. And it's really the latter actually that was kind of the catalyst for philosophers thinking about conceptual engineering, so in particular the work of
00:38:40
Speaker
the philosopher Sally Haslinger and her conceptual engineering projects around the concepts of race and gender. So her position was to say, was to kind of run through the considerations I just ran through and say, it's kind of a dead end to think about this as
00:38:56
Speaker
reporting about the facts out there about the concepts of race and gender, or reporting on how we in fact understand these concepts, we should think about what work we want these concepts to do. How would they, as concepts, work best for certain theoretical and practical purposes that we may have? And this feels like something that philosophers, and indeed any theorist, can can justifiably
00:39:19
Speaker
do. And so that's why it's, and people started to realize, oh, beyond the concepts of race and gender, again, we can even go back to these traditional philosophical discussions and concepts to apply this methodology of conceptual engineering kind of as I've been doing in this explanation of it.
00:39:34
Speaker
And what's particularly fascinating is that you're right to say it's a relatively recent thing that philosophers have engaged in. So for a discipline which is arguably around about 3,000 years old, if we want to trace ourselves back to the ancient Greeks and just be very Western centric in our view of what counts as philosophy.
00:39:54
Speaker
fact that it was in the late 20th century, early 21st century, that we were, you know, it may actually turn out that it's not just we're finding out what the term means, we actually might also be kind of
00:40:09
Speaker
engineering or even bringing assumptions or preconditions into these concepts. It's kind of astounding that, I mean, I remember when I was doing my PhD, we just talked about conceptual analysis, you just sat down, you thought about what a concept was, you unpacked the idea, you wrote it down and a sensible person would agree with you. But as you point out,
00:40:31
Speaker
Hestlinger, when she starts talking about things like race and gender, you start going, actually, it turns out people disagree when you start unpacking the term. There are all of these valences in the terms, which some people see and some people don't.
Conceptual Domination vs. Engineering
00:40:47
Speaker
So I think arguably there's some standpoint epistemology stuff coming in here for our kind of understanding of concepts.
00:40:53
Speaker
And now it's become a kind of exploding growth industry. Now, you contributed to this exploding growth industry because you've gone beyond conceptual engineering. You're now doing domination. You're engaging in conceptual domination. Now, if we're using the analogy that conceptual engineering is like an engineering degree, now I have to ask, what's going on with the domination part of conceptual engineering? Is there a conceptual gimp master? Is there a suit? Are there safe words?
00:41:22
Speaker
The people need to know. Yes, yes. Well, I want to say absolutely. So you're right to say I am a fan of a lot of what's being said and done in the conceptual engineering literature, but I started to
00:41:41
Speaker
develop this worry that within that literature, especially as philosophers, we're starting to see actually, this goes back to kind of your, your question about whether or not you need a philosophy degree to do conceptual engineering with philosophers, we're starting to know, well, wait a second, it looks like conceptual engineering is happening all over the place. So to take
00:41:57
Speaker
Some examples from the philosopher Hermann Cappellan, he looks at legal contexts and in psychiatry where it seems like we're often even kind of from scratch sometimes articulating novel concepts.
00:42:13
Speaker
Or we're simply building concepts that are useful for the purposes of those domains. But my worry became, especially as we have this more expansive view of conceptual engineering, that we think it's kind of happening throughout our lives.
00:42:29
Speaker
that it's this too idealized picture of how conceptual disputes that is arguments over how we ought to understand a certain concept how those actually play out that in fact philosophers were falling prey to and maybe you think that this is kind of a general occupational hazard that we have which is projecting ourselves
00:42:46
Speaker
into disagreements and disputes, or rather, one might think kind of idealized versions of ourselves, how we would like to think we would argue and disagree in these contexts. And in particular, that idealization is that it's sort of this perfect game of giving and asking for reasons.
00:43:06
Speaker
So I say, well, we should use the concept of, say, gender or the concept of speech in this way, given these considerations. And then the person who disagrees with me says, either accepts those considerations or offers reasons of their own that maybe defeat my view. And the thing is, when you step outside of this idealized projection,
00:43:35
Speaker
of how conceptual disputes play out. You realize of course in the real world inflected with power and material interests.
00:43:45
Speaker
that that's not at all how it plays out. So I have this paper just called conceptual domination, in which I say often what's going on in many real world contexts, and one might even think in some philosophical context, is that in conceptual disputes where there's an argument over how to understand a concept, it's not that both parties are trying to arrive at the best concept so that they're both engaged in an engineering project,
00:44:09
Speaker
even if superficially on the surface, that's what they claim to be doing. Often what's going on is that speakers are trying to impose their view of the concept on other speakers, regardless of what the best considerations turn out to be for making sense of it. So in the paper, I give a couple of examples. I'll just very, very briefly mention them just to give people kind of an idea of what I'm going for.
00:44:32
Speaker
So I give the example, just I guess on a Bush administration kick, of the infamous kind of torture memos, where a number of scholars would say, you know, the view of torture of the concept of torture that was that was being articulated within the in the memos, you know, was really, really shoddy scholarship that was and I use kind of the work of
00:44:54
Speaker
legal scholar and himself a philosopher David Lubom to make this case but really reverse engineered to arrive at a view of torture that would permit all the things that the Bush administration wanted to do to detainees and to generate the kind of information that they wanted for their foreign policy so these were not
00:45:11
Speaker
And people have used that example of the torture memos without quite acknowledging it in this literature to be like, oh, that's an example of conceptual engineering, right? People engineering the concept of torture. And I think that's really not what's going on. We need to be much more fine grained here. These were not genuine inquirers who wanted to really arrive at the best concept of torture. Instead, they were trying to impose this concept of torture to pursue certain ends that they had no interest in critically reflecting on or potentially changing their minds about. And they give another example
00:45:41
Speaker
of advocates in the multi-level marketing industry pushing this view of the concept of pyramid scheme, where again, their outward public facing justification is that this is the best concept. This concept will help to avoid fraudulent practices. It'll make sure that the industry is on the up and up. Of course, none of this turns out to be the case when you look at the
00:46:03
Speaker
sort of scholarship from consumer advocates on these kinds of definitions of conspiracy theories. And so again, I think it's a mistake to view this as a form of conceptual engineering is doing what philosophers ideally like to think of themselves as doing. Instead, this is about trying to impose a view of a concept to serve certain interests that the speakers are not in the business of critically reflecting on or evaluating.
00:46:27
Speaker
So you could think of it as kind of conceptual shouting, where you go, what I think the term is, no. What the term actually, well, no, no. What the term actually means. And the torture memos is a really great example, especially given the euphemistic enhanced interrogation terminology that was eventually settled upon when people went
00:46:49
Speaker
does look like it's torture and torture's bad, but if we just, just rename the concept, it's just enhanced interrogation. And that means suddenly you get people like Chris Hitchens to come on board with it. He's against torture, but in house interrogation, that's not torture. It would be called torture. If it was torture, it's enhanced interrogation instead.
00:47:10
Speaker
Now, what does this have to do with conspiracy theories? Well, so some folks in the paper that you mentioned, I'm looking in particular at a paper by M. Julia Napolitano and Kevin Ruder called, What is a conspiracy theory? Right. Is that that? Yeah.
00:47:28
Speaker
Just making sure I have the citation correct. There are so many different permutations of what is a conspiracy theorist, what is conspiracy theorizing anyway. And so it's looking at they sort of invoke this conceptual engineering literature, both to defend a view that they have and to set up these as sort of the backdrop of these studies that they've done of ordinary usage regarding the concept of
00:47:57
Speaker
conspiracy theory, but they've so to defend that kind of project, and I'll say a little bit about about that in a second, but also to sort of reinterpret the conspiracy theory theory literature so that they take views like yours and other particulars and say, these are these are themselves conceptual engineering projects
00:48:18
Speaker
And ours is a conceptual engineering project. And here's why ours works better than the one that the particularists are going for. And so they carry out these studies of ordinary speakers that they take to show that, well, the ordinary concept of conspiracy theory is sort of negatively evaluative. That is, it is just basically a pejorative concept. Conspiracy theories are bad. That's baked into the definition for ordinary usage. And then they say, what we want to do with
00:48:45
Speaker
our engineering project is we want to be, in some ways it's actually very different, interestingly, than many conceptual engineering projects. Many conceptual engineering projects say we want to leave ordinary usage behind. We don't want to be beholden to it. Their position is, no, no, no, we want to engineer, you know, clean up ordinary usage a little bit, sort of around the edges, but we want to preserve this fundamental aspect of ordinary usage. That conspiracy theories are bad, which again, they take their studies to show and we could
00:49:11
Speaker
talk about whether or not their studies actually show that. But for the purposes of my discussion, I just take that for granted. I let them have that. My concern is the following one. So my worry for their kind of project is that
00:49:29
Speaker
The concept of conspiracy theories in this negatively evaluative sense, this pejorative sense, is in my view, it's a site of and steeped in conceptual domination that is various figures with kinds of formal authority, say political figures,
00:49:44
Speaker
certain media outlets, academic researchers, are in fact imposing this concept on other speakers in a way that is not sensitive to the demands of inquiry. And my worry is that, and in some ways this critique is kind of a microcosm of a worry that I have about aspects of the conceptual engineering literature in general,
00:50:06
Speaker
Using conceptual engineering as an excuse not to engage with or think about the broader context in which the concept you're trying to engineer is actually being used, and we can we can see that by just thinking about right to take some sort of extreme examples.
00:50:21
Speaker
I think we can see how bankrupt it is, although it's often not at the forefront of philosophers minds. So suppose I was going to try and let's take your example of enhanced interrogation techniques. I was going to say, okay, I've got a new idea for a paper. I'm going to conceptually engineer enhanced interrogation techniques. And I'll have a couple of sentences at the beginning that say, oh yeah, some bad stuff happened with this concept during the Bush administration. I believe that to the side because I'm conceptual engineering. I don't need to be beholden to the relevant surrounding political historical context.
00:50:49
Speaker
in which that gave life to and that animates this concept. I think we would say that's an egregious mistake. And I think we should say the same thing about this pejorative concept of conspiracy theories. So my worry would then be that if you don't pay attention to that broader context, then inevitably your project, even if it's done with the best intentions, even if
Ordinary Language in Philosophical Discussion
00:51:12
Speaker
it is correctly interpreted as a form of conceptual engineering because it doesn't reckon with this broader context of domination ends up contributing to that form of conceptual domination, whether or not you intended to. And in fact, I think that they also do not get the particularists right. Now, you know, you tell me as the resident particularist, even though, again, of course, I have a great deal of sympathy for particularism, but my view is that
00:51:42
Speaker
And we can talk about why I think they get it wrong and going into more of the details of their account of particularism. But the short of it is that what I see particularists is doing is pointing out these concepts of conceptual domination. So in particular, I think you find this in basically any paper from a particularist, but maybe Husting and Orr's work is the best representative of this.
00:52:04
Speaker
which is to show through good kind of empirical study that these are, again, the kinds of figures with institutional authority weaponize this concept of conspiracy theories as kind of by definition, bad thing to dismiss and marginalize sometimes genuine dissident perspectives. And just in general, anyone who doesn't subscribe to the consensus mainstream view.
00:52:34
Speaker
And what I see Particularis is doing is saying then that in particular, given that kind of history of the use and nature of this kind of concept, that among other reasons, but that is a reason to be very skeptical that there is a useful concept
00:52:55
Speaker
here, that instead what we should do is, as you were saying before, opt for this neutral concept. But the opting for the neutral concept I see is a move against a kind of conceptual domination. So you could call it conceptual engineering. I don't think it's
00:53:13
Speaker
particularly helpful to do it because again, I see the particular risk as kind of making this defensive sort of reactive move that's saying, there is this bad concept that's doing this bad thing. Let's get rid of it or not add it to our theoretical and practical projects. So let's work with this reduced, but in fact, better vocabulary for analyzing conspiracy theories.
00:53:38
Speaker
Actually, that's a nice point for me to wade in on here because one of my reactions to the paper by M. Julian Napolitano and Kevin Ruza was that they described my project when I talk about defining what a conspiracy theory is as an example of conceptual engineering.
00:53:55
Speaker
Now, admittedly, I will say it's a form of conceptual analysis because I just take it, I break the terms apart, conspiracy in theory, and give a nice value neutral non-projorative definition. But I also often go, look, it doesn't really matter what the ordinary language conception of conspiracy theory is. I'm going to stipulate a meaning for debate.
00:54:18
Speaker
and then go through the process of, if we stipulate this particular meaning, what do we get? And then argue, well, this is probably the best means to take if we're interested in studying whether there's problematic belief in these things called conspiracy theories. So I'm glad to see that I'm not necessarily engaging in engineering there.
00:54:38
Speaker
was my kind of stipulation, although it's quite clear they think it's a form of engineering, that by moving away from a negatively encoded or non-pejorative definition, we are engineering the concept away from ordinary language uses.
00:54:59
Speaker
which is just a, as you say, it's a, it's a weird move to make in the conceptual engineering space, because often, often we want to avoid what the folk think. And we want to go, well, actually, what is the most useful and theoretically fruitful position to take with respect to say free will? I mean, the example I like to use is, we don't really respect the folk when it comes to physics.
00:55:24
Speaker
because people get mass and weight wrong all the time. And it would be really weird for a philosopher of science to go, well, look, I don't care what them fancy physicists say in their ivory towers. If the folk think that weight and mass are exactly the same thing, then that's how we should be using those terms going forward. So, boffins, you need to read to your equations so I can use mass and weight interchangeably going forward, because that's what that people want.
00:55:54
Speaker
you heard it NASA that's how we're gonna get to Mars and that seems like a really weird way to go about it and yet there seems to be people in the generals camp who go no no when it comes to conspiracy theories
00:56:10
Speaker
That's what we meant to do. We meant to respect the folk notion. We meant to respect ordinary language diverging from it. That's just wrong. Absolutely. That's really nicely put. And I think it's particularly surprising in these politically charged contexts where I think you just need very minimal assumptions to see why that's such a strange project when it comes to a concept like
00:56:40
Speaker
especially the negatively encoded kind of concept that they're going for of conspiracy theories or concepts say like post-truth or other things that are such a product of our political and historically specific landscape. It's not as though ordinary speakers, and I talk a bit about this in the paper, are sort of generating their concepts out of thin air or ex nihilo, as philosophers would like to say.
00:57:09
Speaker
In fact, that ordinary usage is often both for kind of more principled reasons, but then just for straightforward kind of causal reasons are the product of that larger environment, that larger political environment and the usage of figures who have more of a platform to influence
00:57:27
Speaker
usage more generally. And we might think that that broader political climate is one that, particularly as philosophers, we might want some critical distance from. In other words, we shouldn't assume that just because the concept is out there in our political lives, that it's necessarily doing good work for us. I think we should have the critical distance to think maybe this is the kind of thing we should
00:57:52
Speaker
at the very least interrogate, we should wonder about its popularity, the kind of work that it's doing, we should think very seriously and again critically about that, and maybe if on reflection it turns out we still want to endorse it then fine, but at the very least we have to go through that process and it turns out
00:58:10
Speaker
When you look at the conspiracy theory theory literature, the people who have actually done that work right have concluded that no, in fact, it's it has some very insidious effects that we should be worried about and should motivate us to change our orientation towards this.
00:58:27
Speaker
you know, quote unquote, folk concept. And in some ways, I think it's even, you know, it can be even though this is the way they talk about it as this ordinary folk concept, it's almost misleading, right? Because if you think that, you know, non-ordinary speakers have a disproportionate influence, again, for both sort of more principled reasons, we could we could talk about that just for straightforward causal reasons, have a bigger platform can reach more people.
00:58:50
Speaker
have more influence over usage. There isn't this sort of sharp cut between ordinary usage and the usage of non-ordinary speakers, whereby non-ordinary speakers, I mean any speaker vested with some kind of institutional formal authority, whether a politician or
00:59:08
Speaker
an academic or a journalist at a certain kind of media institution. Those speakers are just, their usage carries more weight. So I think it's very odd to think of ordinary usage as this kind of hermetic self-contained unit that's untainted by the broader historical and political context of the concept. And so part of what I argue in the paper is that that sort of approach is also a mistake.
00:59:37
Speaker
Yeah, their approach is one which ignores
Philosophers and Political Contexts
00:59:40
Speaker
the role of power in society, that all ideas come from the folk, they all emerge from the bottom up, they bubble through our politic and our society, and the people at the top are simply using the terms as the folk use at the bottom. Without going
00:59:58
Speaker
may not work that way. Now there's the infamous CIA memo from the 1960s where the CIA is very concerned that people are spreading what they take to be unwarranted conspiracy theories about the assassination of JFK. And there are certain conspiracy theorists out there that go, this is the origin of the term. It was invented this day by the CIA to tar and dismiss all conspiracy theories, which is
01:00:22
Speaker
historically inaccurate because we have references going back to conspiracy theory, at least to 1902. And that reference indicates the term is being used again. We just don't know when it had been used earlier. But it is also true. The CIA were going, look, we do need a label that we can apply to these theories that will make people think less of them. And if we call them conspiracy theories, a term which already has a negative valence in our society,
01:00:51
Speaker
people are less likely to listen to Bertrand Russell and the fact he has worries about the official investigation into the death of the president. And so there is a top down in position of meaning going on there.
01:01:07
Speaker
and ignoring the role of power in these stories seems like an abrogation of the kind of duty of care that philosophers should have as doing philosophy in the world to make the world a better place. Absolutely, and I think, you know, there's part of me that's kind of of
01:01:27
Speaker
of two minds in these contexts, although I come out very clearly on sort of one side. But the thing I'm of two minds about is that on the one hand, I think it is a good thing that philosophers in general are trying to reach a wider audience and sort of climb down from the ivory tower and
01:01:44
Speaker
demonstrate the potential utility of their projects and insights that they can offer that perhaps people can't get elsewhere. I think that that's great. But at the same time, I think a worry I have, and this goes back to kind of how we started the conversation with a project like Kasam's, is that kind of in the almost
01:02:05
Speaker
stampede towards doing socially and politically relevant and engaged work, there isn't that sufficient critical distance and interrogation of that political and historical context in which these concepts that may well be of philosophical interest live.
01:02:27
Speaker
and that we do, as you very nicely put it there, have that kind of duty or obligation to engage in that type of criticism and at least occupy that kind of position of intellectual and critical distance from that climate before we launch into and invoke the tools of philosophy. Because the worry is that if we don't, then we just get
01:02:54
Speaker
cannibalized into all the problematic aspects of that political context. And certainly, that's something we don't want to do and should be, you know, scrupulous to avoid. It seems like you're very politely trying to say you don't think Napolitano and Roosa are conspiring.
01:03:11
Speaker
to dominate the concept there. They're simply buying into a kind of, well, conspiracy theories are a problem. We need to deal with it. And that's evident by the fact that other academics working outside of philosophy, particularly the social scientists working in social psychology, they keep pointing out it's a problem. And it's weird that philosophers aren't just buying into that program. Yes, exactly. Exactly.
01:03:38
Speaker
which is in itself a weird move that they make for the sheer fact that yes, there's a very dedicated research program in social psychology, and you might go would be quite useful, philosophers could help with that project. But there are also dedicated research programs in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, political studies, rhetoric, media studies, communication studies, and they don't necessarily align with the world
01:04:05
Speaker
that's coming out of social psychology. So why are we serving, to use a gender term, one master over another? Yes, excellent question. And yeah, I mean, at this point we get into the folk psychology of trying to impute motives and intentions to other researchers who I think we both think have the best of intentions.
01:04:31
Speaker
even if we disagree with where their arguments go based upon those intentions. But I'm actually quite curious, is there any role for an ordinary language consideration of conspiracy theory, do you think? Or do we need to basically strip that out of our discussions and go with something which is engineered but avoids being dominated?
01:04:55
Speaker
Yeah, it's a it's a tough question. I mean, in general, I think in in these contexts, I am just sort of inclined towards a kind of skepticism and move towards I mean, it depends on the details of particular cases, but moves towards kind of
01:05:15
Speaker
abandonment, where again, not necessarily abandoning the concept of conspiracy theory full stop, but certainly abandoning a concept of conspiracy theory as by definition, something bad, something negative. So, insofar as perhaps
01:05:32
Speaker
And I think the studies that Napolitano and Ruder do as a matter of kind of ethnography and sort of experimental linguistics in a way trying to track ordinary usage are very interesting. And I do want to echo your point, right? I don't want to get into the game of sort of like speculating about intent or motive or anything like that. I take them very much at the word that they're doing this conceptual engineering project. And my worries are about kind of that methodology.
01:06:02
Speaker
and how it interacts with the existing literature. But yeah, I think in general, I want to say that ordinary language is just too inflected by and often a product of other sources and forces that
01:06:23
Speaker
need to be analyzed and thought about before we can address the question of whether or not to retain this apparent ordinary usage. And in fact, so I talked a little bit about this in the paper, but
01:06:39
Speaker
There's been some discussion now there's this tradition and philosophy of language of thinking about the way in which are not just for causal reasons so not just because some figures have a bigger platform than other figures, but because of the very kind of structure of language and
01:06:55
Speaker
our epistemic lives as such, figures with more authority have an outsized role in shaping meaning and epistemic practice more broadly. So to take some kind of famous examples, the philosophers here for folks who are interested are Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, Tyler Burge,
01:07:14
Speaker
really, to use an example from Burge, right, if a doctor, if I have, you know, false beliefs about arthritis, I think I have arthritis in my in my thigh, because I don't realize that it can only exist in my joints. I'm not using a separate concept from the doctor, right? I simply have a false belief about what's going on with my body. So we're not talking past each other. And that's
01:07:36
Speaker
because the doctor has a kind of privileged authority in the medical community, has a kind of privileged authority with respect to the term arthritis. But then once you take that kind of insight and you have an analysis of our political lives that does want to take into account its material dimensions and the nature of power, well, then certain speakers are going to be more authoritative than other speakers. And to me, that makes a great deal of sense.
01:08:02
Speaker
The authoritative speakers, speaking of intentions, may not have very good intentions or may be informed by those material interests and their power in ways that we worry about, in which case then if ordinary usage is downstream from that more authoritative usage, then we may worry about that ordinary usage as a reflection of those more authoritative figures and that more authoritative usage. And so in general, that's where
01:08:28
Speaker
I kind of incline. I incline more towards that kind of skepticism about trying to preserve ordinary usage, in particular for academic context. There's a separate question of, in ordinary context, should we preserve ordinary usage? And then there's the question of, to what degree in academic project should we preserve?
01:08:48
Speaker
ordinary usage for academic projects. And it's the latter where I'm much more on the skeptical side. And my thoughts are a little more undecided on fully ordinary contexts. In other words, when I'm not in the seminar room, when I'm not writing a paper.
01:09:01
Speaker
And actually, that brings me to my final question, which is, imagine you're at a party, you meet a complete stranger, you've shared no details about your past, but they ask, what do you do? Or I write on conspiracy theories, oh, you write on that kind of nonsense. How do you talk to the folk about the kind of work you do?
01:09:25
Speaker
Yeah, that's a that's a great question. I think I wish I had something more interesting to say. I think it's sort of more it becomes a bit ad hoc. You know, it really depends on on the situation and on the conversation.
01:09:42
Speaker
But I think I try to frame it in general in the way that kind of the way we started the conversation, which is that I have these concerns about the way in which we tend to or many people outside of especially the philosophical literature talk about conspiracy theories and theorists. I'm worried about developing this vocabulary that uniquely indicts and stigmatizes people
01:10:09
Speaker
who already don't have as much power and influence as the people who are deploying that vocabulary. And I find that, I mean, of course, this is totally anecdotal, but I find that actually, you know, people are receptive to that idea.
Casual Conversations on Conspiracy Theories
01:10:29
Speaker
I think people do have
01:10:30
Speaker
you know, even if they themselves certainly wouldn't identify as conspiracy theorists, do recognize that there's a kind of worry there and a potential sort of double standard that's concerning. So I think that's kind of how I try to frame things is to
01:10:47
Speaker
you know, maybe abstain a bit from kind of first order stuff about, you know, this conspiracy theory or this conspiracy theorist, however that plays out in the conversation and just sort of try and take a step back and say, you know, well, I'm sort of worried about this concept in general, where it turns out that the concept that's at play is this more pejorative one.
01:11:06
Speaker
That is a great answer. I do something similar myself, either vacillating between the trying to defang the concept and conversation or just leading with the, you do realize there's an awful lot of conspiracies out there and you probably believe some of them and just entice them to admit that they believe at least one conspiracy theory. Then I hit them with Charles Picton's
01:11:31
Speaker
And if night goes well, drinking commences if night goes badly, you just fake going to the butt bathroom and slink away.
01:11:41
Speaker
Yes, yes, very familiar. Thank you, Matt. That has been a great conversation. It's been an absolute pleasure discussing conspiracy theories with you in your morning and my night. Thank you so much for having me, and yes, a pleasure over here as well. Absolute pleasure. We will do this again. Great. The podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy stars Josh Addison and myself, Associate Professor M.R.X. Denton.
01:12:11
Speaker
Our show's cons... sorry. Producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please do consider joining our Patreon. And remember, the truth is out there, but not quite where you think you left it.