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Taking Conspiracy Theories Seriously
34 Plays6 years ago
This week Josh and M discuss a forthcoming book, Taking Conspiracy Theories Seriously," edited by one Dr. M R. X. Dentith. Spooky...
Learn more about M's academic work on the Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories at:
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Transcript
Introduction and Hosts
00:00:02
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. My name is Josh Edison. I am in Auckland, New Zealand, which is not, you'll notice, Bucharest, Romania.
00:00:19
Speaker
And I am not Dr. M.R.X.Dentive, so I think everything works out fine in the end.
Geospatial Confusion Recap
00:00:24
Speaker
I found it interesting that you pause there trying to work out where you're located, which I think fits into an interesting aspect from last week's broadcast, where you claim that I was broadcasting from Kauru in Germania. So I have a feeling that you are geospatially confused at this particular point in time. Would I be correct in thinking that, Joshua?
00:00:46
Speaker
If you mean to imply that I've somehow become untethered from physical reality and float through existence in no specific physical location, I'm afraid I can't comment on that. Isn't that what happens to everyone who has children? Well, to an extent, yes. I thought as much. But I've said too much. You haven't really said enough. That's the problem.
00:01:08
Speaker
Oh no, I've said too much. I haven't said enough. And with that musical reference, we should probably crack on with the show. Let's just do that to the news. To the news. To the news. Breaking, breaking, conspiracy theories in the news.
Correction and Fictional News
00:01:27
Speaker
We start this week with a correction to an error issued on this very podcast. In an earlier episode we wrongly claim that John D. Rockefeller was Jewish. He is not. Whilst the Rockefellers have long been claimed to be crypto-Judaic, this is not true. See, don't say we don't update our knowledge as new knowledge comes along. Although, truth be told, we don't. We just reformat our minds and start over from scratch.
00:01:52
Speaker
Eh, anyway. News. M. What's Been Happening? Happening, I should point out, was spelt with three P's, which is such a delightful typo that I couldn't bring myself to edit it. Happening. That's lovely. I like it. Well, you know, it's the new slang. What's Been Happening? Which also is a slang invented by people with speech disfluency like myself. Anyways, in answer to your question of what's been happening,
00:02:17
Speaker
No idea. I've been finishing up work on a new volume I'm the editor for, and have been ignoring the news entirely over the last week. But I do have a device here which generates news, not fake news mind, just fictional news. And I've fed the last few months of episodes into this device, and we're going to see what it presents.
00:02:42
Speaker
OK, so I've got a story here which sounds a bit far fetched. Bear with me. All right. So it goes.
Trump, Putin, and Election Interference
00:02:50
Speaker
Trump sides with Putin in Finland and says Russia did not interfere in the 2016 presidential election. That happened. Really? Yes, Trump had a summit in Finland this week.
00:03:05
Speaker
and he held a press conference where, standing beside Vladimir Putin, he said, my people came to me, Dan Coates came to me, they said they think it's Russia. I have President Putin, he just said it's not Russia. I'll say this, I don't see any reason why it would be. Really? He said that. He said that standing beside Vladimir Putin.
00:03:25
Speaker
Yep. Could you get any more conspiratorial? I mean, if you didn't think Putin already controlled Trump, you would kind of have to at least entertain the idea afterwards, at least after this conference, that maybe he does. Well, yes, a lot of people found the spectacle remarkable for a bunch of reasons, but it's okay. Trump misspoke. He misspoke. Yes, in a press conference back in the US, he said that when he said would, he meant to say wouldn't.
00:03:52
Speaker
Okay, can you read back what the revised statement would now sound like? Well it would be, my people came to me, Dan Coates came to me, they said they think it's Russia. I have President Putin, he just said it's not Russia. I'll say this, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be. That doesn't quite sound right. Which is why people think Trump is backpedaling rather than correcting. Certainly seems like Trump took Putin at his word in Finland and then got a bollocking back home and has changed his mind in the guise of correcting the record.
00:04:21
Speaker
But once again it's okay. Trump thinks Putin is marvellous because Putin has suggested agents of the Kremlin come and help in the collusion inquiry. So Trump thinks the people suspected of being behind the collusion should help investigate said purported collusion? Yes. This was a bad week to take
Conspiracy Theories and Russia
00:04:40
Speaker
off. Okay, let's see what else my doodad has.
00:05:05
Speaker
was connected to Russia, although the evidence for that seems to be a bit of an unwarranted conspiracy theory. We're blaming Russia for everything, so why not this? Although I guess that does fit in with some of the recent research, which claims that the move to the right in the white American electoral base predated Trump and was actually over the Black Lives Matter movement. White people, they don't like feeling uncomfortable. Okay, time for one more randomly generated story.
00:05:12
Speaker
Twitter bans Russia. Well that sounds dramatic.
00:05:34
Speaker
Ooh, here's a goodie.
Free Tommy Movement and Free Speech
00:05:36
Speaker
Free Tommy in Auckland. I don't know what that means, but it sounds grand. It sounds awful and you know it. The Free Tommy movement surrounds the case of Tommy Robinson, an English far-right activist. He co-founded and served as spokesman and leader for the English Defence League, a racist, Islamophobic group based, funnily enough, in the UK. In May, he was sentenced to 13 months imprisonment for contempt of court. He broke a court order by publishing identifiable information of defendants entering court during proceedings,
00:06:04
Speaker
And it was not his first conviction for doing so. Somehow this far-right activist has become a beacon for the free speech movement because he's been jailed for trying to get the truth out there, man. Except of course all he was doing was providing identifiable information about some people who may or may not be guilty of a crime in order to agitate his followers. And the Auckland bit? Well, that brings us back to last week's topic, the free speech coalition.
00:06:26
Speaker
About 100 people turned out for a free speech protest in Auckland over the weekend, and some of them were carrying free Tommy placards. So people marching for free speech for far-right activists found that they were marching for activists interested in far-right speech.
Conspiracy News Generator
00:06:44
Speaker
Yep. This news generator is great. We should use it every week.
00:06:47
Speaker
Yeah, I'm worried it's too accurate, suspiciously accurate. That's all right. The next story is obviously nonsense. It goes, Trump writes in Sharpie, no collusion. And it turns out he can't even spell collusion properly. Ring that chime. Right, and we're back.
Academic Publishing Tease
00:07:06
Speaker
So once again, this week, we've chosen to part the veil to draw aside the curtain behind which the man is telling you not to look at the man behind the curtain.
00:07:16
Speaker
and let you in a little bit more into the dark, seedy underworld of academic, book-righty, publishy stuff. You had no idea where you were going with that metaphor, did you? No idea whatsoever. Not fully, not fully, no, but we're taking a behind-the-scenes look at the works of one
00:07:38
Speaker
Says here, Dr. M.R.X. Denteth. Oh, I know. I know that person. They're a charlatan. Yes. Well, apparently they're making a book called Taking Conspiracy Theory Seriously. Making a book. They're making a book out there. Are they making a book? Are they pounding the paper down, pulping things, laying down glue, inscribing words onto pages using archaic ink based technologies. They're making a book.
00:08:06
Speaker
I know of no other way to make a book, do you? Well, you write a book in a word processor, you email files to an editor, they send it to a place in China. In China, they print the book using some kind of advanced kind of photocopying technology, basically, it gets put into a binding, the binding gets sent around the world, it's sold in bookstores, and eventually you get a royalty check.
00:08:28
Speaker
Hmm, sounds like you know a little bit too much about this process. I unfortunately do know too much about this process because I, gentle listener, I am that Dr.
Creating a Book on Conspiracy Theories
00:08:40
Speaker
MRX dentist and I have been making a book. Good Lord in heavens. So yes, I mean, I believe you've mentioned this a little bit before and certainly you mentioned it in the news section at the start of this episode.
00:08:55
Speaker
But we thought it would be a good thing to do because it's what shape is it in at the moment? It's approaching completion, I understand. It's in the shape of a whole bunch of Word files, basically. So yes, since December of last year, I've been working on a new volume, Taking Conspiracy Theory Seriously, which is an edited volume of some pre-existing work and some new work in conspiracy theory theory.
00:09:21
Speaker
and my job as editor has been to kind of corral academics and get them to produce work which in some cases has been very very easy and in other cases has been occasionally nail-biting on getting things in on deadline
00:09:37
Speaker
as well as writing a set of introductions because the book is in two sections and a set of conclusions because once again the book is in two sections so I'm both a contributor to the book and an editor of the book and at the moment the book exists as files but those files are pretty much complete and so those files are if not with the publisher they're transferring through the ether
00:10:19
Speaker
your project as it were, or did it sort of start, is it something you started and roped people into, or did it kind of start as a group effort between a bunch of you? Let me take you back in time to 2016. A era before Trump, before Brexit, a kinder, more pastel time.
00:10:34
Speaker
where they'll then end up being sent to China once again to be printed in a book.
00:10:37
Speaker
And I had a paper published when inferring to a conspiracy theory might be the best explanation in the social epistemology journal and the editor of social epistemology, which I think is still James Collier,
00:10:52
Speaker
Then when, oh this is great, we would like to commission some reply pieces to go into the social epistemology review and reply collective, can you suggest some people who might be good to reply to this thing?
00:11:07
Speaker
and he'd already tapped Lee Basham as one of the responders. He wanted to find out whether there was anyone else I could suggest. So I gave him a few names, and so Lee Basham wrote a reply to my paper, which wasn't really a criticism of the paper, but more a glowing endorsement.
00:11:27
Speaker
So he agreed with me on all substantial issues and pointed out some natural consequences of where my paper led. And James Collier went, do you want to write a reply to Lee's reply? And I was going, sure, I will write a reply to something which praises the paper. And it can just be a mutual backpassing situation. So
00:11:49
Speaker
Lee thinks my paper is great. I think Lee's response is great. We can just generate material where we're agreeing with each other furiously for long periods of time. So I then thought maybe we need to get someone else involved in the conversation who might have a slightly different perspective. So Patrick Stokes, a philosopher at Deakin over in Melbourne, Australia, I say over as if I'm actually back in Auckland, it's not really over anywhere from
00:12:17
Speaker
Well, it's just it's just further over quite quite a long way over. It's really stretching the notion of being just over there to say that just over in Melbourne, but if I was an Auckland saying just over in Melbourne would make complete sense. Definitely allowed. Yes. And so Pat has a
00:12:36
Speaker
slightly more skeptical take on conspiracy theory theory than Lee and Ida. So Pat wrote a reply to Lee and to me. I then wrote a reply both to Pat and to Lee. And as we're going through writing these replies James Collier gets in contact and goes this actually seems like this could be the basis for a fairly interesting volume.
00:13:01
Speaker
Now, at around about the same time, Lee and I co-authored a response that was then co-signed by a bunch of other academics to a piece that appeared in Le Monde in 2016, so Le Monde being the major French newspaper.
00:13:17
Speaker
And this less than one page article which was basically an opinion piece written by a bunch of French social scientists and one UK-based social scientist, Karen Douglas, was critical of the French state's intervention into conspiracy theorising. So the French state has produced an educational kit which they give out to schools
00:13:41
Speaker
to help teachers combat talk of conspiracy in French politics, and the opinion writers for the Le Monde piece, where these seem like untested mechanisms. So basically we're recommending the state take a pause on this initiative and look at the pre-existing research where
00:14:02
Speaker
doing to see what the proper response would be and when Lee and I read this separately we found the piece kind of rose some red flags some things that made us think there's some really weird stuff going on here the French social scientists are assuming such as seemingly assuming that all belief in conspiracy theories is bad which of course goes against the ethos of what's coming out of the philosophy of conspiracy theories at the moment
00:14:32
Speaker
We penned this response piece, we got a whole bunch of people to co-sign it with us. The authors of the Le Monde piece, Sands, Karen Douglas, then wrote a response to our response. We wrote responses to that response. And that then gave us the material to devote an entire book to conspiracy theory theory. So is this going to be sort of an academic
00:15:00
Speaker
text or is it for a more general audience? It is aimed at an academic audience, so it's coming out from Roman and Littlefield. Roman and Littlefield are mostly known for producing academic textbooks, although they also have imprints that produce, say, a social epistemology series, a series in psychology. We're coming out in their social epistemology series, but it is very much a book aimed at an academic
00:15:30
Speaker
audience, although that being said I think much of the material in the text is actually amenable to a general audience reading as well. Well that's good. Now I've had the good fortune of being able to read sort of an abstract of this book and an overview of the chapters and so on and so on and so on. Maybe first of all your co-authors here, their names
00:15:56
Speaker
that for the most part will be familiar, I think, to long time listeners of this podcast. In fact, some of them are people who have appeared on this very podcast in your interviews.
00:16:07
Speaker
Can you give us a quick, quick rundown of who's in it, what we might have heard from them before, or if they're new to our listeners?
Contributors and Philosophical Debate
00:16:15
Speaker
A couple of the names I don't think were familiar to me. All right, so people we've heard from before, we have Martin Orr from Boise State, Idaho. I've co-written papers with Marty. Marty is a good friend of mine. He's a sociologist. I'm a philosopher, but we find that we've been able to kind of bridge that conceptual
00:16:35
Speaker
divide. Jenna hustings, who's also from Boise State, also a good friend of mine. We have met when I was in Boise State last year is it was last year, when I gave a talk at Boise State University. So we've also heard her on the podcast, Charles pigton, who of course, we interviewed for the podcast about
00:16:59
Speaker
three years ago now, has it really been that long? It probably was, it was before I came to Romania. So who's based down in Otago, so we've heard from him as well. And then people who have been mentioned but have never actually featured on the podcast, Lee Basham from South Texas College,
00:17:19
Speaker
Patrick Stokes from Deakin in Australia, Curtis Hargum, who's now retired, and Marius Raab from Bamberg in Bavaria slash Germany, and David Coady, who's just across the ditch from you in Tasmania. And for the most part, they're all philosophers apart from Marius, Jenner, and Marty. Marius is a psychologist.
00:17:46
Speaker
Jenna and Marty are sociologists so it is a slightly interdisciplinary book and it's a book which takes conspiracy theories seriously in that it takes conspiracy theory as something we should study to be a serious concern but it also makes the claim that we need to treat each and every individual conspiracy theory we encounter in the world as a serious proposition that needs investigating.
00:18:14
Speaker
Now, going through the sort of the abstract, the overviews of each chapter here, there seems to be, at least in the earlier part, a bit of tension between philosophy and perhaps some of the other social sciences. Having read through it, there seem to be a bit of the other social scientists treat conspiracy theories this way, and we don't think that's right. I mean, it's an interdisciplinary book, so obviously some of these other social scientists are represented, but do you find philosophy is a little bit at odds?
00:18:43
Speaker
with what's with with some of the other other disciplines take on conspiracy theories? I do and I do from the sheer fact that the reading of the literature I think shows this kind of weird divergence and also because as someone involved in the cost network action compact which is the EU looking at conspiracy theories project I'm involved in I'm very much aware that
00:19:09
Speaker
my particular position on conspiracy theory is often at odds with the other people working in the network, and that does seem to be divided somewhat on disciplinarian grounds, particularly between social scientists and non-social scientists. And this basically gets us down to a term of art we owe to Joel Bonting and Jason Taylor from a 2010 paper, Conspiracy Theories and Fortuitous Data,
00:19:38
Speaker
where they kind of speciate two approaches towards conspiracy theory we find in the literature. There's generalism. Generalism is the thesis that we can treat conspiracy theories as a class and thus we can judge conspiracy theories because of the membership of that class. And generalists by and large take it that belief in conspiracy theories is pathological or irrational in some sense.
00:20:05
Speaker
And so because of that we have a prima facie suspicion of these things called conspiracy theories. Philosophers by and large have adopted the other position which is called particularism. And particularism is the thesis that actually we have to judge conspiracy theories like we do any other theory. We have to judge the theories on the available evidence.
00:20:31
Speaker
and come to a decision as to whether we should believe or disbelieve this particular theory in this particular instance. So particular say you can't judge conspiracy theories as a class, you have to judge them on the evidential merits.
00:20:47
Speaker
And so in that particular aspect, there is a weird dichotomy in the literature between social scientists who by and large are generalists and philosophies, philosophers, philosophers who are by and large particularists. And I noticed going through the outline, it looks like most of your most, if not all of your contributors do go for the particularism, except perhaps Patrick Stokes, he seems to have a slightly different take on it.
00:21:17
Speaker
that he seems to be the lone voice there. Pat's view on this is that he accepts that epistemically speaking, so from the theory of knowledge perspective, many conspiracy theories have turned out to be true. And so because of that, we do have to assess conspiracy theories on the evidential merits. We can't just condemn them for belonging to the class of things called conspiracy theories.
00:21:41
Speaker
But he advances what he calls a reluctant particularism. And by reluctant particularism, he goes, well, look, conspiracy theorizing is a social practice, a practice that's done in socially consituated situations. And in those socially consituated situations, there are a whole bunch of narratives and things that people often tap into when they conspiracy theorize.
00:22:07
Speaker
And some of these narratives actually cause harm. So I mean the obvious point is lots of conspiracy, I say lots, some conspiracy theories tap into international banking cartels and quite often those international banking