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The Problem of Conspiracism
34 Plays2 years ago
In this Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre episode, Brian and Josh take a look at M Dentith's paper "The Problem of Conspiracism". What exactly is the problem of conspiracism, and does it have anything to do with the hordes of zombies descending on Brian's position? No, you're right, probably not.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcaster's Guide to Conspiracy
00:00:06
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy brought to you today by Josh Edison and Professor Brian L. Keeley. Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy here representing the entirety of the Southern Hemisphere. I am Josh Edison and the only person living in the Northern Hemisphere, as far as I'm aware, is Professor Brian L. Keeley.
00:00:28
Speaker
How are you today? Yeah, that nuclear apocalypse that did more damage than we were expecting. It's kind of lonely. They always do. They always do. It's weird. But luckily, I've got a internet connection to the south. And you know, when these days I'll have that boat built and I will I will make that journey back down to the sweet, beautiful southern hemisphere where where like there aren't zombies wandering around eating people. Yeah, it's it's quite nice, actually. Thanks for an interesting change. So.
Reviewing 'The Problem of Conspiricism'
00:00:58
Speaker
We won't let that bother us, because we have a paper to review, another one by good old Ian Dianteth, probably hunkered down in a bunker somewhere, who knows, quite frankly. It's a paper called The Problem of Conspiricism.
00:01:13
Speaker
Interestingly, you may or may not be aware that Em's name on Twitter is conspiracism. So I wondered if perhaps this might be some sort of a searing confessional of Em saying exactly the problems with their own life. But now it turns out it's a it's another philosophy paper on conspiracy theories. So that's good for us. Good. So I think I'm just going to play a chime and then we'll get right into it. Sounds good.
00:01:44
Speaker
So you have the problem of conspiracism published in argument 2018. So argumenter is a philosophical journalist. Yeah, it is. And they did a special issue on conspiracy theories. And I believe this was one of the articles in that special issue. There might have been more than one or maybe maybe it came first and then the special issue came. But they've taken a special interest in conspiracy theories, at least to the extent of dedicating a reasonable amount of space to the topic.
00:02:14
Speaker
Yeah, I found it interesting. This one, I think we can skip fairly quickly over some of the first sections because there's a lot of sort of introducing the ideas and the work that's gone before, which we're already
Stereotypes vs. Merit in Conspiracy Theories
00:02:28
Speaker
familiar with. So I wasn't quite sure if it was introducing it to an audience outside of philosophy or just to an audience inside philosophy who haven't looked at conspiracy theories much. I think it's still philosophy.
00:02:41
Speaker
But we also, in the introduction, see Em's possible career in stand-up comedy that never was. Oh, yes. Yeah, there's a bit of that, too. Hey, they start with a joke here.
00:02:53
Speaker
Actually, I'll just quickly go through the abstract as well, because it's a nice preview of what's to come. The abstract reads, belief in conspiracy theories is typically considered irrational. As a consequence of this, conspiracy theorists, those who dare believe some conspiracy theory, have been charged with a variety of epistemical psychological failings. Yet recent philosophical work has challenged the view that belief in conspiracy theories should be considered as typically irrational.
00:03:19
Speaker
By performing an intro group analysis of those people we call conspiracy theorists, we find that the problematic traits commonly ascribed to the general group of conspiracy theorists turn out to be merely a set of stereotypical behaviors and thought patterns associated with a purported subset of that group. If we understand that the supposed problem of belief in conspiracy theories is centered on the beliefs of this purported subset, the conspiracists, then we can reconcile the recent philosophical contributions to the wider academic debate on the rationality of beliefs in conspiracy theories.
00:03:48
Speaker
Yeah, I got all excited when I read this paper the first time because they talk about performing an intragroup analysis of those people. And I thought, oh, maybe dentists is getting into social sciences statistics. Yeah, something like that. And then it and it turned out to be well, relatively philosophical intragroup analysis. But it was it was exciting for a moment there.
00:04:13
Speaker
So you get into the introduction, which as you say, starts with a joke of a kind. It says, when is a conspiracy theorist not a conspiracy theorist? When she's a government minister. Or if that punchline does not work for you, how about when she's a respected member of the press? Or when she's an academic who writes on conspiracy theories?
00:04:30
Speaker
The point being, of course, that when we think of conspiracy theorists, we tend to think of your David Ikes and your Alex Joneses, not John Dewey of the Moscow show trials, not Woodwood and Bernstein of Watergate and what have you. And we think of the Ikes and the Joneses, as Emcee says, as their particular views are considered at the very least strange and at worst irrational, people often come to the conclusion that conspiracy theories are the kind of thing deeply weird people believe. But obviously,
00:04:58
Speaker
No surprises that M is going to argue against that and says associating conspiracy theories with the noteworthy advocates or proponents of such theories is understandable. Many of these proponents came up or at least at the very least popularized to theories in question. However, it does not follow that our views about people like David Icke or Alex Jones tells us much, if anything, about the merit of their theories.
00:05:20
Speaker
This approach of characterizing belief in conspiracy theories generally because of the faults of certain conspiracy theorists, I argue, gets the matter of analyzing belief in conspiracy theories back to front. To show this, we'll first look at the works of Karl Popper and Richard Hofstadter, which set the stage for this analysis. The work of these elder statesmen will then be contrasted with recent work on the issue in philosophy, which is more sympathetic towards conspiracy theorizing.
00:05:41
Speaker
will then compare the current philosophical project examining belief in conspiracy theories with the work coming out from the social sciences, which seems as discussion of belief in conspiracy theories in terms of conspiracy theorists suffering from a variety of epistemic or psychological vices, which is often put under the label of conspiracist ideation or conspiracism.
00:06:00
Speaker
My contention is that we cannot use the class of conspiracists as a general reason to be suspicious of conspiracy theory in particular, and that the faults of the conspiracist are, should such theorists even exist, overrated.
00:06:12
Speaker
Yeah, and they will make good on that should such theorists even exist later on in the paper, because one of the upshots is going to be trying to come up with a definition of conspiracy or conspiracist or conspiracism that does not either become too broad and everybody is a conspiracist or too narrow and nobody is a conspiracist.
Defining Conspiracy Theories and Theorists
00:06:36
Speaker
We're back. It's another one of these papers trying to sort out the the definitional issues of what exactly we're talking about here. Yeah, yeah. I think a lot of the earlier papers that we've looked at, there was a little bit of that attitude of
00:06:51
Speaker
OK, yes, conspiracies occur, which means some conspiracy theorists are real. But when we talk about conspiracy theorists, you know what we mean. We mean those ones, those ones, raising eyebrows. But when you actually come to define exactly what those ones are, as we'll see, you can get into some problems.
00:07:07
Speaker
Yes. But so then the next few sections, as I say, we can skip over fairly quickly because it's a summary of what's come before. Section two is called Back to the Beginning, Popper and Hofstadter. So it summarizes what Popper said about the conspiracy theory of society. Namely, conspiracy theorists believe that history can be explained as the result of successive and successful conspiracies. Talks about Hofstadter and his paranoid style.
00:07:33
Speaker
but rounds it out by saying the central worry captured by Popper and Hofstad at the end, the concern which continues to resonate through the literature as we will see, is that while conspiracies may very well occur, the kind of people who believe in theories about conspiracies, conspiracy theorists, do not form these beliefs in the right way or for the right reasons.
00:07:53
Speaker
That is to say, the problem with conspiracy theories is typically taken to be something to do with the character of the conspiracy theorist. But can we really explain away what, if anything, is wrong with belief in conspiracy theories simply by appealing to the character flaws of conspiracy theorists?
00:08:08
Speaker
I think the role of Hofstadter, Popper plays less of this role here, but I think the role of Hofstadter, this idea of the paranoid style, actually is pretty central to this paper because there's a sense in which, I mean, I think one way of describing what M is doing here is basically saying that a lot of the work that is being done under the guise of studying conspiracy theories
00:08:34
Speaker
really is just regurgitating Hofstadter's original idea that there is this paranoid style that certain individuals are in the grips of. Hofstadter trots that out in the 1960s as a way of diagnosing, maybe a non-clinical sense, but the word
00:08:55
Speaker
also has a clinical connotation as well, but diagnosing what's wrong with the body politic, particularly in the United States for Hofstetter, who is a historian of American politics and arguing that there's something wrong with American politics.
Paranoid Style in Politics and Conspiracy Perceptions
00:09:09
Speaker
What that thing is, is that there's a large group of people out there who are paranoid and have a particular paranoid style of approaching political ideas and that
00:09:24
Speaker
and that this is problematic in one way or another. And part of, I believe, you know, a big piece of M story here is this idea that, you know, that idea is exactly what we find in a lot of of contemporary work about conspiracy theories, particularly the social scientific work that they just kind of, yeah, they're just right on board with Hofstadter. And so it's kind of a theory of eternal return or something like that, that, you know, known, you know,
00:09:51
Speaker
The more things go on, the more things stay the same because this Hofstadterian idea is still front and center in a way that M wants to call attention to because exactly that's what M wants to dispel and basically argue that whether or not Hofstadter was right about American history in the 1960s or in the American historical moment up to that point, that's not the best way to capture what's going on today.
00:10:21
Speaker
The next section, section three is conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists. And this is just sort of a bit of definition, which we're all thoroughly familiar with. M gives the definition of conspiracy theory as any explanation of an event which cites the existence of a conspiracy as a salient cause.
00:10:38
Speaker
and just sort of briefly argues for this broader definition saying that it allows ordinary users to escape the linguistic trap of saying I'm not a conspiracy theorist but since by this definition we all turn out to be conspiracy theorists of some stripe referring back to Charles Pigdon's paper from
00:10:55
Speaker
quite some time ago I think where he pointed out, you know, if you believe the official account of history, well then you're a conspiracy theorist because history is full of conspiracies, and if you don't believe the official account of history, well then you're a conspiracy theorist because there must be some sort of conspiracy to hide the true history of the world. But we've seen that plenty of times before, so I think we can shoot straight on into section 3.1
00:11:19
Speaker
Although I will know the one thing that I found funny about this section it's entitled conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists and, and that was bugging me for a while before I realized, oh wait there's the Steve Clark paper that I believe we've discussed before conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorizing.
00:11:38
Speaker
the title, I don't think it's an intentional pun on Clark, because I don't believe Clark comes up here. But I kept stumbling over that, like, where have I heard that particular phrasing again? And it's like, and maybe it's pretty obvious phrasing. It's just sticking two things together with a conjunction. But but kind of a kind of a banal title to a section of a paper on on conspiracy theories.
00:12:01
Speaker
Yes, yes, but that moves quickly into the next section which is particularism about conspiracy theories and so then again he talks about the Joel Bunting and Jason Taylor paper where they introduced the term particularists and just goes over them here saying that
00:12:19
Speaker
For the particularist then, there is no principal distinction between a conspiracy theory and the explanation of a historical event which cites a known conspiracy, such as the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE, since they're all examples of explanatory hypotheses which cite conspiracy theories as salient causes of some event.
00:12:36
Speaker
The worry that the particularist is attuned to is that we tend to express worries about conspiracy theories generally before we begin to even analyze them. That is, the generalist view that conspiracy theories are typically bunk trumps the realization that we should be assessing such theories, as we should any theory, on the evidential merits. He says particularists do not think that belief in all conspiracy theories is quintessentially rational. Rather, they argue that we cannot dismiss belief in conspiracy theories generally just because of the perceived faults of a few conspiracy theories or theorists.
00:13:05
Speaker
and again refers to the literature talking about David Coady Lee Basham and Charles Pigdon, the problems that they have pointed out in the generalist view, and finishes by saying the problem then is one of perception. It's not obvious that belief in particular conspiracy theories is irrational, rather the issue is being considered a particular kind of conspiracy theorist, one who seemingly believes in the existence of conspiracy sans evidence, good reason, or just happens to believe such theories as a matter of course.
00:13:32
Speaker
which is starting to tee up this idea that we'll be getting to that there's this particular kind of conspiracy theorist who maybe is the problem. But M's not done. Section 3.2 is now particular problems with generalist positions. So having argued for the particularism has a quick look at generalist positions. It looks at generalist positions outside of philosophy. So we've seen in the past the Karen Douglas and Michael Wood type stuff and what do they do? Are they social psychology? Is that there?
00:13:59
Speaker
Yeah, that would call definitely Karen Douglas is a social psychologist and probably Sutton. That would be a good descriptor for them as well.
00:14:07
Speaker
So yeah, and as we've seen, they've looked at issues around conspiracy theories, but M says of these sorts of people in their papers, whilst they admit that there might be positive social consequences to belief in such theories, questioning who the appropriate authorities are for what counts as evidence, etc. They choose to focus their attention on the negative social consequences of belief in conspiracy theories.
00:14:31
Speaker
They effectively analyse conspiracy theories through the lens of pathological belief in conspiracy theories, ignoring that this talk about the special character of some conspiracy theorists tells us nothing about the merit of their respective conspiracy theories. All these analyses of belief in conspiracy theories share the same underlying critique that belief in such theories is caused by factors other than arguments and evidence, yet the arguments are presented as a generalist stratagem.
00:14:54
Speaker
if we can show that some conspiracy theorists believe in conspiracy theories for factors other than arguments and evidence, then that somehow shows that conspiracy theories as a class are suspect as well. These arguments then assume we have grounds to be suspicious of the broad class of conspiracy theories before analyzing whether the grounds for such a suspicion is itself warranted, which I think the point that gets made several times through here is that you're putting the cart before the horse, I guess. You're making the
00:15:22
Speaker
the judgment before you've actually looked at the evidence before you.
00:15:27
Speaker
I think one of the things I like about this paper and rereading it makes me appreciate it again. Actually, I may even be using this paper in a forthcoming class that I had. I was looking for a quick and easy paper to talk about conspiracy theories. Then we read this for the Masterpiece Theater. I thought, well, maybe this is the nice little one-off paper that we could use. One of the things I like about it is,
00:15:55
Speaker
The original Bunting and Taylor distinction, the generalist versus particularist distinction, was a distinction specifically about theories. Should theories be evaluated as a class, or should they be evaluated as the generalist says, or should they be evaluated on a case-by-case basis?
00:16:16
Speaker
And in some sense, although I don't think M ever comes out and says this directly, what I see is an important upshot of this paper is that M is taking that framework and applying it to the conspiracy theorists, right? This idea that, you know, should conspiracy theorists
00:16:33
Speaker
be characterized in general as a group of irrational individuals? Or should we look at each individual conspiracy theorist on their own merits? You look at Alex Jones and go, yep, that one's a conspiracy theorist. But you look at, you know,
00:16:50
Speaker
Woodward and Bernstein, you go, nope, not a conspiracy theorist. Right. And that that's how you should go about doing things. But it's it's kind of shifting the argument from this argument about how to evaluate conspiracy theories, the explanatory entities that are trotted out by individuals and instead focusing it on more talking about the people, which is
00:17:13
Speaker
kind of what the social science or the social scientists when they stepped into this debate, they're interested in people, right? And that's, so, you know, they're not so much interested in the truth or warrantedness or the plausibility of some particular explanation. Philosophers of science may be interested in that, but the social scientists are interested in, you know, the wacky people and or the purely rational people that hold these beliefs. And so, in some sense,
00:17:39
Speaker
M is taking this distinction within philosophy that had been applied to theorists theories, because that's what philosophers are interested in just kind of, hey, let's just move it over to what the social scientists are more concerned with which is the actual theory theorists themselves the individuals who do it.
00:17:56
Speaker
Although as we see, this is also Kasam starts to get talked about later in the paper, and that's where you're really going to get this idea that really the problem about this whole issue is some bad thinkers, not their theories, but the thinkers themselves.
00:18:16
Speaker
sort of advancing this position in the next section, section four, which is a problem with some conspiracy theorists, where Em introduces the concept of conspiracism, saying the most charitable reading of the social science literature is something like
Understanding Conspiracism
00:18:31
Speaker
this.
00:18:31
Speaker
Even if we admit belief in particular conspiracy theories can be warranted, we need to respect the notion there exists some kind of pathological belief in such theories. We can call this notion, which describes the supposed pathological belief in conspiracy theories, conspiracism.
00:18:47
Speaker
which then gets defined as the view that belief in conspiracy theories is typically due to or caused by factors other than there being good arguments or evidence in favor of such theories. So conspiracists are conspiracy theorists, but not all conspiracy theorists are conspiracists, and conspiracism and conspiracists
00:19:07
Speaker
then can be the terms that we can use to pejoratively label the kind of conspiracy theorists that we want to take issue with. I think this is a sort of a proposal for those conspiracists, you know, those ones.
00:19:23
Speaker
But it's not as simple as that because EMC is yet, if we are to take the thesis of conspiracism seriously, which is up for debate, as we will see, we must realise that the issue concerns the putative existence of a certain kind of conspiracy theorists and not necessarily the theories they believe.
00:19:39
Speaker
This is important because the existing academic literature is largely insensitive to the distinction between the claims of some presumably wacky conspiracy theorists and the larger, more general class of conspiracy theorists, a class Pigdon rightly points out we all belong to. Let's then explore the apparent distinction between conspiracy theorists and conspiracists. And so that brings us into section five, gullible conspiracy theorists. I think here is where Kasam starts showing up.
00:20:06
Speaker
M says, as we saw earlier, critiques of belief in conspiracy theories and conspiracist terms can be motivated by the thought such belief has negative social consequences, loss of trust and authority, potential apathy with respect to contemporary political arrangements and the like. But these consequences may be rational responses to evidence that the world is more conspired than some would either have us believe or like to think.
00:20:28
Speaker
and talks about how people who take a dim view of conspiracy theories or conspiracy theorists tend to invoke that good old paranoid style once again, even if they don't necessarily mean to. And so he incites Daniel Pipes, Joseph Reumann, Michael Bachon, obviously Sunstein and Vibhul, can't get away without mentioning them, and of course Kasim Kasan.
00:20:53
Speaker
We've looked before Ian's objections to Kasam, especially Kasam's Oliver, this theoretical conspiracy theorist who he comes up with who believes in conspiracy theories due to an excess of gullibility. But Ian says,
00:21:09
Speaker
Kasam ends up using what is, in essence, a rhetorical move in order to get to a preordained conclusion. By defining Oliver as being a particular kind of problematic conspiracy theorist, the putative conspiracist, Kasam attempts to derive the more general claim that belief in conspiracy theories is predicated by intellectual vice.
00:21:28
Speaker
However, if this is a vice associated with belief in conspiracy theories, it is a vice suffered only by some conspiracy theorists. We are the ones who'd be gullible and be very gullible if we believed conspiracy theorists generally suffer from epistemic vices. Qassam's argument would only stand if he restricted his talk of epistemic vices to the set of problematic conspiracy theorists. However, if Qassam were only to focus on these putative conspiracists, his general argument about the dangers of belief in conspiracy theories would be seen for what it is, an overstatement.
00:21:58
Speaker
Indeed, Kasam strident insistence about the necessity that the only proper explanation of Oliver's belief in some conspiracy theory about 9-11 is gullibility seems itself to be the product of the intellectual character trait of dogmatism. Also, an epistemic vice. Yeah, I think it's a pretty good point. I mean, again, I like the way that they put it here. Again, it's very, very concise, the way it's captured. And when you see it this way, yeah, you wonder, like,
00:22:27
Speaker
It's this idea of this rhetorical move. I mean, you can imagine an alternative rhetorical move where somebody says, oh, imagine there's this there's this character. Let's call him Shlomi. And and then Shlomi is
00:22:43
Speaker
you know, of who is Jewish. And then you rattle off a bunch of anti-Semitic tropes about a person who is who is Jewish. You know, take whatever your favorite slurs are on Judaism and Jewish people. And you say, oh, this person, Shlomi, has these characters. And it's clearly, you know, something non-virtuous, something vicious about this character.
00:23:06
Speaker
Okay, cool, you could do that. But then to say, and this shows you that all Jews have those characteristics of being like Shlomi, you're like, whoa, wait a minute, all you did was just make up a fake example, load it up with all sorts of negative characterizations. And you started off by setting him up as a character with a particular identity, either a conspiracy theorist or a Jew,
00:23:32
Speaker
And then try to just extrapolate. It's like, wait, no, that's that's just a clearly not only rhetorical move, but a bad rhetorical move. And, you know, it only works in so far as the character you just described as looking familiar.
00:23:49
Speaker
And I think the rhetorical move that I think Em is really good at bringing out is that if we did it with Jews, it would be obviously anti-Semitic, and everybody would pick up on the, wait a minute, you know, you have a bad attitude about Jewish people, and therefore you think, I also have this bad attitude, so you'll be able to slip this past me.
00:24:11
Speaker
and is implying that we also have a bad attitude about conspiracy theorists, right? There's some group, a class of people that we nod our head and go, yeah, there are those people out there that have these kinds of negative characteristics and therefore we can just, you know, we'll just slur them all with this thought experiment example. And, you know, it's just, it's,
00:24:32
Speaker
If anything, it just shows that maybe we have a kind of a – it's just playing on the pejorative element of conspiracy theories, this idea that a lot of people have that there's a group of people out there that there's something wrong with them, and they're irrational or whatever, and we're labeling them as conspiracy theorists.
00:24:51
Speaker
Yeah, no, exactly. And I think further on, you might make exactly that point, essentially, that if we if we treated certain other groups the way we treat conspiracy theorists, then we would see it's obviously wrong. And yet here we are. So that that takes us to section six, the problem of conspiracism. And the problem, the problem essentially, I think involves it down to the fact that too much of the literature treats all conspiracy theorists as conspiracists.
00:25:18
Speaker
M says the problem is that that what constitutes talk of conspiracist ideation in the academic literature is much too broad belief in conspiracy theories gets characterized by what we have called here conspiracism. And so conspiracy theorists are taken to be de facto examples of conspiracists.
00:25:35
Speaker
Now, while we might be able to single out a subset of conspiracy theorists who believe conspiracy theories for reasons other than arguments and evidence, the existence of such conspiracy theorists tells us nothing particularly interesting about belief in conspiracy theories generally. It's not obvious all conspiracy theorists are conspiracists, let alone that there really are many, if any, conspiracists.
00:25:59
Speaker
and goes on to basically point out that by talking about conspiracists only, that makes it very hard, if not impossible, to know if the problems that these people are putting forward with their theories are due to something wrong with the theories or something wrong with the people.
00:26:19
Speaker
And if it's the theories you're interested in, then talking about only a particular kind of people who already you have defined as having some sort of defective reasoning or character even makes it actually much more difficult to evaluate the theories themselves, which is what you're supposedly interested in.
00:26:37
Speaker
And so M says, there are two issues at stake here, and unrestricted talk about belief in conspiracy theories as conspiracists in nature confuses the matter. The first issue is the question of when is belief in a particular conspiracy theory warranted or unwarranted? The second issue is whether some conspiracy theorists believe conspiracy theories regardless of the evidence. Focusing solely on the second issue without considering the first is, it seems, a curious fault of many a conspiracy theory theorists.
00:27:04
Speaker
And then he gives the example of saying the analogy of atheism, saying that we don't treat all atheists in this way. There are some atheists who sort of make their arguments, what have you, and then some atheists are real jerks about it and will criticise others for their religious beliefs and what have you, but we don't focus on one particular subset of them and then write off the views of all atheists just by looking at one group that may have some problems with it.
00:27:32
Speaker
Yeah, I thought that was actually one of my favorite passages in the whole paper, right? Where M writes, after all, the truth or falsity of the thesis of atheism is a fact independent.
00:27:44
Speaker
of what we believe about the world. Either there are gods or there are not. What makes atheism a rational or reasonable belief for individuals to hold depends upon the available evidence and arguments rather than on the views of actual atheists. Yes, there are what we might call unreflective atheists whose atheism is, say, political rather than epistemic, yet this should not count against the thesis of atheism.
00:28:09
Speaker
In the same way, what makes a conspiracy theory a reasonable belief for someone to hold depends on the arguments and the evidence the conspiracy theorist is able to produce. We should not dismiss questions about the merit of some conspiracy theory merely because of the existence of conspiracists. That there are people who do it badly does not mean that the thing that they are attempting to do and doing badly is not something that can at least sometimes be done well.
00:28:34
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So section seven then is called stipulating conspiracism and it says, so how seriously should we take the thesis of conspiracism?
Valid Theories Held for Wrong Reasons
00:28:45
Speaker
So one issue is that it's entirely possible that you could be a conspiracist, a person who believes in a conspiracy theory without good reason,
00:28:55
Speaker
And nevertheless, the thing that the conspiracy theory that you believe in is true. And it turns out there is good reason and argument for it. You just don't happen to appeal to them. So Ian gives the example. Perhaps you irrationally hate Mr. Blair and Bush and thus adopt the view that the stated reason for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to stop the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction was the product of a disinformation campaign.
00:29:20
Speaker
You'd be right. But if your only reason to endorse this particular conspiracy theory was irrational hatred and not actual evidence, your belief looks conspiracist to nature rather than the product of healthy conspiracy theorizing. Yeah, this is a perfect example. I mean, I quite like you, Josh. And the reason I like you, Josh, is because you're an alien from another planet. And I've always enjoyed the company of aliens from other planets. So so that's why I think you're a great guy.
00:29:46
Speaker
Yep, that makes perfect sense and I'm glad to hear you say it. But there are problems though. There are problems with the treatment of conspiracism and even talks about two of them. So problem one is if we define a conspiracist as someone who believes a conspiracy theory for factors other than there being good arguments or evidence, then it might turn out we're all conspiracists because essentially we all have some beliefs that we hold even though they're not really
00:30:14
Speaker
super well justified. They're all things we believe in because they feel right and maybe they match with our limited experience, but when you get right down to it, if you were asked to justify them with reason and an argument and evidence,
00:30:31
Speaker
you might not actually be able to. And that's normal. Everybody's like that. So if that's our definition of conspiracist, then in the way that we're probably all conspiracy theorists about some manner, we're probably all conspiracists about some manner. And then if that's true, then we're writing off
00:30:50
Speaker
everyone when we write off conspiracists as being people who allow the evidence for conspiracy theories. But then the opposite problem, problem two, is if we define a conspiracist as someone who believes a conspiracy theory for factors other than there being good arguments for evidence, it might turn out that there aren't many conspiracists
00:31:11
Speaker
affinity at all, because a lot of these people whom we call conspiracists have quite well developed arguments for their theories. Their arguments might be wrong, you know, they may be starting from the wrong point, they might maybe using false evidence, but they're still arguing towards their point. So I mean, like you're Alex Jones is I mean, there's always been the question with Alex Jones of how sincere he is, whether he actually believes his stuff, or whether it's just a persona, and he's just saying what he knows he wants his audience to hear.
00:31:40
Speaker
But there is a definite position you can see there. There's this sort of starting belief and evidence which is, you know, appeal to things that are happening in the world and say, look, this proves what I've believed all along and so on. So M says,
00:31:58
Speaker
Problem one describes what we might deem a specific problem. Depending on the conspiracy theory, I might turn out to be a conspiracist in one case and a conspiracy theorist in another. Problem two describes a general problem. As defined, there might not be many, if any, conspiracists. Yet both are bullets we need to bite. It may turn out that there are not that many conspiracists, or if conspiracists exist, most of us will turn out to be one.
00:32:21
Speaker
As long as we are aware of these issues, we can proceed to analyze belief in conspiracy theories and ask whether conspiracism is something we need to take into account when analyzing the beliefs of individual conspiracy theorists and their particular conspiracy theories.
00:32:34
Speaker
This is one of the spots in the paper that I'm not completely comfortable with, even though I like a lot about this paper. It wasn't until I got to these two problems that I started to see something that's problematic. It's this idea of this phrase that he's using, the defining conspiracists as someone who believes a conspiracy theory for factors other than there being good arguments or evidence.
00:32:59
Speaker
almost all the work here is being done with the word good, right? Because there's a way in which you can say, Alex Jones has arguments and evidence. They're just not very good arguments and evidence. What is really being built into that notion of good? Does it mean just simply, as you were pointing to earlier, like sincerely held?
00:33:20
Speaker
Right? Or unreflective and sincerely held? Is that a sufficient to be a good argument or evidence? I mean, a lot of the evidence that all of us fall back on is testimony, particularly we trust the testimony of others, we identify certain individuals as experts,
00:33:41
Speaker
I have not done a single experiment having to do with climate change, but I have it on good authority from people who I trust that there is evidence by people who have done these experiments. But if we all do that, and Alex Jones says, I'm just relying on the testimony of others,
00:34:04
Speaker
we get into an argument about, well, maybe the people I'm trusting are better or more trustworthy than the people that Alex Jones is, you know, it's all the works being done by this notion of good here, right? Objectively good, in fact, good, subjectively good, sincerely held, because
00:34:25
Speaker
A lot of the grist of the debate between people are, I've got evidence, but somebody's going to say, yeah, but that's really crappy evidence, or maybe even self-contradictory evidence or other things, and evidence that if only you would think about it, even you would recognize as bad evidence.
00:34:45
Speaker
Yeah. At this point in the paper, I get a little concerned as to whether I have to bite the two bullets that M says I have to bite. Before I bite those bullets, I want to know more what I'm being asked to buy when I say that it has to be factors other than there being good arguments.
00:35:06
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that is a good point. It's good arguments. I guess he says good arguments or evidence. Yeah, I don't know whether good extends over the evidence. Good arguments and good evidence. Because yes, you can have a good argument that based on bad evidence, you can have good evidence that you put into a bad argument. But yeah, it sounds like it's possibly there's more of a question of degree, perhaps. How bad, how much, how flawed an argument and what have you.
00:35:35
Speaker
Yeah, and I think a lot of it also pushes going back to the earlier notions of the use of this term conspiracism and the paranoid style. It's really about the concern that some people jump to the conclusion of conspiracy with no evidence. It's not about good or bad evidence. It's just their first reaction is conspiracy.
00:35:57
Speaker
there's got to be a conspiracy or it's more like the irrational, I just don't like anything that comes out of the mouth of Blair or anything that comes out of the mouth of Bush and therefore not on the basis of no evidence other than that prejudice. It's not even evidence, it's just my prejudice.
00:36:14
Speaker
To me, I would have called that a conspiracist, right? Somebody who doesn't do it just jumps to the conclusion with really little or no argumentation or evidence presenting, good or bad. And it's not clear to me that, you know, what to do with somebody like Jones or Ike who arguably, or at least doing something,
00:36:36
Speaker
And it's not that they're they're not immediately jumping to, oh, maybe they are. And then they're backfilling. Maybe that's maybe we have to look at the process that's involved here. Does Ike jump to the conclusion that somebody is a shape shifting alien and then go looking for lots of evidence to back it up and then ultimately comes around and presents a theory talking about getting things front to back, right? Starts with the conclusion that they jump to irrationally and then backfills to get an argument to it or develops a theory to comes to that.
00:37:04
Speaker
then, you know, then maybe that is conspiracism if if the evidence is after the fact or post hoc or something like that. So again, it just seems like there's got to be a little bit more that we've got to say here to to kind of figure out a sense of the term conspiracism that it's going to do the work that him wants him to do.
00:37:21
Speaker
Yeah, but even allowing for all that, Ian does say if we're going to treat the thesis of conspiracism seriously and investigate it, we need to keep in mind that conspiracists are simply one kind of conspiracy theorist. The putative existence of such conspiracists does not tell us that belief in conspiracy theories generally is problematic. The question should be when, if ever,
00:37:44
Speaker
Is a conspiracy theorist a conspiracist, rather than presupposing that conspiracy theorists suffer from conspiracist ideation?
00:37:52
Speaker
Yeah, so maybe Em just takes all my points online and says, okay, fair enough. Let me get rid of that word good, or let me come up with a different way of defining conspiracists that would make Brian happy. Still, whatever that ends up being, that's still only going to be some of the people who are spouting conspiracy theories. It still leaves us with these two classes of people, and we still have to judge them on a case by case basis.
00:38:21
Speaker
So we at least have to be open to the possibility that no matter how we define it, we're going to end up with either too few or too many depending on exactly how we apply. So I give him that point.
00:38:32
Speaker
That brings us all to the conclusion, which reads, conspiracy theorists, like most people, typically form their beliefs on the basis of the arguments and evidence available to them. Whilst there are some cases of seemingly irrational or even pathological belief in conspiracy theories, the existing academic literature is often insensitive to the distinction between claims about the problems of certain conspiracy theorists and the claims about the rationality of belief in conspiracy theories generally.
00:39:00
Speaker
This has resulted in the masking of a slight shift of the burden of proof from conspiracy theory theorists onto the pejoratively labeled conspiracy theorists. Rather than requiring conspiracy theory theorists to support their assertion that belief in conspiracy theories is, in fact, suspicious, talk of conspiracism effectively requires conspiracy theorists to say, but I'm not a conspiracy theorist.
00:39:21
Speaker
in order to avoid being charged with acting irrationally or suffering from some psychological defect. We can avoid this unfortunate situation if we recognise that the problem, if it indeed is a problem, is merely found in a subset of conspiracy theorists, the so-called conspiracists. We'd then be able to accommodate the conspiracist-style literature of much of the social sciences without automatically buying into a pejorative gloss on belief in conspiracy theories generally.
00:39:46
Speaker
My argument then provides additional support for particularism with respect to conspiracy theories. By diagnosing what's really happening with much work in the social sciences, which makes mistakes conspiracism a thesis about some conspiracy theorists for belief in conspiracy theories generally, we can show why particularism about conspiracy theories is preferable.
Conclusion: Evaluating Conspiracies on Their Own Merit
00:40:06
Speaker
So if someone alleges a conspiracy has occurred, we should examine the evidence for that conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories are not the problem. Conspiracism might be, especially if we end up construing belief in conspiracy theories solely in terms of the conspiracists. And there you have it. So I mean, we have we have seen papers in the past. Who was it? I think it was one of Steve Clark's earliest one was looking at the conspiracy theorists rather than the conspiracy theories. But I think this one is a good
00:40:34
Speaker
I think that does a good treatment of the issue basically and separating the people from the theories that they hold and also advocating for the particular risk position.
00:40:46
Speaker
Yeah, like I said, overall, I like the paper and I do think that it does some interesting it does some interesting work. And but and also the answer to your earlier question, argumenta, it actually it has a subtitle. It's a journal of analytic philosophy. So it is definitely a philosophical journey journal and journey in a sense.
00:41:16
Speaker
Yeah, so yeah, I can see why you might want to have this as an example in a course. I think that first half of it where you're summing up everything that's gone before, I think makes a good introduction to the issues in general and then teases out an interesting aspect of it and brings it to a nice conclusion. So yeah, I quite enjoyed reading through that one as well.
00:41:38
Speaker
Actually, I didn't know this. It turns out that argumenta is actually the journal of the Italian Society for Analytic Philosophy. Interesting. I did not realize that it was actually an Italian journal originally. We've learned something new. It's always nice. Right. Well, I think that brings us to the end of this episode then. Do you have any final thoughts?
00:42:03
Speaker
Nope, I enjoyed reading Dinta's paper today and definitely seems like another worthy entry in the annals of our Masterpiece Theatre discussion. Indeed, yes it does. So thank you for listening one and all, getting to the end of another episode for us. We'll be back with who knows what next week, quite frankly. I have no idea. But until then, I think the only responsible thing to do would be for me to say goodbye.
00:42:54
Speaker
And I'll say, tootily pip.