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Conspiracy as Heresy
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This episode was recorded on Easter Monday, and if we had been off the air for three days instead of three weeks, there might be some significance in that. As it stands, we're looking at David Coady's paper "Conspiracy as Heresy", whose title has religious connotations of its own, so I guess it all works out and we regret nothing.
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Transcript
Introduction and Setting
00:00:07
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Edison and Ian Denteth.
Easter in China Discussion
00:00:28
Speaker
Hello and Happy Easter. It's the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy in Auckland, New Zealand. i am Josh Addison in Guangzhou, China. They are Dr. MRX Denteth. um ah you How does Easter work in China? Is it a thing at all?
00:00:42
Speaker
Not really. No, I mean, I'm sure. i mean, there are there are Christians in China, so they will be celebrating Easter at this time. I haven't seen any Easter-related advertising or specials going on in stores. So it is a public holiday here in China, but for a company. Completely different reason which of course we can't go into on this podcast mostly because I don't actually know the details of that particular public holiday particularly well and i don't want to be a typical white person trying to explain the culture of another country when I don't quite understand that culture myself Fair
YouTube Subscriber Count Joke
00:01:18
Speaker
enough. Well, it is very definitely Easter Monday here um as as as I'm recording so i'm I'm wearing suitably sacrilegious attire, which will be visible to the people who watch this on our YouTube channel, which is almost no one from what I can gather. But they have eight subscribers. Eight subscribers. One of them is me.
00:01:38
Speaker
We have seven subscribers. Actually, no, actually, i'm I'm not subscribed. So we have seven subscribers. Seven subscribers. And I will say now to the people who are listening to this podcast on YouTube and making the usual comments, that takes us a really, really long time to get to the meat of the episode.
00:01:58
Speaker
The more you tell us we have long preambles, the longer those preambles are going to be.
Purpose of Podcasts
00:02:05
Speaker
This is a podcast. The whole point of a podcast is that two people of middle age use a podcast as a proxy for their friendship to have conversations because that's how podcasts work. They're not actually designed for audiences. They're designed for the co-hosts to basically have a chat, which is in some way structured.
00:02:27
Speaker
That is what a podcast is. And if you keep telling us, oh, it takes us too long to get to the content, we will slow these preambles all the way down.
00:02:37
Speaker
This isn't for you. This podcast is for us. Yeah, precisely. Precisely. That said, I don't know that we actually have a lot else. Oh, yeah. I mean, today's preambles are quite short because we've we've basically done our griping. We should get into the meat of the episode.
Paper Review: 'Conspiracy Theory as Heresy'
00:02:54
Speaker
Yeah. So let's do that now.
00:03:02
Speaker
Right, so we have a ah paper and a paper to look at this week, and and it's the very best kind of paper. It's a short paper. Em said, here's this one we can look at, and and and and it's four pages long. And were we not on separate continents, I would have i would have kissed you on the face.
00:03:21
Speaker
Josh, you can save that kiss for next year. yeah Although actually, given the world situation and jet fuel prices going up Yeah, probably not a good idea to bank on international travel right at the moment Yeah, yeah i mean but you you can save that kiss I mean, even if you die before me i will take that kiss from your corpse's face Excellent.
00:03:42
Speaker
So you have to dig your body up after funeral, because maybe I can't get to the funeral on time. I will dig that body up. If you're cremated, I will find your ashes and I will create a golem-like creature from them and I'll get that kiss.
00:03:58
Speaker
That's my guarantee. Yeah, I'm fully on board with that. um Now, because this is a short paper, the temptation is to say, well, this will probably be a short episode, but we've said that before.
00:04:08
Speaker
We've said that before quite a few times, and it doesn't seem to matter the actual amount of content we have. We're we're able to get sidetracked and rabbit on and digress and make things... There's generally no correlation. So we should probably...
00:04:24
Speaker
get straight into it on the assumption that we're going to waffle on about bollocks, and then maybe this podcast will come out at a reasonable length.
Historical Context of Conspiracy Theories
00:04:32
Speaker
Indeed. So the paper we're looking at today is called Conspiracy Theory as Heresy a friend of the podcast, David Cody, published in 2021 Educational Philosophy and Theory.
00:04:45
Speaker
So i mean it's it's really short enough that we could probably actually just read the entire thing out from start to finish through the length of this podcast. But but that that seems a bit cheeky and possibly, i don't know, if if if there are if there are sort of copyright issues or what have you involved. So let's not do that.
00:05:00
Speaker
Yes, let's just say people would not be impressed if we started just reading out papers verbatim online. yeahp ah Nevertheless, it doesn't have an abstract or an introduction. it's such a short little thing. So here's here's the first paragraph.
00:05:16
Speaker
Ever since the term conspiracy theory was first popularized by the philosopher Sir Karl Popper in the 1950s, conspiracy theories have had a bad reputation. To call a theory a conspiracy theory is to imply that it is false and that the people who believe it or who would like to investigate it, i.e. conspiracy theorists, are irrational.
00:05:35
Speaker
Conspiracy theories are widely held to be not only false in the products of irrationality, but also to be particularly harmful. Hence, they're widely thought of as a problem, which might be solved or at least mitigated through the intervention of social scientists, psychologists, and even philosophers.
00:05:51
Speaker
The problem is typically thought of as being of quite recent origin, or at any rate one which has recently been getting worse, especially in the age of COVID-19, when conspiracy theories are routinely spoken of as a threat to public safety and even to democracy itself. Now, I just want to step straight um and talk about this popper stuff.
00:06:09
Speaker
So, this very first sentence. Ever since the term conspiracy theory was first popularized by the philosopher Sal, Sal, Sal, Sir Karl Popper in the 1950s.
00:06:22
Speaker
Conspiracy theories have had a bad reputation. Cowl Popper did not popularize the term conspiracy theory, and there's a variety of reasons to think this.
00:06:33
Speaker
First of all, Cowl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies was a you know, it was a big book of its time, but by no means was it a big popular book. It wasn't the book that people were talking about around the water cooler at work. So, Karl Popper was not popularizing the term in the sense of people were reading his book and talking about Karl Popper's work. Intellectuals might well have been having those conversations.
00:07:01
Speaker
The common people were not. But the other reason to think that Karl Popper didn't popularize the term conspiracy theory is that Karl Popper doesn't really talk about conspiracy theories per se. in the open society and its enemies. He talks about the conspiracy theory of society, and he only talks about the conspiracy theories of society in two sections of that work. It's a minor footnote, effectively, in Popper's work, this discussion of the conspiracy theory of society. So, a he's not popularizing it because he's not that popular, and B, he's not popularizing it because even if he was that popular, It's such a minor part of the open society and its enemies. It would be really weird if that was the one thing people took from his discussion.
00:07:55
Speaker
Would it be fair to say he popularized it within academic discussion? No, because that's the thing. If we look at the kind of a literature on conspiracy theory, theory, both in philosophy and the wider social sciences, psychology and the like, doesn't really re-enter discussion and until about the 1980s or so. and actually a lot of that discussion about conspiracy theories in the 1980s, which is the late 80s, early 90s, is mostly going on in things like cultural studies or American studies. And so they're actually looking at cases where people have been talking about the phrase rhetorically. They're taking work from rhetoric, not from philosophy. So it is true that in the ninety s people go, oh, Popper also talked about conspiracy theories. So you get s scattered references to Popper in various locations, then leading to Charles Pigden writing about conspiracy theories in Popper Revisited. But no, there's absolutely no way that this was a popular term, even in academic circles, taken from the nineteen fifty s It was a thing that was rediscovered, but it it wasn't popularized. It was rediscovered that someone written something on this in the past and actually had written quite tangentially on it in the past.
00:09:23
Speaker
Right. Well, with that disclaimer out of the way, then, we can carry on with the
Understanding Conspiracy Theories
00:09:28
Speaker
paper. Now, having um having having discussed this idea that conspiracy theories are thought of as being as being a problem and a potential danger, David continues, i think all of this is mistaken.
00:09:41
Speaker
Conspiracy theories are not a new or growing problem. In fact, conspiracy theories as such are not a problem at all. contrary Contrary to conventional wisdom, we do not have a problem with conspiracy theories. We do, however, have a problem with the term conspiracy theory, along with related terms such as conspiracy theorist conspiracism and conspiracist ideation. And this problem really is quite new and increasingly widespread.
00:10:05
Speaker
And so, I mean, not not only is this paper quite short, I think it's quite familiar familiar ground for a large part of it. I think his conclusion is is interesting. But I think what we will see for a fair bit of this are sort of ideas and arguments that we've seen plenty of before.
00:10:23
Speaker
In particular, straight away, he says that the big reputation of conspiracy theories is puzzling. After all, people do it people do conspire. And so this is ah this is this an idea we've seen a lot. Conspiracies actually happen. Conspiracies are a real thing. They happen, they actually happen quite a lot.
00:10:38
Speaker
And people theorize about conspiracies. And when you're criticizing belief in conspiracy theories, you do have to actually criticize belief in conspiracy theories along with a fact about the world, which is that people do conspire and people will suspect the existence of conspiracies. So David's quite right here. It is puzzling that we think of conspiracy theory as a pejorative, if indeed people do think that. I'm doing some work with Martin Orr, which suggests that actually maybe we're just getting that assumption back to front.
00:11:16
Speaker
But it is unusual that we treat, or at least we tend to treat, conspiracy theory as a pejorative theory. given that because conspiracies occur and people theorize about conspiracies, that should be a perfectly natural thing to do as long as you're doing it properly.
00:11:34
Speaker
And it seems like where it comes from is is that it's the age old problem of of ah of a it's it's those conspiracy theories, you know, the ones, the crazy ones, the wacky ones.
00:11:45
Speaker
And he says, you know, it's weird. It doesn't make sense to take the most irrational examples of a conspiracy theory and make those make out as though those are characteristic of conspiracy theories in general. He says it's as if we thought of phrenology as a paradigm of a scientific theory. Although I have to say, I remember a little while ago, we we was in the um the British Post Office scandal episode where someone referred to something as the modern equivalent conspiracy. Flat Earthism, which I think actually modern equivalent of belief in flat earth is is still belief in flat earth, unfortunately. And phrenology, I mean, there's it's not exactly the looks-maxing stuff, but there is some sort of incel subculture business that that descends from, which does actually go to the extent of, like, you know, if your jaw is not this exact angle and these dimensions of your face are not precisely right, you'll never get a mate and so on. So...
00:12:41
Speaker
Phrenology is not that far in the dustbin. And there's a kind of analogy. You get this claim people make, oh, I can't get COVID. I'm very healthy. And that's along the lines of phrenology. that' the know There are certain essential biological characteristics which can be easily protected by someone being thin and trim, which indicates that they must be prima facie healthy and therefore incapable of being infected by bacteria or viruses.
00:13:10
Speaker
And educated people make that claim. Oh, i I would never get COVID. I'm far too healthy. I don't have the comorbidities we expect from people who get COVID.
00:13:21
Speaker
And the scientist then goes, yeah, viruses don't care. They really don't care whether you're healthy or unhealthy. If they've got a vector, they're going to take it Now, we've said that it's it's silly to think about conspiracy theories these this way because conspiracies happen all the time and ah and a conspiracy theory is just a theory about a conspiracy.
00:13:41
Speaker
Now, David acknowledges at this point that that this is how we're defining conspiracy theory. We're defining it as simply a theory about a conspiracy. But as we we we we all know, there are quite a few competing definitions of conspiracy theory. Some of them overlap and some of them contradict.
00:13:57
Speaker
So David says that he has considered many of these alternative definitions elsewhere and concluded that none of them are satisfactory and that there is reason to believe that no satisfactory alternative can be found.
00:14:09
Speaker
At which point I ring my bell and I ring my bell very loud. So David here is talking about his book, What to Believe Now, which is a ah survey of how people should reason in our complicated political age. and So he has a chapter on conspiracy theories and essentially makes the same argument as he's making here. People should just give up on the term conspiracy theory, which is a spoiler for the end of this particular article.
00:14:39
Speaker
And so he does consider briefly some of the alternative definitions. So what we might call the compositional definition, the simple and minimal definition, a conspiracy theory is simply a theory about a conspiracy. ah The definition that says a conspiracy theory is contra some official theory.
00:14:58
Speaker
And it is true, he has considered them. But he hasn't considered them comprehensively, hasn't gone into the kind of minutiae of the argument for the simple minimal definition, or the minutiae as to why the simple minimal definition needs to pay attention to ordinary language. It is just a very cursory examination of those definitions. So...
00:15:24
Speaker
it is It's true that he has considered these things, but it's not really much of an argument, because when you look at his consideration, it's not a very robust consideration of those definitions. But even more importantly...
00:15:40
Speaker
This article occurs about 10 years after that book was written. And there's been a lot of ink spilled on definitions of conspiracy theory subsequent to what to believe now. And you would expect him to at least have paid some attention to that material because some of that material actually takes David to task for his, oh, what can you do about it? There's no satisfactory definition out there.
00:16:11
Speaker
Yeah, and that's a different claim. like it would be true, I would say, to say that there is no universally accepted definition of a conspiracy theory, but that's not the same as saying there can't be one. It's not saying that in principle there could never be one.
00:16:27
Speaker
Nevertheless, he he takes it from here by saying that although the term conspiracy theory lacks any fixed definition, it does serve a fixed function. Its function, like that of the word heresy in medieval Europe, is to stigmatize people with beliefs which conflict with officially sanctioned or orthodox beliefs of the time and place in question.
Conspiracy Theory vs. Heresy
00:16:47
Speaker
So there we have the justification for the title of this paper.
00:16:51
Speaker
He believes that conspiracy theories for perform a similar function to heresy. in more in earlier more religious times. It's a little disparaging that he doesn't actually make reference here to the sociological literature, because sociologists and media studies scholars have been banging this drum for quite some time, that no matter what you think about conspiracy theories as a phenomena, the label conspiracy theory...
00:17:23
Speaker
is often used by the powerful to mark out theories that they don't want people to be talking about, in the same way that church officials back in the day would simply go, oh, i don't quite like that theological argument you're putting forward there.
00:17:41
Speaker
I'm going to label that as being heretical. Yes, and this is the danger he then highlights here by saying that a pejorative definition of conspiracy theory has the effect of silencing people who believe in conspiracy theories, rightly or wrongly, which aids actual conspirators. um As he puts it, So one bad effect of the current use of this term is that it makes it easier for conspiracy to thrive at the expense of openness. Another bad effect is that it is an injustice to people whose beliefs are characterized as conspiracy theories.
00:18:12
Speaker
And I mean, this this again, not nothing new here. We've seen this a lot the time. yeah People use the term, people in power have been known to use the phrase conspiracy theory to simply label a belief that they don't like and and therefore dis dismiss dismiss it, rightly or wrongly.
00:18:31
Speaker
So he now continues by looking at the psychological literature. by saying, if I am right that our current use of the term conspiracy theory is comparable to the medieval use of the term heresy, then the work of psychologists on the subject is comparable to the work of the Inquisition, which possibly using the term Inquisition? Yeah, I mean, nobody expects the conspiracy theory Inquisition. mean, this is one of those analogies where you can kind of see someone who is a generalist going, well, that's a mistake of rhetoric there, because...
00:19:06
Speaker
I don't know that we can make the claim that psychologists as a group are comparable to the Inquisition, in part because there were lots and lots of different forms of the Inquisition in medieval Europe.
00:19:22
Speaker
We often focus our attention on the Spanish Inquisition, which was not led by the Roman Catholic Church, but was by its name actually led by the Spanish crown,
00:19:34
Speaker
and was taken to be quite a torturous version of the Inquisition. Not every single Inquisition worked in the same way. So, a you need to ask what version of the Inquisition, but also, b I'm not aware of psychologists torturing conspiracy theorists to death for their beliefs.
00:19:56
Speaker
That seems like the analogy kind of falls down at that point if we're taking the prototypical Spanish Inquisition as our, well, if conspiracy theories like heresy, then psychologists who use conspiracy theory as heresy must also be chaining people up and burning them to death.
00:20:15
Speaker
Well, I don't know. Maybe metaphorically in ah in a vague academic sense, I'm not sure. But um but i guess what he's getting at is that if we have this this pejorative use of conspiracy theory, it is the psychologists who are the ones who are saying this is a problem and why, and here's how we can fix it. I don't know if that's... You you know more about the psychological literature than I do. i assume there's at least some of that going on.
00:20:42
Speaker
For some psychologists, yes. And i mean, it's a very open question as to how many psychologists are using this, in part because we have a problem in the psychological literature in that psychologists actually often have particularist or particularist-friendly definitions of conspiracy theory. So if you actually go look at the operating definitions of conspiracy theory that a lot of psychologists use,
00:21:10
Speaker
Nothing about the definition says that conspiracy theories are necessarily mad, bad, or dangerous. Instead, what seems to be the issue is that psychologists rely on examples of conspiracy theories that they assume everyone agrees are bad examples of conspiracy theories.
00:21:32
Speaker
So it's a little bit trickier to pass out, because if we're going to make the analogy strict between psychologists and the Inquisition, then it seems that you've got the case of, well, I you know don't necessarily believe that the actions you're engaging here are the devil's work, but we're just going to use it as an example of the devil's work, which is why I think the analogy kind of falls down.
00:21:56
Speaker
It's a little, it's a little bit, the situation's trickier and more nuanced than maybe David's making out in this short article. Well, he goes on to um to talk about the history of of psychology with respect to conspiracy theories. So according to his his telling of it, to begin with, psychology characterized any belief in conspiracies as problematic, but...
00:22:20
Speaker
And that's evolved now now that now that psychologists, or at least some of them, acknowledge that people do actually conspire and that believing in conspiracies isn't necessarily a bad thing. The psychological literature apparently has moved on to talking about people who are overly willing to believe in conspiracy theories.
00:22:38
Speaker
I mean, ah I'm not entirely sure that's entirely fair portrayal of psychological literature. i think it's fair to claim that even the early work goes, well, know, sometimes conspiracy theories turn out to
Psychologists and Conspiracy Theories
00:22:52
Speaker
be true. So they'll mention things like Watergate. But Watergate was always kind of the exception.
00:22:58
Speaker
So yes, some of these conspiracy theories turn out to be true, brackets Watergate, but in most cases they aren't. So it wasn't any belief, it was most belief. I think what has happened in subsequent years is that psychologists have seen pushback by non-psychologists on this it on this issue, and they're admitting now that the pool of warranted conspiracy theories is larger than previously thought.
00:23:27
Speaker
So they're moving from characterize most belief in conspiracies as problematic to now going, well, we're we're going to be agnostic about how many slash how few. Instead, we're going to use our diagnostic apparatus to focus on the cases where people seem to be overly willing to believe in the existence of a conspiracy, whether or not the conspiracy is occurring.
00:23:52
Speaker
Yes. So then you get the use of terms like conspiracism or conspiratorial ideation, meaning a person who is who is overly willing to believe in conspiracy theories. But how how overly willing, how how willing do you have to be to be overly willing to believe in conspiracy theories? And so...
00:24:11
Speaker
Apparently, they will test whether someone is is a conspiracist or having conspiratorial ideation by just just counting up the number of irrational conspiracy theories that they believe. They'll give them a big long list, you know, how many of these things do you believe are or might be true.
00:24:28
Speaker
But the problem is the theories these lists of theories often include conspiracy theories that have that have been proven true, or at the very least, conspiracy theories which were not proven true are not actually implausible to believe in.
00:24:43
Speaker
Yes, so herein lies an issue with a lot of the polling or surveys undertaken both by psychologists and by political scientists.
00:24:55
Speaker
they'll often ask a question, and the question will be some variant of people behind the scenes are in control of world events. And they will go, well, look, if you if you if you strongly agree or agree with that particular claim, then you believe in some kind of conspiracy theory. But a lot of very reasonable, put in scare quotes, sensible people will go, well, I mean...
00:25:24
Speaker
If we're talking about unelected people having control of the world, I mean, I know the civil service exists. It exists in almost every government around the world, and civil servants are not elected.
00:25:35
Speaker
many cases, civil servants actually persist from one administration to another, and that does seem as if there are unelected people behind the scenes who are in control to some extent with world events.
00:25:50
Speaker
And so you might go, well, I i mean, i I kind of agree with that claim. So I'm going to have a kind of hesitant agree on my seven-point Lickett scale. And that's often taken as being an example of someone believing a conspiracy theory.
00:26:06
Speaker
And so if you have a lot of these vague statements... which will sometimes be you think there's something suspicious about the events of 9-11, etc, etc, then they go, look, these people are overly prone to believing in the existence of conspiracies. And yet it seems at least some of those cases are people reasoning quite rationally to the idea that actually suspecting conspiracies, but not necessarily endorsing them as being true, is a perfectly normal thing to do.
00:26:38
Speaker
Yes, I mean, one of the um examples he brings up are the the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, both of whom have have conspiracy theories around their assassinations. And in both cases, they may not be the official version, but there's enough going on that a reasonable person could look at them and say, well, I mean, you know, it's not impossible. With respect to Martin Luther King, there is that very awkward court case that found in favor of the family saying that Martin Luther King was killed by elements within the United States. So some people go, well, look, in a court of law, it was it was proven beyond reasonable doubt that the American government was involved in the assassination of Dr. King.
00:27:23
Speaker
At which point you might go, well, that seems like something that people ought to at least consider when thinking about claims of that kind. As David puts it, reasonable and well-informed people disagree about whether or not there were conspiracies behind these assassinations. Since it is unclear whether we should believe in conspiracies in these cases, they cannot be cited as evidence of excessive willingness to believe in conspiracy theories.
00:27:48
Speaker
Now, you you you had some notes here. That seemed reasonable enough to me, but is there more going on there than than meets the eye? Well, there's just a lot going on in these two sentences. The first sentence reasonable and well-informed people disagree about whether or not there were conspiracies behind these assassinations.
00:28:07
Speaker
Now, it might be that reasonable people disagree, because most reasonable people don't have a vested interest in looking into these particular conspiracy theories. So they might go, well, you know, I haven't looked into it, but it's it's plausible that there could be a government conspiracy here.
00:28:26
Speaker
So the fact that reasonable people disagree doesn't tell us anything about whether they've reasonably investigated these particular claims. And so you can't really take from that first sentence the second claim, since it is unclear whether we should believe in conspiracies in these cases, they cannot be cited as evidence of excessive willingness to believe conspiracy theories. And this is where I do a hat to to the psychologists here and go, well, look, it might well just there might still be a tendency to believe in conspiracies in these particular situations. That tendency may be malformed or well formed in some situations. But we we can't just take the existence of reasonable disagreement as a reason to throw up our hands or be agnostic, because you need to actually have a further claim between there, which is that reasonable and well-informed people are interested in investigating these claims.
00:29:23
Speaker
And that's not necessarily entailed by someone being reasonable and well-informed. They could be reasonable, well-informed, and also incurious. Yeah.
00:29:34
Speaker
But nevertheless, I think his his main point is that the the willingness to entertain the plausibility of something like this does not necessarily mean that you're you're excessively willing to believe in conspiracy theories.
The 9/11 Conspiracy Debate
00:29:46
Speaker
And he goes from the cases of of things like JFK and MLK to says...
00:29:53
Speaker
now he says um that that belief in nine eleven truth of theories isn't, and again, this is a point which has come up plenty of plenty of times before, belief in 9-11 truth of theories isn't believing a conspiracy theory in favor of a non-conspiratorial explanation. It's believing one conspiracy theory in favor of another conspiracy theory. As as we've said countless times, no matter what you believe about what happened on 9-11, you believe a conspiracy theory, the official version 9-11. is a conspiracy theory.
00:30:22
Speaker
So it does seem weird to call that conspiratorial ideation a belief in ah and in a truth of theory when you can't not believe in a conspiracy theory in that context. Unless, of course, you define conspiracy theories as being opposed to official theories, but David pointedly has not done that so far.
00:30:43
Speaker
Yes, he's just thrown up his hand to say there is no satisfactory definition for us to fall back upon. ah But regarding 9-11, he says, those who believe American government agencies were involved in the 9-11 plots are certainly mistaken, but they are not mistaken because they suffer from conspiratorial ideation.
00:30:59
Speaker
Their mistake is not that they are overly willing to believe in a conspiracy. They are absolutely correct to believe in a conspiracy. They just believe in the wrong one. They have misidentified conspirators. I read that and thought, reminded me of Curtis Hagen taking extreme issue with old Sunstein and Vermeule talking about 9-11 things being demonstrably false. What would he think of David saying that the truth inside the inside job hypothesis is certainly a false belief in evidence of some sort of irrationality?
00:31:29
Speaker
Do we need to arrange some sort of a cage match? I mean, it is interesting that both David and Curtis have written pointed critiques of Sunstein and Vermeule here. So it is also interesting that they have quite diametrically opposed views when it comes to The reasonableness of nine eleven conspiracy theories And once again, there are a lot of 9-11 conspiracy theories So David's kind of making the mistake here Of tarring all conspiracy theories with the same brush there are Even i with my view 9-11, will say, look, there are some plausible nine eleven conspiracy theories and some utterly implausible conspiracy theories. I think the hologrammatic plane's hypothesis is so implausible, I'm willing to say that it is probably demonstrably false.
00:32:25
Speaker
But some inside job hypotheses, even if I don't think they're likely to be true, at least have a veneer of plausibility. And at least one inside job hypothesis, I think, might actually be something actually i shouldn't say might actually be something worth considering considering. I don't need to hedge here.
00:32:48
Speaker
I think is worth considering, which is the CIA knew more about the events in question, but due to intelligence failures, failed to act upon that information in a timely fashion and have been covering up the fact they could have prevented nine eleven since 2001. And that's a 9-11 conspiracy theory here. And I think it's plausible and with serious consideration.
00:33:14
Speaker
So i mean it' all this has been in service of of pointing out the idea that that trying to define these ideas ideas these ideas of conspiracism or conspiracist ideation as a person who who is too willing to believe that conspiracy theories are true.
Thresholds for Belief in Conspiracy Theories
00:33:29
Speaker
um Now, David points out, if if psychologists want to show that people are too willing to believe in conspiracy theories...
00:33:37
Speaker
they first need to establish what an acceptable level of belief in conspiracy theories is. Because, I mean, as everyone seems to acknowledge, there are some conspiracy theories that are true. there are It is perfectly rational to believe in some conspiracy theories.
00:33:50
Speaker
And you're trying to say it's also possible to believe in them too much. Well, how much is too much? How do you quantify that? And again, i haven't read the psychological literature, but David seems to think that they aren't particularly good at establishing an acceptable level of conspiracy theories and possibly may not even be able to do it at all. Have you seen anything like that in the literature?
00:34:13
Speaker
No, I mean, there is no discussion of what the base rate should be for conspiratorial belief. It is just assumed that there is too much belief in conspiracy theories out there. I i think we get we're going through a kind of weird period of overcorrection.
00:34:30
Speaker
So... overcorrection so For a large chunk of the latter part of the 20th century, I think people were probably far too trusting of authority, whether it be scientific authority, political authority and the like.
00:34:45
Speaker
And we're seeing a backlash against that as we've discovered that some of these elites, both academic or political, have been feathering their own nests, lying, misleading, etc, etc, which has then led to a kind of overcorrection of doubting a lot of claims that come from or fuck authority.
00:35:05
Speaker
But that doesn't tell us what the base rate is it just tells us there might be an overcorrection compared to previous levels of trust. What that base rate is, I think would be fascinating to find out. I don't know how you would either work it out.
00:35:19
Speaker
But my suspicion is the base rate is a lot higher than many social scientists and psychologists want it to be. Now, it's at this point in the paper that David mentions the Martha Mitchell effect, which was the reason why we did the little filler episode last time.
The Martha Mitchell Effect
00:35:37
Speaker
So if you didn't catch that that short episode, the Martha Mitchell effect is when a person's beliefs, a person's accurate beliefs, are dismissed as delusional, resulting in a misdiagnosis of mental illness in them.
00:35:50
Speaker
So it was named, of course, after Martha Mitchell. So the short version of the story is Martha Mitchell was the wife of John Mitchell, who was President Nixon's Attorney General. um She tried to raise the alarm about Watergate quite early on in the process, but was ignored and sign sidelined. And when she tried to go to the press, she ended up being held against her will, at one point drugged drugged with a sedative. to keep her quiet, and then afterwards was portrayed in the media as an alcoholic with mental health issues, whose words should therefore not be regarded about anything. And of course, she would eventually be vindicated once the true details of Watergate were uncovered, that that the conspiracy theories she was advocating were actually true. Unfortunately, if you listened to that last little episode, she did um sadly die in, I think, 1976, Not long after Nixon had resigned and her then ex-husband had gone to prison. if there There was actually 2022, there was a miniseries called Gaslit that was about Watergate and specifically Martha Mitchell's role in it. Julia Roberts played Martha Mitchell.
00:36:55
Speaker
And simply from the title Gaslit, you can you can you get a fairly good idea of how things went for her. it was I didn't know this, but Madeleine Kahn played her in Oliver Stone's Nixon film. Is that one of her last roles?
00:37:09
Speaker
Ah, I don't know. Well, it was a while ago, Nixon. I'm not sure. I haven't seen Nixon, I have to say. so I have not either. I'm not really an Oliver Stone fan. No, no, not a big fan. Not a big fan. But anyway, so so that's why i thought it was worth talking. like I sort of read this and thought, oh, maybe we could do an episode about this sometime in the future, but then it turned out we weren't able to record at the usual time. So it's like, well, perfect excuse to...
00:37:36
Speaker
do a little filler episode about it. So the reason, of course, David is bringing it up is that this you can see this with conspiracy theories. a um a person the The big problem he has with this pejorative use of conspiracy theory, of treating conspiracy theory analogous to heresy, is that a person will will posit a conspiracy theory and people will immediately say, no, that's just delusion. There must be something wrong with this person that they would believe in that in the first place, which he thinks is not at all true.
00:38:06
Speaker
So we're we're getting near to the end of the paper. um david john jimmy me bit button it was one of her last roles. there we go r i p madelin k a classic But anyway, so so so we David's beginning to wrap things up and brings up a point that we've seen made many times before, which is that if conspiracy theories are irrational, and plenty of them are, they're not irrational simply by virtue of being a conspiracy theory. And so if you dismiss a if you dismiss a theory on those grounds, you're making a mistake.
00:38:38
Speaker
And worse still, in David's words, when professional psychologists pathologize belief in conspiracy theories or conspiratorial ideation by treating them as a phenomena standing in need of psychological explanation, they can be engaged in a form of gaslighting, the manipulation of people into doubting their own sanity.
00:38:56
Speaker
So this is very much, um he's he's really, really hammering home the idea that that the treating conspiracy theories as a pejorative is is not just sort of irrational and and possibly indefensible, but is actually genuinely harmful.
00:39:11
Speaker
i don do people Do people often go this far with it? Or do they, a lot of the literature that ah that that I've seen has just been more along the, you know, this is this this is this is this is not a defensible position to take, but...
00:39:25
Speaker
How much do people talk about the potential harm? I almost feel as if David's making the classic psychologist versus psychiatrist distinction here, in that it is true that if psychologists pathologize belief in conspiracy theories, then they're producing a literature that says belief in conspiracy theories is bad.
00:39:47
Speaker
But they're not going around actually telling individual conspiracy theorists, you've got bad bullets. They're simply making a claim about a phenomenon that they see in the aggregate in the wild.
00:39:59
Speaker
It actually feels as if David is making that classic mistake of confusing a psychologist with a psychiatrist and going, well, look, if these psychiatrists In individual meetings with their clients, are then saying, if you believe a conspiracy theory, then obviously you're in need of psychiatric intervention.
00:40:20
Speaker
Then that's going to be a case of manipulating people who have warranted belief in conspiracy theories into doubting their own sanity. So I do wonder whether he's making a mistake here of kind of conflating the psychologist with someone in an armchair talking with an individual, or whether, once again, this is a bit of the hyperbole that we've seen throughout this particular paper.
00:40:44
Speaker
Yes, well, we now reach the conclusion of the paper, which has ah he's got ah got a bit of a sting in the tail here.
Conclusion: Eliminativism Argument
00:40:52
Speaker
He brings up his his his his own little sort of pet story,
00:40:56
Speaker
pet view right at the very end when he says, I have argued against the current pejorative use of the term conspiracy theory. What's the alternative? Broadly speaking, there are two options. First, we could retain the term without the pejorative connotations. This is the option that Charles Pigden takes, arguing that a conspiracy theory should be understood simply as a theory according to which a conspiracy has taken place, and that conspiracy theories should be evaluated on their merits like any other theory.
00:41:23
Speaker
While this would certainly be preferable to the current situation, I don't think stripping the term of its negative connotations is practically feasible. Furthermore, it's not clear to me that the term would serve any useful purpose after it was stripped of its negative connotations. Hence, I prefer another option, eliminativism.
00:41:38
Speaker
I've come to think that there is no such thing as a correct or even good definition of this term. I hold that we should stop using, as opposed to mentioning, this term altogether. It appears to do no good while doing considerable harm. Before the 1950s we got by without it, I see no reason we cannot learn to do so again.
00:41:56
Speaker
So first of all, we were using the term before the 1950s. It's attested all the way back to the end of the 19th century. So once again, David's just getting his history completely wrong here. But Josh...
00:42:12
Speaker
you've you're You're a cunning link a cunning linguist. It would be great if I could have just not stumbled over saying that and had a smooth delivery rather than mucking it up as I went along. But that's speechless fluency for
Language and Political Misuse
00:42:26
Speaker
you. yeah As someone one who knows more than the average Joe about linguistics, can academics change language? And even if we could, would that stop politicians from abusing the term?
00:42:40
Speaker
Well, I'd have to say I'm very doubtful. I mean, obviously, language has never stopped changing. Language change is constantly occurring. And language, I mean, usually it's fairly sort of organic. But, you know, there can be actual...
00:42:55
Speaker
It can can be led by campaigns. there There can be movements to change the meanings of certain words and certainly social pressure. I mean, one thing that I find very interesting is that in my lifetime, i have seen the the most taboo kind of language change from being profanity to being slurs.
00:43:14
Speaker
you know When I was a child, it was it was curse words were the rudest thing a person could say. And there were various sort various various slurs for homosexuality and mental illness and what have you, which were were always considered rude. They were they were never a sort of polite conversation, but they weren't considered taboo the way that swearing was. And yet now, its its its slurs are the words that ah have the most social stigma attached to them. And again, swearing is still not considered polite, but it's not considered nearly as bad.
00:43:44
Speaker
So we can see that sort of, you know, social pressures can can cause people to to stop using terms. Again, obviously, that the words all still exist in the English language. But I mean, that's that that tends to be more of a grassroots kind of a thing. it tends to have a lot of social or societal buy-in. And certainly something is as relatively niche as the use of the term conspiracy theory. I just don't see there being enough behind it to ever to to to to to sort of spread a change in the word out into the wider society. And certainly eliminating a term completely sounds more difficult than changing its meaning. If he thinks changing the meaning isn't feasible, I don't see how he can think that eliminating it is.
00:44:28
Speaker
Yeah, and if academics, for example, say, right, as a group, we're just no longer going to talk about conspiracy theories at all. Well, it's going to open up a whole wraith wreth whole swathe of opportunities.
00:44:43
Speaker
for politicians go, well, I know it's going to push back upon us using the term now. We can label everything we don't like as conspiracy theories. At least if academics are cognizant of the term and its power, they can at least step in and go, well, this doesn't seem like a conspiracy theory, or not all belief in conspiracy theories is bad. If we decide, oh, we're just not going to use that term anymore, then we actually...
00:45:10
Speaker
lose a weapon in our political arsenal to use against the abusive politician. So, yeah, I mean, overall, like I'd say we agree with the the vast majority of David's paper, but just sometimes I think he pushes a bit too hard and then he has his his own little pet theory, the pet pit idea at the end there, which doesn't sound doesn't sound practical to me, but at least I guess I can see where he's coming from.
00:45:38
Speaker
So um look at that. It's it's only been about 45 minutes. we We did actually have a short episode on the back of this short paper. Yeah, we only spent 10 minutes per page.
00:45:50
Speaker
It's a new record. e e So i think I think we should probably quit well quit while we we're ahead rather than getting sidetracked and and and blowing our time budget anyway. um So I think that's the end of this episode for now. Now,
00:46:04
Speaker
This will presumably be going up on YouTube again. that we've we've only We've only done one, when when I say we, I mean Em has only done one episode up on YouTube so far. And in that first one, for some reason, my video was, and like it it it it looked blurry. It looked like I was out of focus. I could imagine i could understand if if the the quality that got sent that that got sent out ended up not being good enough, but it didn't look like a low-quality video. It looked like an out-of-focus video, and I don't know why. so I'll be interested to see how it looks this time.
00:46:37
Speaker
Well, so I'm actually still fixated on the term time budget and thinking about whether A, we should say time budget like we say time cube, or whether we should be thinking time budget in the same way we think about time cop.
00:46:51
Speaker
Ooh, why not both? know. We say time cop the way we say time cube. I think everyone should, to be honest. Yes. There just should be a rule. If you're putting time in front of another word, then you have to do something with that other word.
00:47:05
Speaker
You really do. So yeah but we didn't actually say that there is Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy channel on YouTube. If you want to see YouTube versions of this, just search for the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. You should find the channel or you'll find my old videos, although in, of course, you have put up a whole bunch of our old episodes on that channel now. just without without actual video, just the audio with a with her graphic over top.
00:47:29
Speaker
Yeah. So that's there. if you if If you're into YouTube, I don't think most of you are, but but but but you've got that option. We like giving you options. You also have the option of becoming one of our patrons if you want. and if you are then you're about to get a bonus episode because we're going to go and record one now.
00:47:44
Speaker
And we're probably probably going to talk about Iran a bit because that's what's been going on. And it's been a few weeks since we've had a proper episode and haven't had a good chance to talk about it. And unfortunately, the war on Iran has been going on for a few weeks. Now, admittedly, there are other wars that have been going on for even longer, but we've talked about those in the past. So it's now time for us to get get up to date with Iran. Although the problem with getting up to date with Iran is that at time of recording...
00:48:12
Speaker
Trump's ultimatum for the ceasefire agreement must be signed by this particular time basically falls between this episode being recorded and that bonus episode being released. So whatever we're going to release is likely to be out of date by time of release. But yeah given the way that Trump's and administration works, anything we say about Iran is going to be out of date even before we record it.
00:48:41
Speaker
Yes. And one final point before we go. Now, we were able to record this video because, um as you said at the top, it's a holiday in China as well as in the Western world, um which means you don't have very loud, annoying building works going on, making it impossible for us to record. But that's they they're going to be coming back, aren't they?
00:49:00
Speaker
Yes, although hopefully the building work will be finished by the time of the next recording. But I have noticed that the little sign downstairs, which is there will be building works between these dates and these hours, They keep on erasing one date and then adding a date in the future. So in theory, in 14 days' time, the building works are meant to come to an end.
00:49:31
Speaker
Whether that's true, I don't know. But we will find a way around this. We'll find out. And you'll yeah you'll find out. If I have to stick up a a quick filler episode again, i will do that. Since I don't have... loud earthworks or drilling or whatever the heck is going on outside my window.
00:49:50
Speaker
But either way, you'll you'll you'll hear about it when we do, I guess. So until next episode, whenever that happens to be, i think I'll just say goodbye. and I will say Why not?
00:50:03
Speaker
why not
00:50:10
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy features Josh Addison and Associate Professor M.R. Extentis. Our producers are a mysterious cabal of conspirators known as Tom, Philip, and another who is so mysterious that they remain anonymous.
00:50:25
Speaker
You can contact us electronically via podcastconspiracy at gmail.com or join our Patreon and get access to our Discord server. Or don't, I'm not your mum
00:50:51
Speaker
And remember, the bird in the hand will probably pick you in the face. Leave birds alone.