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Lee Basham is "Living with the Conspiracy"
29 Plays4 years ago
Join Josh and M for another episode of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre in which they review Lee Basham's 2001 paper, "Living with the Conspiracy."
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
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Transcript
Sinister Newspaper Discovery
00:00:16
Speaker
I remember it as if it were last week, for it were. I was sitting in my customary armchair at number 23 Rettlesfield Street when Lord Morrissey Morrissey stormed into the room and newspaper clenched in hand. Pluttles, have you seen this? I'd only started rooming with Morrissey a week prior and I was still becoming accustomed to his errant moods. It appears to be a newspaper, Morrissey.
00:00:36
Speaker
I have told you, pluddles, to not refer to me in such an informal manner. Sorry, Morrissey. Still, my point stands. Well, of course it's a newspaper. Have you seen page three? He thrusts the broad sheet in front of my face, causing my whiskers to twitch due to the smell of the cheap ink that Fleet Street rags relied upon. An advertisement for silk denier stockings? Most interesting. No, you fool, the other advertisement.
00:01:03
Speaker
I scanned the lines and then began reading them aloud, trying to discern whatever it was Morrissey was concerned with. What a strange advertisement, Morrissey. Strange? Strange? It's downright sinister, Puddles.
00:01:28
Speaker
Horsey's bookcases contained within them volumes which ranged from the history of invertebrates to the soothing power of whale song and the use of questioning suspects. He began to pull volumes of what seemed like random, throwing them onto my lab. That advertisement is confirmation of my worst fears, Puddles. I'm afraid your menial work at the post office will have to wait.
00:01:46
Speaker
We need to check our Rogers and verify a few geographical details. But if I am correct, this is the first proof positive of the recurrence of a dartedly conspiracy. One I thought had been put to bed at the end of the Stickle Affair.
00:02:02
Speaker
Although I had only been in Morrissey's company a short time, I knew enough of his history, even the bits that had not made the papers, to realise that anything to do with the former exchequer of the exchange and Morrissey's late companion could be nothing other than a rum doing. This would be a two pots of tea concern, so I rang the bell and settled down to work.
Introductions from New Zealand
00:02:28
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denteth. Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. In Auckland, New Zealand, I am Josh Addison, and in Hamilton, New Zealand, they are Dr. M. Denteth. Are you calling me from the vaulted halls of academia there?
00:02:52
Speaker
No, I'm calling you from the vaulted halls of my flat. I actually was planning to do the recording in the lounge, but actually my flatmate is still here. I thought he was returning back to Auckland this afternoon. So I've decided to relocate or decamp, as they say in the trade, to my bedroom. So I'm recording here in the parlor where I do my sleeping stuff.
Humor on Sleep and Whiskey
00:03:20
Speaker
that would be lying unconscious, drooling a little bit. Which is, when you think about it, a really weird thing that everyone of us does every day. We just, for some reason, decide the next eight hours, I'm just not going to be anywhere, which is why Billie Eilish said, when we sleep, where do we go? Because that's a good question.
00:03:40
Speaker
I mean, we know exactly where we go. We stay in one place. And then you go into REM sleep. There's a whole bunch of weird stuff going on there. There are drinks in your system that basically make you immobile, because otherwise you'd probably kill yourself by spasming during your dreams. I mean, really, it's a wild trip when you actually start looking at what's going on in the brain when we are dreaming. And that's why I drink whiskey, because those thoughts make me go, mmm, life is very complex. Only whiskey will make it better. Whiskey, it's the thought killer.
00:04:09
Speaker
But enough advertising for whisky for which we are not being paid. You're not being paid for advertising whisky. Son of a bitch.
Series on Conspiracy Literature Begins
00:04:16
Speaker
So we have for you this week another episode of conspiracy theory masterpiece theatre. So we began, if I recall, back in the mists of four weeks ago or something, six weeks, I don't know, time no longer has meaning. We've done two previous ones, which means that basically five weeks ago, we started this journey, this journey into a brave new world, Joshua.
00:04:38
Speaker
So we began with Papa Revisited by Charles Pigdon. We moved on to of conspiracy theories by Brian Alkely. And this week we look at Living with the Conspiracy by Lee Basham, which on my reading of it is kind of a reaction to Brian Alkely's one. So we've had our two seminal works. And now we're sort of getting into your commentary on the stuff, on the thesis and antithesis and all that philosophy business that I totally remember.
00:05:07
Speaker
You're not going to do some kind of seminal gag? Or what happens after the seminal work has been produced? I never
Lee Basham's Commentary on Conspiracy Theories
00:05:14
Speaker
gag on seminal matters. I mean, I see I was going to go with going to be sponging up the issues left behind by the two seminal papers. But you know, your gagging gag was very crude and not particularly gentlemanly, was indeed a well worth it moment in our podcast.
00:05:33
Speaker
It will probably go down as the third most important moment the podcast has ever had. Probably. So I think we should get straight into a look at Philosophy, Conspiracy Theory, Masterpiece Theatre in a grave and serious tone with none of our usual spunk.
00:05:54
Speaker
Right, so living with the conspiracy by Lee Basham, the Philosophical Forum, volume 32, number three, fall 2001. So I'm guessing... Yeah, fall would probably... In fact, it may fall in America, sort of August, September, isn't it?
00:06:13
Speaker
But I'm assuming he would have written it in advance of that. So yes, again, missed out by by that much the most conspiracy general theory generating event of recent time, but that's okay. And once again, I do have to ask what's with the lack of foresword foresword foresword? Where is it? What is with the lack of foresword and foresight, guys? I mean, really, you should have been able to predict there's actually no one could. That's kind of what made it such a no amazing.
00:06:42
Speaker
event in history and why there are so many conspiracy theories around it.
Pre-9/11 Conspiracy Theories
00:06:45
Speaker
So yes, this is another example of a pre-9-11 conspiracy theory paper in philosophy, and the abstract goes something like this. What if you're told that select Freemasons in a consortium of satellite groups are the secret masters of the planet?
00:07:01
Speaker
What if you're showing that if this is true, the history of Western civilization down to minute details becomes an illuminated path, an incredibly clear cogent chronology? All it takes is a cognitive cliff dive into the dark, spooky waters of conspiracy theory. But few of us will go near that cliff.
00:07:23
Speaker
Even fuel will step to the edge and pare down at the abyss. Only very few step into the air and take the plunge.
Philosophical Skepticism and Epistemology
00:07:31
Speaker
This is surprising. Why is contemporary conspiracy theory with its seductive promise of hidden knowledge and genuine understanding the notorious exception in human belief rather than the norm?
00:07:46
Speaker
The temptation is obvious. Why the commonplace refusal, which is so complete as to suggest that many of us think the cliff dive isn't even a rational option? As recent obsessed philosophers, we probably assume the answer lies in rational epistemology. We likely believe it's an easy task to show most conspiracy theories are utterly unwarranted. But is it?
00:08:11
Speaker
Which is interesting right off the bat, because the general tone, I think, of Charles Pigton and Brian L. Keeley's papers before it was sort of, why do people believe in these conspiracy theories, these wacky things, and then go on to say why exactly what's wrong with them? Whereas this kind of starts on the other way, why don't more people believe in conspiracy theories?
00:08:34
Speaker
which I guess sets the tone for the rest of the paper really, which goes into mentions of conspiracy theories in the, let's see, third paragraph straight into it, but looks a little kind of different. It's not beating around the bush when it comes to Lee's work.
Oklahoma City Bombing Theories
00:08:51
Speaker
So establish itself fairly early on as a commentary on the paper of conspiracy theories that we looked at last time. And so because of conspiracy theories, it starts with a good long look at the Oklahoma City bombing, which is sort of the test case in that one, the exemplar. This paper also does the same and basically gives a recap really. We probably don't need to go into it given that we've talked about it.
00:09:17
Speaker
when we talked about of conspiracy theories and we talked about a few weeks before that when we talked about the actual Oklahoma City bombing.
00:09:23
Speaker
So it goes through all of that business and basically sets out the ground that we're familiar with already. In particular, the fact that there are these errant facts about it, things which either are not accounted for by the official narrative or which potentially contradict the official narrative.
00:09:51
Speaker
and he sort of points out these things exist and what do we do about them. But he carries on. Am I rushing through this too fast? The beginning of it seemed to be largely sort of a restatement of conspiracy theories and picking out the bits he's interested in before he gets into his particular opinion on it. Is there anything that needs to be said in particular about those early sections?
00:10:17
Speaker
Well, I mean, you haven't asked the question you asked with respect to the first two papers, which is, say a little bit about the author. Oh, of course. How remiss of me. Yes, OK, before we continue, now we've heard the voice of Lee Basham. We've indeed seen the face of Lee Basham if you watch the YouTube version of these ones and end this last interview with him. But yes, tell us a little bit about Lee.
00:10:38
Speaker
So Lee is a philosopher at South Texas College in Texas, which is part of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. I think the valley is part of it. It's definitely Rio Grande, which is a large research institution down in South Texas. I have shared a bedroom with Lee on many an occasion. No hanky-panky was engaged in, but we had spent time at conferences together and shared digs. So I've been in Miami with him.
00:11:07
Speaker
I've been in Taku with him. I've been in Bamberg with him. I mean, frankly, I've been all around the world with this particular wacky guy doing my Steve Martin reference there. And he's a quality philosopher writing on conspiracy theory, as this paper kind of points out. He's the third modern philosopher to deal with the topic of conspiracy theory.
00:11:32
Speaker
in a kind of serious appraisal of what is wrong or what is right with conspiracy theory, both generally and with respect to particular cases. And probably along with me is the most published philosopher on conspiracy theory. Lee and I have both written an awful lot of papers. Indeed, one of the papers we'll be looking at next
00:11:55
Speaker
is another paper by the aforementioned Lee Basham. It's either going to be the next paper or the paper after Nick. So we'll be encountering his work an awful lot in the series of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre papers.
Critique of Brian Keeley's Views
00:12:10
Speaker
Right, so yes, I was rushing things too fast. I'd forgotten the most important bit of introduction at the very beginning.
00:12:16
Speaker
That aside, so he does establish this paper as a reaction to slash commentary on Brian Elkely's paper that came before it. He talks about how in all conspiracy theories, Brian Kely talks about why conspiracy theories are popular and yet to quote Brian Elkely, epistemically unwarranted,
00:12:41
Speaker
Yes, and indeed, Lee takes it that Brian's article was probably the most articulate and compelling diagnosis of why these theories are popular, but also problematic. Indeed, he actually goes on to then describe Keeley's project as one of explicating why we should reject most conspiratorial explanations of morally, culturally, and politically momentous events, and instead place our confidence in the official story.
00:13:11
Speaker
Now what's interesting about this, and I am also guilty of this particular error, although actually I don't think Lee thinks this is an error or not, so this is a difference of opinion between Lee and myself. I think Lee, and by extension myself in my own work,
00:13:27
Speaker
kind of gets Brian wrong here, because it is true within the last section of conspiracy theories. Brian does seem to talk quite generally about the popularity of conspiracy theories, and also why people who believe in them believe in a kind of ordered world, which is not one that we should actually respect given our understanding of politics and the like. But I actually think that Brian's analysis in the first two-thirds of the paper
00:13:56
Speaker
squares his analysis quite centrally on mature unwarranted conspiracy theories. And charitably, we have to assume that when he's talking about the popularity of such theories, he's talking about the popularity of mature conspiracy theories which are unwarranted,
00:14:13
Speaker
rather than conspiracy theories, generally. So I think that Lee gets Brian Rong here, and I also think I got Brian Rong here when I wrote a similar analysis in my PhD thesis, and also my book, The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories.
Agnosticism and Human Fallibility
00:14:30
Speaker
If I will now, from Pelgrave McCullough, probably, or is that the other one?
00:14:33
Speaker
No, no, no. I think I'm available now from Palgrave and Millan. It's very expensive. Well, it's another true statement. Yes. So he continues to summarize.
00:14:47
Speaker
what we talked about last time in terms of explanatory completeness, the fact that conspiracy theories promote themselves above the official narrative in many ways because they are more explanatory of the events. They account for more of the data and
00:15:05
Speaker
in the novel conspiracy theories that are applied to that was, yeah, that's actually suspicious because in any set of data, some of it's just going to be wrong. And so if something manages to account for all of it, it's probably not actually that that's evidence against it. Yeah, there's a kind of tension between
00:15:23
Speaker
an explanation being fulsome and an explanation being overly complete. So you want your explanations to explain a lot and account for a lot of data. The worry is if the explanation accounts for all of the data
00:15:40
Speaker
then you're looking at an explanation that might be post facto. It's been constructed to take all the data into account. Because normally, particularly when we're dealing with explanations in the social sciences and the humanities, where we're dealing with actions by human beings,
00:15:57
Speaker
explanation should be fuzzy. So I mean it's true that if you've got an explanation in the sciences which is more explanatory complete than another one, then that is ground to have a preference for that particular explanation. Although it still could be a post-factor one where people have designed an explanation to cover all points. But when you're dealing with an explanation of human activity,
00:16:21
Speaker
If it suddenly explains things like the choice of the colour of the socks the president wore on the day he died, then that explanation is probably something which you should be looking at slightly as scouts by going, yeah, but why is it explaining that? That doesn't seem relevant. So completeness is important, but you also want to be able to make some claim about the completeness being relevant to the thing you're trying to explain.
00:16:50
Speaker
And then he goes on and mentions the business around unfalsifiability. And he agrees that Brian O'Kelley is right to say unfalsifiability isn't actually a problem in conspiracy theories, maybe in science.
Tactical Deception in Human Actions
00:17:07
Speaker
It's a problem if your theory is unfalsifiable. But again, when we're in sort of in the social sphere, when we're talking about things involving those pesky human beings, and especially when we're investigating things where part of the very nature of it is that people are going to be actively concealing things from you, unfalsifiability isn't necessarily a problem. I think I come with it in this paper of conspiracy theories. They point that in science,
00:17:36
Speaker
the objects of your study are not actively concealing themselves from you. I guess that's the point that's made by Keeley and of conspiracy theories. I mean, Lee does push this point rather well. One of the things which is interesting about studying humans is that we engage in tactical deception. So we don't just lie from time to time. We often lie to achieve particular ends.
00:18:04
Speaker
So, and we know that. We know that from dealing with family members. We know about that with dealing with colleagues at work. And if we're unlucky, we know about that when dealing with friends every so often. People will go, I need to achieve some particular end, which is for you to do something.
00:18:24
Speaker
or for you to not find out something about what I've done. So I am going to deceive you and you do it tactically. You're going to do it for a particular rationale and you're going to do it in a rather interesting way. And once we admit that actually tactical deception is a natural part of human activity,
00:18:44
Speaker
Now, there's a good question as to how common this is. But if it's a part of human activity, then it doesn't seem particularly weird to think that actually people are lying to us quite a lot of the time. And in some cases, groups of people will be lying to us quite a bit of the time. And that sounds an awful lot like conspiracy. It sure does. Now,
00:19:10
Speaker
After sort of a summary of conspiracy theories, which is basically sort of a restatement in most cases, a wholehearted agreement with the message of that paper, he starts to disagree, basically. The section called The Critical Mistake of Unwarranted Conspiracy Theories, he talks about how, if you recall,
Skepticism Towards Public Institutions
00:19:37
Speaker
In conspiracy theories, Brian says that the real problem with this sort of unwarranted conspiracy theory is that you end up becoming too skeptical as the more the conspiracy theory grows, the more you're required to doubt in order to continue holding to it.
00:19:57
Speaker
you eventually become skeptical of pretty much anything. We see this in your Flat Earth conspiracy theories, where people will actually doubt the laws of physics themselves and what have you. This is possibly an exaggeration and an overstatement. My impression of the paper is that it seemed to be sort of
00:20:21
Speaker
painting of conspiracies as a slightly sort of Pollyanna-ish rosy view of society that says, no, no, you should just trust in the world and not be skeptical about everything. And then the paper goes on to show, well, actually, there's lots and lots about the world that we shouldn't trust and it's full of deceit and deception and so on.
00:20:40
Speaker
I'm not sure if I'm entirely doing justice to it there, but that was the impression I got. And certainly his restatement of conspiracy theory talks about the problem is that you end up being too skeptical. This paper states it as, he's saying you should believe in the public trust. Am I getting that right?
00:21:01
Speaker
Yes, so Lee takes it that Brian's approach is the best articulation or what he calls the public trust approach towards conspiracy theory, which is the reason to be skeptical of conspiracy theories is that we should trust in authority. So he kind of states,
Trust in Authorities Amidst Conspiracies
00:21:20
Speaker
an appeal to trust in the public's ability to discover the truth, that is an appeal to public trust, the trust we have in public mechanisms of information to uncover the deceit and lies that a conspiracy needs to
00:21:31
Speaker
to exist. This is the argument for public trust, and Lee is very much of the opinion that actually this is a naive appeal to authority, given how much we know about the existence of conspiracies historically, and what we also know about human nature. Such an appeal to the public trust is going to be a bad one, it's going to lead us down the wrong path.
00:22:00
Speaker
And so he takes it that Keeley is kind of committed to advocating public trust. Now, I don't agree. Once again, I think that Lee and I have got Brian wrong on this particular respect. I think that Brian's interest is in mature, unwarranted conspiracy theories. Certainly the work that I co-authored with Brian a few years ago in the Rutledge Handbook of Applied Epistemology,
00:22:29
Speaker
Brian at least doesn't have this view anymore. But yes, Lee does push a particular issue. Now I should point out, it's actually kind of irrelevant as to whether we've got Brian right or wrong here. We should be analyzing the kind of argument that Lee puts forward for why the public trust approach is bad, regardless of whether it refers to Brian's work, because it certainly is the case
00:22:53
Speaker
even if we disregard Keeley's work, that there are people in the wider literature, I'm thinking particularly in social psychology, who do seem to put forward the if a scientist says it, you must believe it, or even if a political authority says it, you ought to believe it as well.
00:23:13
Speaker
And so there are people going, well, look, the problem with conspiracy theories is they counter what authorities tell us. If authorities tell us things, we should believe them because otherwise we're going to be stuck in a mire of skepticism everywhere. And that does seem like an epistemically poor choice to make if you want to reason through the kind of world that we actually live in.
00:23:37
Speaker
Yeah. And so in this paper, Lee talks about stuff that we've talked about at length many times on this podcast, the fact that conspiracies do occur everywhere.
Conspiracies in Business and Politics
00:23:50
Speaker
The business world is full of them. The political world is full of them. Low grade versions of them happen in everyday life between private individuals all the time. So to say that
00:24:01
Speaker
You shouldn't believe in conspiracy theories because you can trust in the public to arrive at the truth, kind of ignores a large amount of public life.
00:24:16
Speaker
Yeah, indeed, he states this. The real issue haunting us is what a relatively conspiracy free society that we would be well justified in believing is relatively conspiracy free would look like. One thing is clear, it would not look like ours, whatever the truth about our society is. So Lee's point is,
00:24:39
Speaker
If we actually want to make judgments about the prior probability of conspiracy, we have to have some kind of judgment about how conspired our society is here and now. And no matter what we believe about our society's here and now, we cannot be sure that conspiracies are not occurring around us as we speak. We have no confidence in the belief that people don't conspire in the here and now.
00:25:09
Speaker
And our judgments have to take that kind of thing into account when we start judging the warrant of particular conspiracy theories that we encounter on a day-to-day basis.
00:25:20
Speaker
So there's a lot to this. I'm thinking about what I want to say, and I'm finding myself boiling it down to a few short sentences when, in fact, there's a lot of good, reasoned pages and pages of stuff behind it. But basically, that's where we arrive at. If you're trying to say that the problem with conspiracy theories is that they require us to give up trust, to give up this public trust when, in fact,
00:25:49
Speaker
everything we know about society says that we probably shouldn't actually trust what we hear. So then what? It's still like, up until this, as I was reading through it, up until this point, it kind of seemed to be very much
00:26:05
Speaker
in defense of conspiracy theories, I guess, the previous of conspiracy theories and Papa Revisited seem to very much start from the position, okay, well, we know we've got these conspiracy theories that are rubbish. They're just silly, they're nonsense, but why? Why do people believe them when they are nonsense, but why are they actually nonsense? Whereas this seems to come out from the other angle, that conspiracy theories, it's entirely reasonable to believe in them.
00:26:31
Speaker
And then he ends up with what, to my reading, is the sort of particularist view that we've talked about a lot before. When he talks about why, so what is it that would cause us to be skeptical of a conspiracy theory?
00:26:47
Speaker
He starts talking about, we ought to be skeptical of conspiracy theories when they suffer various internal faults. These include problems with self-consistency, explanatory gaps, appeals to unlikely or obviously weak motives, and other unrealistic psychological states, poor technological claims, and the theory's own incongruencies with observed facts it grants, including failed predictions. And certainly we can think about lots of conspiracies there. I mean, good old QAnon has a
00:27:12
Speaker
good record and failed predictions. Your 9-11 ones that rely on the existence of cloaking technology or Star Wars laser beams or hologrammatic planes. Did I say hologrammatic planes as opposed to hologramatic planes?
00:27:33
Speaker
or hologram. I suppose it would be hologramatic. It's just hologramatic sounds to fit some kind of weird technological spell checking thing. Oh yes, I ran the hologramatic sticker over the article and it's covered three misplaced semicolons. So yes, as
00:27:52
Speaker
sort of as I read over this bit it then sounds like okay hang on this this is starting to sound familiar we're basically the the if I'm reading it correctly and do correct me if I'm wrong the point of it turns out to be well no there's nothing about conspiracy theories in general that means they're unreasonable you have to but you can show a particular conspiracy theory to be unreasonable by evaluating it on its merits which sounds awfully familiar
00:28:19
Speaker
Yes, and indeed, when we get to the Buting and Taylor paper on particularism versus generalism, we'll kind of see suddenly two authors who have never reappeared in a literature at all, actually giving a name to something which was kind of being argued quite explicitly by Lee, but also arguably being argued by Pigdon and Keeley as well.
00:28:48
Speaker
which is we need to be dealing with conspiracy theories on the particulars of the evidence, rather than dismissing them merely because of these general claims about the class of these things called conspiracy theories. So Lee is putting forward a very explicit particular agenda, he just isn't using that particular term,
00:29:11
Speaker
because that term has yet to be co-opted from the ethical literature by two other authors whose work we will see in short records. And he does make a good point about the whole Oklahoma City bombing example, which is that
00:29:31
Speaker
Oh, actually, let's quote the paper. It's revealing that Keighley never explicitly tells us at what point the BATF, Mar a Bombing Conspiracy Theory, becomes unwarranted by his lights. At what point are public institutions of information brought into too great suspicion by it? We never told how to draw the line. We can't say either. But we know why the ultimate danger of these nature of these institutions is largely beyond our kin. So yes, that is a
00:29:55
Speaker
It is an interesting point, if you're saying the problem with these theories is that you end up becoming too sceptical, well what exactly is too sceptical?
00:30:04
Speaker
And I think this is a particular problem with Keeley's paper with respect to the Oklahoma City bombing, because there isn't actually that much time between the publication of the paper and the event in question. Surely if you're worried about maturity, you're actually talking about quite a long period of time, and that's what Lee points out. It's a very vague metric what makes a conspiracy theory mature with respect to its unwarranted claims.
00:30:30
Speaker
I mean, it'd be much more interesting to make these claims about, say, 9-11 now, given that 9-11 was, and I hate to remind you, back in 2001. It's 19 years ago, folks. Almost. Almost. Almost. And you might well go, well...
00:30:50
Speaker
Let's just say that the proof positive that 9-11 was a inside job, either mihop or lihop, doesn't appear to be
00:31:02
Speaker
exactly the case at this particular point in time, at which point you might go, there does seem to be a lengthy period of time of no new evidence showing the conspiracy to be true. So you then might go, that would be the perfect thing to put your analysis of the mature unwarranted conspiracy theory upon, an example which is almost 19 years of age.
00:31:26
Speaker
And admittedly, it does seem the numbers indicate that it's kind of stables to whether people believe nine levels are inside job or not. But it's a much better example now than the Oklahoma City bombing was at the time Brian wrote his paper. And so then my eyes lit up, as I read the next section, because when it started to work, so what should we do about it? We get a section entitled agnosticism about the conspiracy.
00:31:52
Speaker
Now, when I was a young man full of piss and vinegar doing my Master of Arts at the University of Auckland, I did a dissertation in philosophy on epistemological fallibilism and used agnosticism as an example of it. So I was like, oh,
00:32:09
Speaker
This is almost maybe something that I might know about, but basically sort of seems to be suggesting that we be agnostic about conspiracy theories, which again, basically ties in with the particularist view when you see a particular conspiracy theory until you have warrant one way or another, possibly best to reserve judgment.
00:32:33
Speaker
So Josh, explain to our illustrious audience what agnosticism is, given that you've written on what agnosticism actually is, as opposed to possibly what some people take it to be from the commonplace understanding.
00:32:48
Speaker
Well, as also a linguistic student, I probably have to preface it by saying that usage determines meaning, so whatever the common conception of it is, is probably closer to what the word means these days. But agnosticism is a term that was invented by Thomas Henry Huxley, who was Charles Darwin's right-hand man.
00:33:09
Speaker
And indeed, apparently, he was sort of the most vocal proponent of Darwin's views. Darwin, from what I gather, was a bit more shy and retiring. But Huxley had this thunderous voice and would give these rousing dissertations promoting these views. But he also wrote about
00:33:24
Speaker
the term agnosticism. And although he doesn't say as much, when he talks about it, it's very clear that he's talking about a particular kind of fallibilistic belief, the idea that we humans are flawed, we are fallible, which means that anything we hold on, any belief we hold on to, we have to at least acknowledge the possibility that we might be wrong about it.
00:33:51
Speaker
So it's not quite skepticism, it doesn't say knowledge is impossible, it doesn't say we can't ever arrive at knowledge, but it does kind of say that
00:34:03
Speaker
Even if we do arrive at knowledge, we can never be quite certain that it may turn out the thing we believe is 100% true, but we can never be 100% sure that the thing is 100% true. And then he in particular applies this to a religious sphere and essentially says, yeah, humans are flawed, so we can't say with certain either way. These days, agnostic just kind of means, I'm not really sure.
00:34:29
Speaker
and often you sort of see agnostic often in more religious communities when a person says they're agnostic what they really mean is they're an atheist but they just don't want to admit it to the rest of their community but essentially yeah it's just acknowledge that we don't and indeed can't know everything because we're just humans with our puny little three-dimensional brains and so with that and I guess the other thing to point out is that this is not a
00:34:55
Speaker
This is a rule of thumb in papers on the subject. It's referred to as being similar to Occam's Razor, so not an absolute rule, but just a maxim that we should guide ourselves by. Why am I talking about this again?
Agnostic Approach to Conspiracy Theories
00:35:07
Speaker
Just because I can? Because we're relating it back to the agnosticism towards conspiracy theory. Right, well there we go. So because we know what we don't know,
00:35:16
Speaker
We know that when we see something- You're sounding a little bit like Donald Rumsfeld. A little bit. I am coming over a bit Rumsfeld, I'm afraid. But because we acknowledge our infallibility, when we see a conspiracy theory, we have to say, well, I don't have enough at the moment to know whether or not this is true. So I just have to accept that fact. And then as time goes by, it might become more and more warranted or more and more unwarranted.
00:35:43
Speaker
But the good agnostic would acknowledge it, no matter how certain it seems, there's always that niggling little possibility that maybe it'll turn out one way or the other. And that's agnosticism. Hooray. Hooray for agnosticism, and hooray for agnosticism towards conspiracy theorems. Hooray for Pocoyo. Have you watched Pocoyo?
00:36:00
Speaker
No, I have not. What is Pacquiao? It's a, I think, originally Spanish animated kids show with that little kid called Pacquiao. The English version is narrated by Stephen Fry, and every episode ends with hooray for whatever it is they've been talking about. Hooray for Pacquiao. So I can't hear the words. And my children obviously watch this show a lot, and I can no longer hear hooray for something without immediately wanting to reply hooray for Pacquiao.
00:36:25
Speaker
Sometimes I think the way you talk about your children, you treat them like Pavlov's dog. I treat them, they're a good excuse to expose myself to other kinds of pop culture. Don't say expose yourself to other children, because that will just be wrong. Right now, actually, not right now, because they've gone to bed, but before I began recording this podcast, they were watching a new show on Netflix. Were you ever into your WWE?
00:36:49
Speaker
Not really. You don't know The Big Show? No. A very large wrestler is now the lovable dad in a family sitcom called The Big Show, which I didn't know until today.
00:37:03
Speaker
Well, I feel as if I've learnt absolutely nothing from that little titbit, given I didn't know anything about in the first place, and now I'm going, you've given me a reference to hang something on, and I don't know what that reference is. Nice. Well done, sir. Well done. So anyway, we are, as is our want getting distracted by pop culture diversion, which probably means we're near the end of the episode, and indeed we're near the end of the paper.
00:37:26
Speaker
So the paper runs out, the paper of course being called Living with the Conspiracy. The final section of it is how to live with the conspiracy. How should we live with the conspiracy?
00:37:39
Speaker
Well, Lee argues thusly, a more solid ground for the rejection of conspiracy theories is simply pragmatic. There is nothing you can do. So essentially it's just to, it almost seems just to sort of shrug and accept it really. Conspiracy theories exist, get used to it.
00:37:59
Speaker
And
Living with Conspiracy Theories Pragmatically
00:38:00
Speaker
that doesn't preclude, of course, investigating and finding out whether it's more or less warranted. But that's pretty much all you can say on first blush, which to begin with, when I first read through this paper,
00:38:13
Speaker
It reminded me a little bit, actually, of conspiracy theories that spend most of their time bagging the official version and then don't have much to say at the end about to promote their own view of things. It seemed to be a lot of criticising of conspiracy theories, but then not a lot at the end. But then as I read through it again, though I actually know it is...
00:38:30
Speaker
It is really putting forward that particularist idea, and it's not just a shrug at the end. It's an acknowledgement of our fallible nature and putting forward a good way forwards of analyzing conspiracy theories.
00:38:47
Speaker
And I think we need to realize in the historical context this paper was published. This was essentially from the looks of it, not now, but the time then. It did look like trying to push a boulder up the mountain. This was basically going, look, most of you think conspiracy theories are bad. I'm actually going to argue that they're not just not bad. In some cases, they actually might be good.
00:39:14
Speaker
And so it's written in a way which is both meant to appeal to people who have read the earlier papers and agree with some of the sentiment, whilst actually being a bit subversive by putting forward something completely new in the literature.
00:39:30
Speaker
And so I mean, in retrospect, it does seem a bit weird now. But at the time, it was a groundbreaking piece of work. Context turns out to be king. Sure does. Yes. So another very interesting paper there, I think. And it is it's becoming interesting to see how the field of conspiracy theory theorizing has has started to evolve. But there's plenty more where that came from, I gather.
00:39:55
Speaker
Oh, yes. I mean, when I wrote my PhD back in 2012, there really weren't that many papers at all. But my, my there's been an explosion. I've been part of that explosion. I've been I've been exploding like everyone else in this literature. So there'll be a lot to see. And we do have to confront the issue of what happens when you start finding my papers. I've got a kind of plan, but we'll have to see whether it works out. So we've got a little ways to go till then.
00:40:22
Speaker
We have indeed. But before then, we've got some bonus content for our patrons. And my, what a grab bag of conspiracy nuggets we've got this week. We've got some local news about a national MP who's really quite concerned about road signage. We have some international news where it turns out that Twitter is finally doing fact checks against the President of the United States of America.
00:40:49
Speaker
and that hasn't worked out particularly well. We discovered that the US is actually funding COVID-9 disinformation overseas. We'll learn a little bit about a USB stick that apparently prevents COVID-19. We'll discover that hydroxychloroquine actually might be back on the menu as a viable treatment for COVID-19.
00:41:13
Speaker
There's an interesting little thing we have to kind of say about those riots going on in the US, which I guess we can't really ignore, but at the same time, it almost seems too soon. And a little bit about how our local police minister actually turns out to be a bit of a dick.
00:41:33
Speaker
in relation to the aforementioned riots. But that's all coming up in the bonus episode for our patrons. If you'd like to become one of our patrons and are not currently, you can go to the trayon and search for the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. And I think that that is all we have to say to you in this regular episode of the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy today. But next week,
00:41:56
Speaker
Who knows what excitement we'll have. Well, we probably have a good idea, but you will find out when you get there and we'll all get there very soon. But until then, goodbye. Murder, she wrote.
00:42:16
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:43:17
Speaker
And remember, it's just a step to the left.