Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T19:08:50.817Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

What's Epistemically Wrong with Conspiracy Theorising?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 November 2018

Keith Harris
Keith Harris*
Affiliation:
University of Missouri
*
[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Belief in conspiracy theories is often taken to be a paradigm of epistemic irrationality. Yet, as I argue in the first half of this paper, standard criticisms of conspiracy theorising fail to demonstrate that the practice is invariably irrational. Perhaps for this reason, many scholars have taken a relatively charitable attitude toward conspiracy theorists and conspiracy theorising in recent years. Still, it would be a mistake to conclude from the defence of conspiracy theorising offered here that belief in conspiracy theories is on an epistemic par with belief in other theories. I argue that a range of epistemic errors are pervasive among conspiracy theorists. First, the refusal of conspiracy theorists to accept the official account of some target event often seems to be due to the exercise of a probabilistic, and fallacious, extension of modus tollens. Additionally, conspiracy theorists tend to be inconsistent in their intellectual attention insofar as the effort they expend on uncovering the truth excludes attention to their own capacities for biased or otherwise erroneous reasoning. Finally, the scepticism with which conspiracy theorists tend to view common sources of information leaves little room for conspiracy theorists to attain positive warrant for their preferred explanations of target events.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 84: Harms and Wrongs in Epistemic Practice , November 2018 , pp. 235 - 257
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 These effects, including distrust of scientific authorities and the stoking of racial resentments, are emphasized by Sunstein, Cass R. and Vermeule, Adrian in ‘Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures’, Journal of Political Philosophy 17.2 (2009), 202–227CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 The stipulated definition owes much to Brian Keeley's definition of ‘unwarranted conspiracy theories’ in Keeley, Brian, ‘Of Conspiracy Theories’, in Conspiracy Theories: The Philosophical Debate, (ed.) Coady, David (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006), 45–60Google Scholar, as well as Susan Feldman's definition of ‘explanatory conspiracy theories’ in Feldman, Susan, ‘Counterfact Conspiracy Theories’, The International Journal of Applied Philosophy 25.1 (2011), 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Dentith, Matthew R. X., The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 123CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Dentith, The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories, 123.

5 Coady, David, What to Believe Now: Applying Epistemology to Contemporary Issues (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)Google Scholar.

6 Although the theory that the Earth is flat is not itself a claim about the correct explanation of some event, endorsement of the flat Earth theory will typically be attended by a host of conspiracy theories intended to explain recalcitrant data.

7 The suggestion that what counts as a conspiracy theory may vary across countries is explicitly criticized by Pidgen, Charles, ‘Conspiracy Theories and the Conventional Wisdom’, Episteme 4.2 (2007), 229Google Scholar. However, the absurd consequences that Pidgen associates with this view arise only on the supposition that belief in conspiracy theories is invariably irrational and so such criticism need not concern us here.

8 Keeley, ‘Of Conspiracy Theories’, 47.

9 Hume, David, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: 2nd Edition, Steinberg, Eric (ed.) (Cambridge: Hackett, 1993)Google Scholar.

10 Buenting, Joel and Taylor, Jason, ‘Conspiracy Theories and Fortuitous Data’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 40.4 (2010), 567–578CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Goertzel, Ted, ‘Belief in Conspiracy Theories,’ Political Psychology 15.4 (1994), 731–742CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Wood, Michael J., Douglas, Karen M. and Sutton, Robbie M., ‘Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories.’ Social Psychology and Personality Science 3.6 (2012), 767–773CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 This possibility is suggested by Cassam, Quassim, ‘Vice Epistemology’, The Monist 99.2 (2016), 159–180CrossRefGoogle Scholar and briefly suggested by Feldman, ‘Counterfact Conspiracy Theories’, 22.

14 Sosa, Ernest, A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Greco, John, Achieving Knowledge: A Virtue-Theoretic Account of Epistemic Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Zagzebski, Linda, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baehr, Jason, The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Baehr, The Inquiring Mind, 55.

17 Sosa, Ernest, Knowledge in Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 229CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Baehr, The Inquiring Mind, 55.

19 Axtell, Guy, ‘Epistemic Luck in Light of the Virtues’, in Fairweather, Abrol and Zagzebski, Linda (eds.), Virtue Epistemology: Essays on Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 162Google Scholar.

20 Clarke, Steve, ‘Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracy Theorizing’ in Coady, David (ed.), Conspiracy Theories: The Philosophical Debate, (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006), 77–92Google Scholar.

21 Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind.

22 Cassam, ’Vice Epistemology’.

23 Keeley, ‘Of Conspiracy Theories’, 55–56. Keeley's central response to the present objection to belief in conspiracy theories is that conspiracy theorists have good grounds for thinking that those individuals responsible for a given target event will attempt to cover it up by generating data that appears to conflict with the conspiracy theory. Keeley thus suggests that, while falsifiability is a reasonable criterion of goodness in the case of hypotheses in the natural sciences, the fact that conspiracy theories are unfalsifiable is not a strike against them. I concur with Keeley that the unfalsifiability of conspiracy theories is not enough to dismiss them. In what follows I argue that the sort of straightforward falsifiability at work in this objection is too much to expect of any theory, not just of conspiracy theories.

24 Keeley, ‘Of Conspiracy Theories’, 54.

25 Lakatos, Imre, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

26 Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, 4.

27 Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, 4.

28 Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, 48.

29 Clarke, ‘Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracy Theorizing’, 81.

30 Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, 49.

31 Clarke, ‘Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracy Theorizing’, 82.

32 Keeley, ‘Of Conspiracy Theories’, 55.

33 Coady, David, ‘Are Conspiracy Theorists Epistemically Irrational?’, Episteme, 4.2 (2007), 193–204CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dentith, The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories; Pidgen, Charles, ‘Complots of Mischief’, in Coady, David (ed.), Conspiracy Theories: The Philosophical Debate (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006), 139–166Google Scholar.

34 Keeley, ‘Of Conspiracy Theories’, 52.

35 van Prooijen, Jan-Willem, Douglas, Karen M. and de Inocencio, Clara, ‘Connecting the Dots: Illusory Pattern Perception Predicts Belief in Conspiracies and the Supernatural’, European Journal of Social Psychology 48.3 (2018), 320–335CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

36 Keeley, ‘Of Conspiracy Theories’, 53.

37 Keeley, ‘Of Conspiracy Theories’, 55.

38 Sober, Elliott, ‘Intelligent Design and Probability Reasoning’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 52.2 (2002), 65–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Brotherton, Rob, Suspicious Minds: Why we Believe Conspiracy Theories (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015)Google Scholar.

40 For more on the inability of many conspiracy theories to generate specific predictions, see Clarke, Steve, ‘Conspiracy Theories and the Internet: Controlled Demolition and Arrested Development’, Episteme 4.2 (2007), 167–180CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Sober, ‘Intelligent Design and Probability Reasoning’, 70–71.

42 For a thorough survey of experimental evidence of confirmation bias, see Nickerson, Raymond, ‘Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises’, Review of General Psychology 2.2 (1998), 175–220CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 Mößner, Nicola, ‘Trusting the Media? TV News as a Source of Knowledge’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 26.2 (2018), 205–220CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Cassam, ‘Vice Epistemology’, 172.

45 Note that it is consistent with conspiracy theorists exhibiting epistemic vice in a way that their counterparts do not that there might be other vices more prevalent among non-conspiracy theorists, as suggested by Pidgen, Charles in ‘Are Conspiracy Theorists Epistemically Vicious?’, in Lippert-Rasmussen, Kasper, Brownlee, Kimberly, and Coady, David (eds.), A Companion to Applied Philosophy (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), 120–132Google Scholar.

46 Descartes, René, Meditations on First Philosophy: with Selections from the Objections and Replies, Cottingham, John (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

47 Feldman raises a similar objection to what she calls ‘counterfact conspiracy theories’ in her ‘Counterfact Conspiracy Theories’, 20.

48 I am deeply indebted to the participants of the 2017 Harms and Wrongs in Epistemic Practice conference for their invaluable feedback on an early version of this paper. I owe additional thanks to the conference organizers and an anonymous referee for their thoughtful comments on later versions.