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Chapter 8 studies what we can do so that people do not fall into traps of trying to believe in conspiracy theories that resist falsification. Belief in conspiracy theories often starts by looking at important societal authorities and a certain amount of suspicion about these authorities. The chapter examines when conspiracy thinking feels so good that people exaggerate their levels of suspicion of what is actually going on in society. The chapter also explains how the online quality of our modern way of living tends to amplify levels of suspicion and the ease with which conspiracy theories are spread. The chapter distinguishes between three different motivations that often are equated with each other, yet that drive conspiracy thinking in different ways. One important motivation is epistemic and concerns people trying to make sense of what is going on in their world. Another important motivation is existential and concerns people trying to deal with threats in their life. Yet another motivation concerns group identification. This includes people wanting to belong to unique groups that give them a sense of belonging. The three motivations point out different ways of trying to intervene when people start falling for exaggerated suspicion and conspiracy thoughts.
This chapter sets the programme for building up a metaethics of belief from the unexplored angle of motivation. It introduces and transposes to epistemology three standard metaethical debates, internalism versus externalism about the connection between moral judgements and motivation; Humeanism versus anti-Humeanism about the nature of motivation; and cognitivism versus non-cognitivism about moral judgements. The chapter shows how the position on motivation affects the commitments in the higher, more metaphysical, realms of our metaethics of belief: in particular, it makes cognitivism about epistemic judgements prima facie plausible. It shows that loftier metaethical questions can be answered from a stance on motivation. As far as motivation goes, then, our metaethics of belief should be anti-Humean about the nature of epistemic motivation, and internalist about how epistemic judgements motivate us. Methodologically, the kind in question is one which builds itself up from theoretically lower-level commitments concerning motivation.
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