Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories
Conspiracies are usually revealed by leakers who are either members of the plots or people who are otherwise close to conspirators and know enough. The news is checked and published in newspapers and elsewhere — sooner or later.
Sometimes conspiracies are revealed by the investigative journalists independently of the leakers, but typically the investigations start only when there is already a clue, namely, a leak. Big organizations often have their own monitoring systems against corruption and plotting, and the state authorities should watch and double check that everything goes well. But everything does not always go well. Anti-corruption authorities, national health authorities, food safety authorities, medical agencies, patient safety agencies, environmental protection agencies, traffic control authorities, and radiation and nuclear safety authorities all reveal conspiracies — for instance, related to the origin of the (fake) food, or to the (wrong) construction materials used in nuclear plants, or the (misleading) information about emissions of cars. The state authorities are not infallible, and the scientific community and the public media should monitor their actions and statements, as well as possible. Still, conspiracies may go unnoticed, and some conspiracies are revealed only after a long period of time, if ever. Such revelations are usually made by historians or by people who confess their secret role in some operation that belongs to history. A striking feature related to the revelation of conspiracies is that they are seldom revealed by “conspiracy theorists,” although they are the only people who are explicitly interested in revealing conspiracies. If conspiracy theorists have any role in revealing conspiracies, it is that they provide others with a motivation to study further some political or economic issue.1What are conspiracy theories? One way to characterize them is to say that they are explanations of political events that have two key features:
A.
Conspiracy Criterion.They refer to (actual or alleged) conspiracies or plots.B. Conflict Criterion. They conflict with a received explanation of the same political event so that the relevant epistemic authorities, more or less unanimously, find the conspiracy claim strikingly implausible, after considering the claim.
A. Conspiracy Criterion. Conspiracy theories refer to conspiracies and plots. If an explanation of a political event does not refer to a conspiracy or a plot, it cannot be a conspiracy theory. Conspiracies can be done for good or bad reasons. To say that a group of people “conspired” is not to say that their secret cooperation was, all things considered, wrong. Operation Valkyrie was a conspiracy, but there are many who would say that the members of the plot that aimed to murder Hitler had an excellent moral justification for their plan. It seems clear that conspirators need not have “nefarious intentions” (Keeley 1999, 117; cf. Van Prooijen and Acker 2015, 753), although conspiracy theories tend to refer to vicious conspiracies. However, we can say that secret cooperative activities whose aims and nature conflict with the so-called positive morality (that reflects our de facto moral commitments) or with specific prima facie duties (e.g. a duty not to kill anyone) are usually called “conspiracies,” especially if the members of the cooperation have a certain position, and if the goal of their activities differs from the goal they are authorized to pursue. Conspiracies involve secret cooperation, but that does not mean that the conspirators must meet secretly. When a gang of criminals or terrorists commits a crime and some sort of deception is involved, people may talk about a conspiracy or a “terrorist plot.”
B. Conflict Criterion. An explanation that refers to a conspiracy as a prime cause of some political event is not a conspiracy theory if it is and has always been completely consistent with the shared opinion of the relevant epistemic authorities.
It is important to distinguish between conspiracy theories and ordinary conspiracy explanations. They both explain political events by referring to a conspiracy. History books are full of conspiracy explanations, but the books are not supposed to represent conspiracy theories. The difference between conspiracy explanations and conspiracy theories is that a conspiracy explanation is supported by the relevant epistemic authorities, while a typical conspiracy theory is not supported by them and would probably get much media attention were it shown to be true (cf. Keeley 1999, 116; Levy 2007, 187; Raikka 2018, 211). By epistemic authorities I refer to the knowledge-producing institutions that, among other things, reveal conspiracies (although it is certainly not their main task). Epistemic authorities thus include institutions as diverse as mainstream media, investigative journalists, various state authorities and agencies, the scientific community, professional historians and so on. Our reliance upon the expertise of others is very extensive and almost automatic. Although the epistemic authorities work imperfectly and make mistakes, they are still the main social institutions that we use in the acquisition of our beliefs. Their trustworthiness is a default stance in the formation of our beliefs (cf Coady 1992, 7; Adler 2002, 136; Fricker 2006, 225; Lehrer 2006, 145; Lackey 2011, 71). Of course, critical and rational people often doubt the information provided by the epistemic authorities, but the doubting is usually based on beliefs that are supported by the other views of the same authorities — and not, say, by the views of gurus or witches. In general, we know about the failures of epistemic authorities because they have produced information that helps us to notice the failures. Conspiracy theories do not get the status of being a “rival scientific theory,” or anything like that; instead, epistemic authorities consider them strikingly implausible.2Experts’ opinions often conflict with one another, and then lay persons may have a hard time in choosing between disagreeing experts (Goldman 2011, 116; Guerrero 2017, 181).
In these cases it may be advisable to leave the issue open, or use some external criteria to evaluate experts and their opinions — criteria such as how well an expert has done before and what the other experts in the same field think about her. Evidence of the expert’s interests and possible biases vis-a-vis the question at issue may also be important (Goldberg 2011, 105; Goldman 2011, 116; Ritola 2012, 675; Guerrero 2017, 169). In usual cases, a novice cannot make her judgment by evaluating relevant evidence directly, however good her “epistemic environment” happens to be. Conspiracy theorists sometimes argue that people should evaluate evidence themselves instead of passively accepting mainstream news and information provided by epistemic authorities. Unfortunately, in most cases, that requirement is too demanding, as we are ordinarily dependent on others’ opinions (although public participation in scientific research and citizen science provide examples that show that we are not completely dependent on experts, and that experts can be dependent on citizens).3These two defining features (A and B) of conspiracy theories allow us to ask whether conspiracy theories are plausible or implausible. There are many who think that conspiracy theories (that is, alternative explanations that refer to alleged conspiracies) can be rather plausible, given the amount of conspiracies in history (Basham 2003; Pigden 2007; Dentith 2018). However, it seems more natural to think that conspiracy theories are prima facie implausible. As far as we trust that, generally speaking, epistemic institutions work tolerably well, and that we are justified in acquiring our beliefs in the way we do, the suggestions inspired by conspiracy theories are not plausible. A belief in the existence of conspiracy is quite likely to be unjustified when many epistemic authorities, more or less independently of each other, assert that the plausible explanation for an event does not require postulation of a conspiracy. It is unlikely that someone else is able to identify and interpret the evidence more reliably than most of the experts, or that all the defenders of the non-conspiratorial explanation are simply liars. Badly corrupted and totalitarian societies aside, the claims characteristic to conspiracy theories rarely have good grounds. When epistemic authorities reject conspiracy theories they do so because the theories lack sufficient evidence and do not meet rational scrutiny. In this respect, conspiracy theories resemble forms of pseudoscience, such as climate science denialism and so-called alternative medicine (“Silver water is healthy”). The claims of pseudoscientists can be true, perhaps, but it is unlikely that they are.4
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