The Definition According to the Social Sciences
Within the last four years or so, the academic interest in conspiracy theories, conspiracism, alternative medicine beliefs, and pseudoscientific beliefs has gained a lot of ground. I can speculate as to why this trend exists, but it would only be speculation. The first is the resurgence of the flat earth movement which is a pseudoscientific meta-conspiracy theory. That gained news coverage because it's so abjectly ridiculous that it easily makes for a puff piece in the 24 hour news cycle. The fact that it was endorsed by semi-famous people in the music world, and famous people in the basketball world gave it a popular interest in the crazy thing that some people believed. The second, was that facebook had finally reached everyone, and while we can again speculate as to who was pushing the conspiracy theories--that is irrelevant because regular people shared them all over the place. The third is probably predictable--the current US president who has endorsed Alex Jones, 9/11 conspiracy theories, birtherism, and anti-vaccination theories.
Nevertheless, the academic interest is now present in what was once a niche field that saw a few papers published a year. There are two directions the academic investigations go in: the first is philosophical in which the conversation is about epistemic status of theories, the beliefs therein, and some demarcation issues between when these conspiracy theories become regular theories. We've discussed this issue before and will again. This post is about the problem of academic papers on the subject in the social sciences (psychology, sociology, etc.).
Every paper on the subject has to do one thing first, and that is define the term in order to establish a foundation for their investigation. A good number of my posts for this blog have dealt with the issue of making such a definition, but one thing that the social sciences seems to need to do for their definitions is add a truth value to the conspiracy theories. For instance Swami et. al (Swami 2014) define them as, "A subset of false beliefs in which the ultimate cause of an event is believed to be due to a plot by multiple actors working together with a clear goal in mind, often unlawfully and in secret." Hunemann and Vorns calls the theorists mentally flawed in their adherence (Hunemann and Vorns 2018), while Brotherton and French (2015) refrain from calling them false, but then build into their definition every estimation by which we consider them false.
I want to be clear on this: I don't feel that the social sciences are doing this because they are being incompetent or malicious. However it's not a mistake either. What is happening here, is that these academics are driving at a different goal than my colleagues in philosophy. The social sciences are more interested in why people adhere to conspiracy theories, what that does to them mentally, and how they act on their adherence. In order to do that, they've picked the theories that are patently conspiracy theories and have been thoroughly debunked. In doing this they've set aside the gray area theories that seem, at most, plausible if unsupported--and picked the ones that are implausible bordering on impossible. A person that holds the belief that the Tuskegee syphilis study was a plot by the US government to infect African Americans with syphilis may not be a conspiracy theorist, they may just have a misunderstanding of history. While a person that believes former president Barak Obama was born in Kenya is definitely a conspiracy theorist.
For their purposes it much easier to arrive at a conclusion of a study by taking the latter rather than the former. This is because it saves time in parsing out the person with a mistaken view of an experiment (which was a horrible program do not get me wrong here) from the person that they want to study. Social science definitions ought to be considered, but in order to be clear on what a conspiracy theory is or what a conspiracist is, we ought to be looking elsewhere for that information.
Nevertheless, the academic interest is now present in what was once a niche field that saw a few papers published a year. There are two directions the academic investigations go in: the first is philosophical in which the conversation is about epistemic status of theories, the beliefs therein, and some demarcation issues between when these conspiracy theories become regular theories. We've discussed this issue before and will again. This post is about the problem of academic papers on the subject in the social sciences (psychology, sociology, etc.).
Every paper on the subject has to do one thing first, and that is define the term in order to establish a foundation for their investigation. A good number of my posts for this blog have dealt with the issue of making such a definition, but one thing that the social sciences seems to need to do for their definitions is add a truth value to the conspiracy theories. For instance Swami et. al (Swami 2014) define them as, "A subset of false beliefs in which the ultimate cause of an event is believed to be due to a plot by multiple actors working together with a clear goal in mind, often unlawfully and in secret." Hunemann and Vorns calls the theorists mentally flawed in their adherence (Hunemann and Vorns 2018), while Brotherton and French (2015) refrain from calling them false, but then build into their definition every estimation by which we consider them false.
I want to be clear on this: I don't feel that the social sciences are doing this because they are being incompetent or malicious. However it's not a mistake either. What is happening here, is that these academics are driving at a different goal than my colleagues in philosophy. The social sciences are more interested in why people adhere to conspiracy theories, what that does to them mentally, and how they act on their adherence. In order to do that, they've picked the theories that are patently conspiracy theories and have been thoroughly debunked. In doing this they've set aside the gray area theories that seem, at most, plausible if unsupported--and picked the ones that are implausible bordering on impossible. A person that holds the belief that the Tuskegee syphilis study was a plot by the US government to infect African Americans with syphilis may not be a conspiracy theorist, they may just have a misunderstanding of history. While a person that believes former president Barak Obama was born in Kenya is definitely a conspiracy theorist.
For their purposes it much easier to arrive at a conclusion of a study by taking the latter rather than the former. This is because it saves time in parsing out the person with a mistaken view of an experiment (which was a horrible program do not get me wrong here) from the person that they want to study. Social science definitions ought to be considered, but in order to be clear on what a conspiracy theory is or what a conspiracist is, we ought to be looking elsewhere for that information.
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