Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

"Are you even going to give out your calendars? Seems kind of depressing. Maybe it should just be the first meeting of our secret society."--FBI Lawyer Lisa Page. This text revealed earlier this week sent a lot of people into a titter because it apparently confirms the existence of a secret society within the FBI that is apparently in opposition to the president. Senate Republican Ron Johnson of Wisconsin claimed that he had corroborating information and that the revelation didn't surprise him. This single text along with the revelation that the FBI "lost" about 50,000 texts between Page and FBI agent Peter Strozk (though they are beginning to be recovered) "confirmed" the story that supporters of the president and the president himself has been pushing for what seems to be forever--though it's only been a year. First off let's address the secret society comment in the text. I read the text has sarcastic and missing an eye roll emoji, but o...

I've covered this before , but that was five months ago and I've been really bad at making updates. Don't blame me, well, blame me, but I have a course on this stuff to teach and sometimes just making the lectures work takes far more work than I anticipated. However, I'm beginning a "Plan B'' in pursuit of my PhD and that's forced me to delve into the academic literature surrounding this topic...more than I had to before. One of the problems is that there is scarce literature on the topic. Sure there's enough but the debate is just beginning, and that means going backward to the years before conspiracy theories were not uttered out of the mouth of the president of the United States...at least publicly. The problem lies not necessarily with the scarcity of material but that within that set there is good and bad. So far the standard piece to work with is Brian Keeley's "Of Conspiracy Theories" (99). This work deals with laying out a s...

Now returning to the third view regarding Conspiracy theories, "The Public Trust Approach" (PTA). This theory takes some unpacking in that it is not specifically labelled as such by the author. It is also not laid out as a specific approach to dealing with conspiracy theories, however it is easily derived from Keeley's article "Of Conspiracy Theories. (Keeley '99)" Any person writing about conspiracy theories in an academic fashion first must lay out the definition of what the term "conspiracy theory" actually means. What this means for our purpose is to see how his definition stacks up against mine. Keeley identifies five characteristics which separate CTs from other explanations. In fact he wants to make a clear distinction between what he calls Unwarranted Conspiracy Theories (UCT) and warranted theories of conspiracy which would be, at the very least, deserving of further investigation. This last category doesn't need a specific label sin...

Last post we discussed what is known as the "Generalist position" regarding the confrontation with conspiracy theories. The generalist position holds the view that we ought to disengage with any theory that can be labelled as a "conspiracy theory." I concluded that this position is untenable for a couple of reasons: the first being that it is intellectually lazy, stereotypes theories (and by extension theorists), and what is likely the most important objection: that it can dismiss legitimate explanations of events that would likely be labelled as a conspiracy before enough evidence was discovered (the paradigmatic cases of this position are the Watergate break in and the Oliver North Iran Contra affair). The opposing position is that of "Particularism." It is, in nearly every sense, the converse of generalism. This position holds that each claim be taken on a case by case basis. Amongst the philosophical papers on the subject, particularism seems to be t...

Generalism as it pertains to a position regarding the philosophical attitude toward conspiracy theories is the idea that any explanation which makes a reference to or could be pushed underneath an umbrella of the label "conspiracy theory" should be regarded with suspicion. This means that person X while trying to explain position Y, says that Y is a conspiracy theory we should mentally begin dismissing the listener's assertion. This is a tempting position to take, especially among people who consider themselves skeptics (like this author for instance). When someone seeks to explain a current/historical event and uses key words like "they," "secret group," or "I'm just asking the questions;" the tendency is to begin preparing a debunking argument. This generalist position has some advantages to it. The first is that because "conspiracy theories" have certain qualities that can be identified, it helps to be able to save time by ...

The topic of gun control in the United States is a rather difficult one to process because politics have gotten in the way of reasoned debate. Most Americans, all of them, favor expansion of laws that require background checks on all gun purchases , that includes Republicans, the party that is on the gun rights side of the debate. According to the same poll, 54% of Republicans even favor a ban on assault style weapons, again the party most in favor of gun rights. In the wake of the Las Vegas shooting, those on the pro-gun side repeated a simple mantra, "don't politicize the tragedy." There are two problems with this sentiment, the first is that it was not a "tragedy" it was a massacre. A "tragedy" isn't something that a person can control. It's a tragedy when a landslide kills a bunch of people, or someone dies suddenly from a disease. When one person commits an act of mass murder, it's a massacre, senseless violence, but not a tragedy. Sec...

For the last month I've been working on a presentation. Updates will be a little more frequent from now on. I've just finished writing my presentation for the CFI (Center for Inquiry) that I'm going to give on Friday on conspiracy theories. I close with advise on what a person can do to prevent themselves from turning into a conspiracy theorist: think logically, apply Occam's razor, and generalize the theory to the world at large. It's not a full proof system, but it's at least a start. I do not go into how to uproot the theories in other people, that's a much more difficult process considering the number of psychological guards that every person has against finding out something they believe is wrong. First, our brain regularly shuts out this kind of proof. Especially when we attach our beliefs to our individual sense of identity. With these kinds beliefs it's not merely something that we believe it is something that we are. The deeper a person is i...