“Conspiracy theory”: The case for being critically receptive

Abstract

“Conspiracy theory” is widely used as a pejorative term. An effect of this usage, however, is to discourage certain kinds of legitimate critical inquiry. In a world where conspiracies happen, it is reasonable to seek to formulate good theories of what exactly is happening; and through competent investigation, hypotheses of conspiracy can sometimes be verified. Thus, the general denigration of “conspiracy theory” tends to discourage a kind of practice that there is reason, in fact, to encourage. Of course, this kind of serious inquiry is not necessarily typical of conspiracy theories more generally. Some researchers regard its instances as exceptions to a more general rule whereby conspiracy theories involve unwarranted assumptions and misleading speculation;1 others maintain—instead or as well—that such investigations as happen to identify a verifiable conspiracy should be exempted from the designation “conspiracy theory” and called something else.2 However, such suggestions presuppose not only that the grounds of exception or exemption can be clearly specified but also that the specification will be generally understood and applied. But what if neither presupposition turns out to be warranted? That concern is at the heart of this paper: when the pejorative understanding of “conspiracy theory” is allowed to influence policy-making it can serve to legitimate policies whose effect is to impede or even outlaw the kind of civic vigilance that aims to uncover malfeasance on the part of powerful actors. If all kinds of critical and unorthodox inquiry that challenge “official narratives” or institutionally recognized epistemic authorities are potentially liable to be dismissed as “conspiracy theory,” then in the event of corruption or capture of institutions this may not only go undetected but could even be protected from detection. The concern is by no means purely hypothetical, and this paper will cite troubling evidence of such an inquiry being not only denigrated and marginalized but actively censored, with those pursuing it being vilified and even persecuted. Accordingly, a central claim here is that the public interest is not well served by general compliance with a default assumption that conspiracy theory should be understood in a pejorative sense. Of course, the public interest is also not well served by the flooding of information channels by the kind of unfounded speculations and misleading claims that are commonly associated with conspiracism. And this countervailing concern has driven the extensive and growing literature across several disciplines that seeks to understand it as a cognitive and epistemic problem. Conspiracism—the elicit presumption that hypotheses of conspiracy explain every undesirable event, regardless of what reason or evidence suggest—involves, as Muirhead and Rosenblum (2019) put it, the positing of “conspiracy without the theory.” A proper theory—of a conspiracy as of anything else—treats reason and evidence with methodological rigour. Some theories about conspiracies will be rigorous, and others will not; some will succeed in explaining what they aim to, and others will fail. So although much of the literature does not clearly observe a clear distinction between the concept of conspiracy theory and that of conspiracism, there are good reasons why we should (Dentith 2017). Accordingly, this paper shows that what can be problematic about conspiracy theories can be discussed, and more incisively, by excising prejudicial framings of the matter. As to be shown in Section 2, there is no particular difficulty in operationalizing a conceptual distinction between conspiracy theories that are methodologically rigorous and speculations about conspiracies that are not. This simple and robust approach has in fact already been developed by a number of philosophers who engage in applied epistemology. The approach allows that the term conspiracy theory—when not appended by an evaluative qualifier—can and should be used in a neutral sense. Any specific conspiracy theory may or may not be problematic, but this can only be known when it is evaluated. What makes a conspiracy theory problematic is the kind of fallaciousness in assumptions or methods that would make a theory about anything problematic, not the fact that it features conspiratorial hypotheses. This approach assumes that there is no inherent general defect that a respectable theory needs to prove itself exempt from. Hence any given conspiracy theory should be assessed on its particular merits.3 Nonetheless, because the opposite assumption is operative in some of the literature, the possibility to be canvassed in Section 3 is that there could be a particular kind of problem about conspiratorial hypotheses that is distinctive and inherent to them. When seeking to specify what may be inherently problematic about conspiratorial hypotheses, critics draw attention particularly to the degree of suspicion, or scepticism they depend on. Granting reasonable assumptions about limits to how sceptical it is rational to be, a general objection to conspiracy theories would be that they quite routinely exceed these limits. An important consideration that can be appealed to in this argument is the essentially collaborative nature of knowledge in general and the fact that we must all depend on others virtually all of the time for knowledge that we cannot immediately access individually. This is why it is generally rational to defer to established epistemic authorities and not to suppose that an individual who from their own narrow perspective identifies some anomaly in received wisdom has necessarily gained an enlightened insight rather than merely a “little knowledge” of the kind that is a “dangerous thing.” However, the response commended in this paper is recognize that just as scepticism should not be unbounded, nor should deference. The collective production of reliable knowledge is by no means the sole preserve of accredited institutions of epistemic authority. Section 4 highlights the practical significance of the critically receptive approach with a case study of a group of citizen investigators who have been very publicly stigmatized as conspiracy theorists. They have challenged an institution with clear epistemic authority in its field and thus their challenge would qualify, on several of the other approaches discussed in this paper, for being considered prima facie unwarranted. However, on the approach advocated, the salient question is whether the group has engaged in rigorous and competent investigation. As it transpires, the study reveals that the group's investigation has been endorsed by scientists of the institution in question, who complain of corruption and intimidation on the part of its management. The case thus illustrates the reality that even institutions with seemingly unimpeachable claims to epistemic authority do not necessarily stand above and immune from political contestations over knowledge and truth claims. For this reason, skepticism about them cannot always or necessarily be condemned as irrational. The argument of this paper is that when trust in institutions diminishes, the answer does not lie in suppressing questions about their trustworthiness or seeking to deter potential questioners, but in taking steps to make them worthy of trust. Meanwhile, the fact that malfeasance by powerful actors can and does occur is ultimately itself sufficient reason to take an attitude of critical receptiveness to conspiracy theories. Few, if any, events or situations in the human world can ever be adequately explained in terms of one causal factor or with the methods of one discipline. So when conspiracy is a factor, it is unlikely to be the only one and may not be the most significant. The term conspiracy theory is sometimes used in practice to refer to any explanation which includes that factor; some users of the term, however, reserve it for explanations that prioritize conspiratorial hypotheses; some even use it of explanations that may be prima facie absurd but involve no necessary conspiratorial hypothesis (e.g., “Flat Earth” theory). On the other hand, some rule out its applicability to an explanation that has a conspiratorial hypothesis at its core if this is accorded the status of official explanation: hence to talk about the conspiracy of Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda to perpetrate the attacks of 9/11 is not to qualify for the “conspiracy theorist” label. This latter position might be rationalized by claiming that “conspiracy facts” are not “mere conspiracy theories,” but that would beg crucial questions about what one calls a theory prior to its investigation and how it is verified that official explanations are epistemically authoritative; alternatively, it might be suggested that a “plausible theory of conspiracy theory” is a different kind of thing than a “conspiracy theory”; indeed, one author even suggests that we use the term Conspiracy Theory, capitalized, when we mean the latter kind of thing. However, no matter what semantic innovations might be engaged in, the core conceptual question remains, and most vividly in those cases where an explanation starts out as a seemingly extravagant speculation but is subsequently vindicated: are there any epistemic criteria in terms of which all, and only, conspiracy theories may consistently be defined?4 One suggestion would be to use the term of any theory that generates a conspiratorial hypothesis. To define the term by this use, though, would be to make it unavailable as a slur. For it is possible to engage in investigations involving a conspiratorial element while observing established principles of scholarly and scientific inquiry. This is recognized by Peter Knight, leader of a largescale collaborative research project on conspiracy theories, who refers to “(plausible) theories of conspiracy” (Knight 2014, 348). It is not just any assertion of the existence of a conspiracy that has a reasonable claim to be entertained and assessed, though: there needs to be a cogent hypothesis, supported by a logically coherent explanatory argument, whose key premises are not prima facie implausible. Since the plausibility of a theory can only be ascertained by assessing it, an appropriate attitude to adopt, ex ante, toward any conspiracy theory, so understood, is one of critical receptivity. This attitude differs markedly from that encountered in those research programs in the social and psychological sciences that regard conspiracy theories as a generic kind of cognitive phenomenon and construct them as a problematic object of inquiry.5 Typically, these less receptive approaches tend to focus on concerns about cognitive processes rather than epistemic criteria, and thus look not so much at the characteristics of the theories themselves as the personal and behavioral traits of conspiracy believers. Since the ways and means by which people come to hold or relinquish beliefs are many and various, this general question area is understandably of interest to psychologists and other behavioral scientists. Insofar as people form beliefs in relation to untested conspiracy postulates, the cognitive processes involved can be treated as objects of inquiry. (The same could also apply, of course, to the psychology of those with marked resistance to entertaining conspiracy beliefs or with a high tolerance for concatenations of remarkable coincidences.6) It is as well to be clear, however, that the cognitive and behavioral scientists engaged in such research are not thereby normally claiming to establish anything about the truth or epistemic justification of the ideas that their subjects of study do or do not believe in. Nor can they be presumed to know, in the case of conspiracy theories that are not implausible on their face, which of them are well founded or not, true or not, unless or until the specific questions have been properly investigated. This kind of investigation falls under the provenance of practical epistemology rather than social psychology. So while there may be interrelationships between those different fields of investigation, the distinctiveness of each should not be ignored: the psychological studies of people who hold “irrational beliefs” are distinguishable from epistemological investigations of what beliefs it would be irrational to hold. This and related points have already been discussed by a number of philosophers writing about conspiracy theories from the perspective of applied epistemology. Indeed, something of a philosophical school of thought has been emerging around the question of critically evaluating “conspiracy theory” as a rational form of intellectual inquiry (see e.g., Basham 2016, 2018; Coady 2007, 2018; Dentith 2016a, 2016b, 2017; Hagen 2010, 2017; Pigden 2016). A general problem that can be stated at a descriptive level, however, and does have resonance with both epistemological and psychological concerns, is appropriately called conspiracism. The term conspiracism, as it is taken here, designates an attachment to a fallacious mode of reasoning that tends to reduce the explanation of events to posited conspiracies, without properly investigating the relevant evidence for alternative hypotheses.7 It can involve persistence in seeking a conspiratorial explanation even when wider inquiries have shown that factor not to be decisive or perhaps even operative at all. A conspiracist tendency is to see conspiracies where there is little evidence for them, without giving sufficient consideration to alternative explanations, and perhaps even being resistant to heeding quite compelling counter-indications. What is wrong with conspiracism, it may thus be noted, can be specified by reference to standards of inquiry that would characterize good conspiracy theory. For this reason, far from being interchangeable designations, the rational development of a serious conspiracy theory does not involve conspiracism and in fact can be seen as its antithesis. Thus when those who are unsympathetic to conspiracy theory of any kind use the terms interchangeably, they elide a crucial distinction. Moreover, just as one would not abandon the study of psychology, for instance, because some people make inappropriately reductive claims using it to explain things better understood in other ways—thereby committing the fallacy of psychologism—so there is no good reason to abandon the study of situations that could quite reasonably be suspected to involve conspiracies just because some people do it very badly. A crucial point, though, is that to differentiate an instance of conspiracism from an instance of reasonable suspicion one needs to have independent criteria to establish the bounds of reasonableness. This is a matter of research methodology as applied to theory of conspiracy. One should accordingly be clear that social scientific analyses of conspiracist tendencies in an individual's psyche or socio-cultural environment have no bearing on an understanding of the methods and conduct of the investigative practices of serious conspiracy theory as I am proposing we understand this intellectual activity.8 As will shortly be noted, the psychological disposition that supports a tendency to cleave to unreasonable conspiracy theories is also operative when scientists sometimes cling onto theories that their peers regard as no longer reasonable to maintain. One should thus be cautious about endorsing the idea of a distinctively “conspiracist mindset.” This was developed in the work of Harold Lasswell and Franz Neumann, and it informed Richard Hofstadter's (1964) influential study of the political pathologies of the “paranoid style” in the 1960s. This association of conspiracy suspicions with irrationality and paranoia was then actively promoted in the United States. Lance deHaven Smith notes that “the conspiracy-theory label was popularized as a pejorative term by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a propaganda program initiated in 1967.” (deHaven Smith 2013, 21) The program was created as a response to critical citizens' questions about the assassination of JF Kennedy. It “called on media corporations and journalists to criticize “conspiracy theorists” and raise questions about their motives and judgments.” Its reach has extended greatly since, and Knight takes it not to be particularly controversial now that “some of the labelling of particular views as ‘conspiracy theories’ is a technique of governmentality” (Knight 2014, 348). It is thus worth noting that a clear purpose for fostering the very concept of “conspiracy theory” has, in practice, been to disparage it so that people who desire to have a reputation as intellectually serious, or even just sensible, are discouraged from engaging in it. If it were the case that all and only the designated conspiracy theories manifested distinctive fallacies associated with conspiracism, it would be reasonable to heed admonitions not to promote them. The problem is that those who use the term conspiracy theory to designate an intellectually disreputable activity cannot at the same time cogently define the term in such a way as to exclude intellectually respectable activities from its scope. It follows that to discern whether a “conspiracy theory” is worth taking seriously one has to be critically receptive to the possibility of its being so. “In a progressive research program the proponents of a theory are able to anticipate new evidence and make predictions (and retrodictions) that are generally successful. By contrast, a degenerating research program is characterized by a lack of successful predictions (and retrodictions) and by the subsequent modification of initial conditions and auxiliary hypotheses after new evidence has come in.” (Clarke 2007, 167) On this basis, the problem typical of conspiracists is that they are unable or unwilling to recognize when a theory they hold to has become demonstrably regressive. Their critics rightly regard persistent adherence to it as irrational, and they understandably look to psychological or ideological causes of this, since its cause is not a dispassionate epistemic estimate of what the evidence suggests. Questions of psychology can impinge on epistemology due to the problem that in the real circumstances of controversy there are likely to be grey areas. As Clarke points out, although Lakatos plausibly maintains that it becomes irrational, at a certain point, to continue to adhere to a degenerating research program, he offers no categorical guidance as to how and where exactly such a point can be located. Moreover, Clarke considers it “doubtful whether we could stipulate an exact point at which it becomes rational to abandon any particular theory” (Clarke 2007, 167). As philosophers of science more generally recognize, the mere fact of anomalous data “can never logically compel a scientist to abandon a particular hypothesis because the hypothesis is embedded in a network of beliefs, any one of which might be wrong” (Chinn and Brewer 1993, 10). So, if it can happen sometimes that a scientist clings to a theory that peers see as crumbling, it can likewise happen that a person maintains a conspiracy theory that most others would commend dropping. It is only with the development of a comprehensively better theory that one can speak of the old one being refuted. It is possible meanwhile to adhere to a degenerating research program even as the rationality of doing so diminishes (Hayward 2019, 545). It is in seeking to understand this adherence to hypotheses of diminishing epistemological rationality that psychological investigations may have a role to play. Something important to appreciate, however, is that if adherence to demonstrably implausible hypotheses is a matter for behavioral analysis, then exactly the same line of inquiry can sometimes be appropriate in relation to cognitive subjects' acceptance of hypotheses advanced in relation to the official narratives that conspiracy theories challenge. For sometimes official narratives too have features of a “degenerating research program.” In fact, it is precisely this that makes the activities of critical conspiracy theorists potentially valuable. Thus adopting the proposed approach keeps open the possibility of discovering that some conspiracy theories are not only methodologically rigorous but also have important insights to afford. So while the problem of conspiracism has a psychological dimension, another—and arguably more significant dimension of the problem—is the political contestation over truth that is a wider concern of the social sciences. Notwithstanding the cogent arguments that philosophers have made for adopting a neutral understanding of conspiracy theory, research projects premised on a pejorative understanding have burgeoned in recent years. The aim of this section is to see how cogently and informatively such an understanding can be articulated. The challenge is to provide a definition of conspiracy theory as an irrational cognitive activity that differentiates this both from other—non-conspiratorial—kinds of irrational thought process and from intellectually respectable investigations into potential conspiracies. This means explicating what is wrong with conspiracy theories from an epistemological perspective. “A conspiracy theory is a proposed explanation of some historical event (or events) in terms of the significant causal agency of a relatively small group of persons—the conspirators—acting in secret.” (Keeley 1999, 116) ‘First, a conspiracy theory deserves the appellation "theory," because it proffers an explanation of the event in question. … Second, a conspiracy theory need not propose that the conspirators are all powerful, only that they have played some pivotal role in bringing about the event. … Third, the group of conspirators must be small, although the upper bounds are necessarily vague.’ (Keeley 1999, 116) This can be considered a neutral definition because it does not imply anything inherently problematic about conspiracy theories in general.10 Problems only arise with the subset of them that Keeley calls unwarranted conspiracy theories (UCTs) on account of additional characteristics they exhibit. For instance, Keeley suggests, a UCT will run counter to an official story and take the intentions behind a conspiracy to be nefarious: UCTs also typically seek to tie together seemingly unrelated events and to take the truths behind events to be well-guarded secrets, even if the ultimate perpetrators are public figures. A problem with this auxiliary list of characteristics is that any of them, in any combination, could in principle also be found in a warranted theory. It follows from the fact that some cases of coordinated malfeasance have been revealed to have such characteristics that a warranted theory could refer to them. To be clear, though, it does not suffice, for the warrant of a theory, that findings it claims to predict turn out to be true. This is a point that some critics of conspiracy theory have been at pains to emphasize, and Cass Sunstein seeks to illustrate: “I may believe, correctly, that there are fires within the earth's core, but if I believe that because the god Vulcan revealed it to me in a dream, my belief is unwarranted” (Sunstein and Vermeule 2009, 207).11 The “explanation” offered in such a “theory” would not pass minimal tests of plausibility or cogency. A fortuitously correct statement cannot be considered the warranted conclusion of a theory when the theory is faulty. What should also be understood, however, is that the difference between being warranted and being true cuts both ways. As in normal scientific inquiries, a theory may be warranted—because it rationally develops a line of investigation that pursues a reasonable hypothesis, as formulated in the light of available evidence—and yet it ultimately fails when fully tested against evidence. It is only after this failure that continued adherence to the theory would be unwarranted. If this applies with regard to scientific theories there is no reason it should not apply to theories with conspiratorial hypotheses: a conspiracy theory does not have to be proven, or “successful,” to be rational and warranted. For the sake of analytical clarity, it is worth noting three distinct ways in which a theory might be unwarranted. First, as we have noted, a theory in the process of development and testing might be warranted or otherwise depending on its being methodologically rigorous. Second, as we have also noted, if a methodologically sound theory is revealed to be substantively untenable in light of new evidence, then at that point—ex post—continued adherence to it is unwarranted. A third way is implied by the idea that there is something specific to a conspiracy theory—as distinct from any other kind of theory in any other domain—that generally makes it unwarranted ex ante. To make sense of this latter idea, the question to ask is what do conspiracy theories in general presuppose, ex ante, that other kinds of theory do not? ‘Conspiracies are a common feature of social and political life, common enough that refusing to believe in their existence would leave us unable to understand the contours of our world; moreover, warranted belief in conspiracies is widespread, even among the intellectuals who confidently reject this or that putative explanation of an event as “just a conspiracy theory.”’ (Levy 2007, 181) In practice, he suggests, it is not conspiracy theories as such toward which intellectually responsible people evince a reflexive suspicion but, rather, it is “conspiracy theories which conflict with (the right kind of) official stories that come under suspicion.” (Levy 2007, 181) The mark of a conspiracy theory that is irrational to accept is that it goes against relevant epistemic authorities. “Clearly, it is often rational to heavily discount the official stories offered by some authorities. In totalitarian countries, people learn to read the official news media with a jaundiced eye, and this attitude is often warranted. Recent events in Anglophone Western democracies demonstrate that this kind of attitude toward the official stories promulgated by governments and by their sycophants in the media is all too often warranted in non-totalitarian countries.” (Levy 2007, 187) “When there is a conflict between official stories, between the explanation offered by the political authorities and that offered by the epistemic authorities, responsible intellectuals are ready to believe the latter (regardless of whether either explanation cites the actions of conspirators).” (Levy 2007, 187–8) Our later discussion will oblige us to reflect more closely on what even makes a story “official”—and whose view should rationally be deferred to (where “rationally” means for epistemological rather than prudential reasons)—when political authorities and epistemic authorities diverge. As for what constitutes an epistemic authority, Levy's view is that “an epistemic authority is properly constituted when it has the right kind of structure.” (188) The right kind of structure is that exemplified by science, where knowledge claims are the product of a socially distributed network of inquirers, whose methods and results are publicly available. Scientific inquirers “are trained in assessing knowledge claims according to standards relevant to the discipline, and rewards are distributed according to success at validating new knowledge and at criticizing the claims of other members of the network.” (188) As Levy thereby emphasizes, scientific investigations tend to be pursued within the bounds of disciplines and in accordance with the methods, concepts and procedures appropriate to the discipline. Accepting the general good sense of Levy's view—notwithstanding its arguable idealization of the purity of actual scientific research practices—and so granting its premise that scientific research does generally aspire to conform to the methodological norms indicated, its emphasis on disciplinarity prompts an interesting question for the present inquiry: is there or is there not a disciplinary home for conspiracy theory as a distinctive kind of inquiry? Differently nuanced answers to this general question might be offered, but we know that in the case of any specific putative conspiracy, depending on the particulars of the case, a variety of expertises are likely to be required to make headway. Each specific case, moreover, may require a distinctive interdisciplinary collaboration, with the mix of expertise required in any given case quite possibly differing from that needed in any other. What this means is that there is no uniquely determinable field known as conspiracy theory in which any scientist or scholar could claim special disciplinary expertise. The field of what we might call “conspiracy studies” is inherently interdisciplinary. “The intellectuals who embrace explanations of the kind that we typically and pejoratively label conspiracy theories are almost never in possession of the directly relevant expertise. They may be experts in something, but rarely do they belong to the class of enquirers with the authority to issue official stories regarding the event to be explained.” (Levy 2007, 189) Our insight reveals Levy's statement here to be misleading in implying that an officially authorized group comprises anything other than a number of individuals each of whom is expert in something but not in the whole complex multidisciplinary field of inquiry relevant to a conspiracy theory. How would an “official” group differ—in terms of epistemological capacities—from another multidisciplinary group who were to gather together in an unofficial collaboration? Suppose the latter group challenged the epistemic authority of the official group? “It is because the relevant epistemic authorities—the distr