You’re probably thinking about conspiracy theories in the wrong way, and here’s how to remedy
Conspiracy theories are a hot topic on mainstream media and in politicians’ speeches. A 2017 Guardian article titles, “Are we entering a golden age of conspiracy theory?”. The article reported the results of a survey conducted in the United States where, asked to consider the sentence “I’m convinced there’s a conspiracy behind many things in the world”, more than one in four people thought it was true. Looking at politics, President Trump, among the other things, tweeted once, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive” (he later said it was a joke; see here), and on various occasions suggested a connection between vaccines and autism.
It’s needless to say. When it comes to the environment or our own health declarations like these from a person trusted by millions of people can bring about harmful effects. COVID-19 pandemic made this evident. Although less then one year has passed from the outbreak, there is already a 90 pages long Wikipedia entry about misinformation on the virus. In it, not less than nine conspiracy theories about the epidemic are listed. Of course, health is not the only thing to be threatened. Trump conspirational declarations that COVID-19 was created in Wuhan laboratory — supported by his generally racist jargon — could have played a decisive role in the wave of racism towards Asian-looking people in America.
It seems undeniable that the role conspiracy theories play in the public debate is by no means marginal. For this reason, it’s essential to have clear ideas about what people mean when they talk about them. In my view, as I will try to show, discourses about conspiracy theories tend to be flawed. And it’s not only the pub’s conversations to be plagued; the same problems are recognisable in official media’s use of the term and in some scientific publications. In particular, I hold that the concept of conspiracy theory generates misinterpretations and miscomprehensions, and it also negatively affects our judgements of other people’s worldviews. Of course, identifying the disease is not enough. A cure is needed. So, I will also suggest better conceptual uses to orient ourselves among the overwhelming amount of information related to conspiracy theories.
What are we talking about
Even if it sounds alarmingly pedantic (I sware — or perhaps hope — it won’t), a good way to get a rough sense of how conspiracy theories tend to be thought is consulting a good dictionary. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a conspiracy theory is «a belief that an event or situation is the result of a secret plan made by powerful people». The definition contains two main ingredients: the secret plan and the idea that it’s been set up by influential people. If you are like me the first time I read it, you probably have the feeling that our dictionary does a pretty good job in saying what conspiracy theories are. Unfortunately, it couldn’t be wronger. Suppose believing in the plan and the powerful people were enough for the conspiracy theory. In that case, I’d be a great conspirator simply for my belief that influential people set up secret plans in all private firms like Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba, Huawei, etc.
Clearly, thinking that business strategies exist doesn’t make a believer in conspiracy theories. So, what should we look for? What other ingredients do we need? There are two vital lacks we have to compensate. On the one hand, we must supply the “secrecy” part in the definition with something more; on the other, we need to consider the reasonableness associated with belief in conspiracy theories.
Starting with the former, the firms’ example shows that secrecy and the plan alone are not sufficient to have a conspiracy. What do we need? A reasonable hypothesis is that malicious intent is required. However, I don’t think it works. Imagine your neighbour believes Greta Thunberg is an alien coming from a parallel universe to save the environment. We would consider this a crystal clear example of conspiracy theory belief. Yet, no malicious intent is involved. My proposal is that to be a conspiracy, the plan must be outside or against the rules. A conspiracy is something that goes against or ignores the rules of society. Indeed, business strategy plans aren’t conspiracies, for law allows for them. But imagine that a company goes further; that it plans to destroy competitors in some illegal way and… puff. We got the conspiracy.
One might say that once we know what a conspiracy is, getting to the idea of conspiracy theory is child play. Isn’t it just a theory that there’s a conspiracy? I think the answer should be negative again. Virtually all historians believe that the Pazzi conspiracy and the Watergate scandal actually happened, but that doesn’t make them believers in conspiracy theories, does it? There could be contrasting intuitions here. One might think, “well, there is indeed a sense in which they believe in conspiracy theories, but there is also a sense in which they don’t”. Fair enough. But let’s focus on the concept according to which historians are not believers in conspiracy theories just because they think the Watergate scandal happened. Why should we focus on that one? Because — and this brings us to the other lack in the dictionary definition — it captures an essential feature of people use of the expression ‘conspiracy theory’. Indeed, speakers use it in a clearly pejorative sense. There is a presumption of some kind of illegitimacy, if not plain foolishness, connected to conspiracy theories. Now, the question is: what kind of illegitimacy?
I suggest that we tend to attach to conspiracy theories illegitimacy of an epistemic kind. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that studies things like belief and knowledge and tries to figure out the conditions for having them. So, saying that subscribing to a particular theory or holding a certain belief is ‘epistemically illegitimate’, I mean that it is unreasonable, nonsensical, irrational, and the like. (For present purposes, we don’t need to go more precise than this.) For example, subscribing to a theory can be unreasonable or irrational if other theories that explain the same phenomena in a better way are available (and the subject has access to them). A person is unreasonable also when he or she subscribes to a theory for the wrong reasons. Imagine a person who believes in the theory of evolution because Morgan Freeman revealed to him or her in a dream that the theory is correct. That’s obviously epistemically irresponsible.
This view is widely supported by scientific literature engaging with the reasons for which people believe in conspiracy theories. In a review putting together some hundreds of works on the issue (Douglas et al. 2019), the authors summarise some of the motives bringing people to conspiracy theories: psychological, epistemic, demographic, and political factors. Interestingly, what the four have in common is that neither of them is an appropriate kind of reasons to endorse a theory. Ideally, one should choose a particular theory for its explanatory power, the probability of being true, etc., not just because one likes it or because it supports one’s political view. But that doesn’t happen with conspiracy theories.
Wrapping up what we have said, we can come up with the following concept of conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories are theories that an event or situation is the result of a secret and illicit plan made by powerful people, and such that holding them is epistemically irresponsible.
Why our use is problematic
Now, considering this updated concept and all the reasoning preceding it, we have the tools to track down some problems regarding the concept’s use. They stem from the fact that illegitimacy is usually taken not as an applying condition for the concept, but as a consequence of using it. In other words, it often happens that something is called a conspiracy theory just because it’s a theory about a conspiracy. Then, and only then, the pejorative idea that it is epistemically irresponsible is added. Why is this a problem? Well, because if irresponsibility is not taken to be among the conditions of applicability, but added successively, we’ll end up considering epistemically irresponsible theories that aren’t really so.
It seems to me that most of us can easily spoil this tendency in their own use of the concept and in that of the people around them (as I spoiled it in my use). However, it’s not hard to find cases of the problem in both media and scientific papers. There’s a simple method to discover improper uses. To know that a theory is epistemically irresponsible, one has to engage a little bit with it. One needs a grasp of what kind of arguments and evidence, if any, the theory has on its side. Therefore, if one says that something is a conspiracy theory without having the foggiest idea about what ground the theory has, then this person is not considering whether believing it is irrational or not before labelling it ‘conspiracy theory’. So, if then one goes further and dismisses the theory only because of that label, then he or she falls in the mistake we have pointed out.
For example, in a BBC video titled “Coronavirus: How to talk about conspiracy theories”, the journalist says at the beginning to have received plenty of emails containing conspiracy theories. However, at least for a part of them, she couldn’t be sure that they were theory such that believing them is irrational since, for sure, not all the emails contained detailed argumentations. But during the video, they just assume that conspiracy theories are illegitimate. Again, the risk with this move is to include among the wrong ones perfectly fine theories which argue that there is a conspiracy on a legitimate ground.
Of course, I don’t want to argue that any particular conspiracy theory about COVID-19 or anything else is epistemically legitimate, neither I’m saying that any of these theories is correct. In the same way, I don’t deny that many conspiracy theorists are often unwilling to change their views in light of evidence to the contrary and that they engage in fallacious argumentations. What I’m saying is simply that neither the legitimacy nor the truthfulness of a theory can be ruled out in principle for the simple reason that the theory says there’s a conspiracy. Doing that is just as irresponsible as believing that Obama is a reptilian. Conspiracies have happened throughout history; therefore, there is no doubt they can happen. So we just can’t dismiss all claims of this sort a priori and without engaging an appropriate critique of them.
A lot of scientific literature is not in a better position. In the paper “The anatomy of conspiracy theories” (Byford 2011), the author writes that conspiracy theories «are replete with elaborate arguments, evidence and ‘proof’ which purport to validate the conspiratorial perspective on history and politics». This is a very odd claim. Isn’t it a good feature for a theory to be full of elaborate arguments and evidence? Isn’t the theory of evolution supported by precisely this kind of things? Or general relativity? Of course they are. So why do elaborated arguments and evidence become a reason for critique when what is argued is that some conspiracy is taking place?
It should be needless to say that there are also plenty of scholars much more careful in employing concepts. Various papers highlight that defining what one means by ‘conspiracy theory’ is particularly important given that the expression can be used to stigmatise and dismiss other’s views (Douglas et al. 2019, 5). Nonetheless, the misunderstanding is widespread.
The same problem is recognised in an article programmatically titled “Why we should not treat conspiracy theories all the same”. The author argues that generalising on conspiracy theories considering all of them illegitimate, we fail to account for the reasons of each conspiracy theory, as well as for their different plausibilities. His suggestion is to discriminate among different conspiracy theories.
Solutions
My suggestion is slightly different. We should be more aware of what we mean when using the concept of conspiracy theory. In principle, we are free to use it in a more general way, without taking illegitimacy as a condition to apply it. However, in this case, the illegitimacy of the theory can’t be assumed. Or we can employ the restricted concept that applies only to theories that are illegitimate. But if we do so, we must be much more careful in calling something a conspiracy theory. At the same time, speakers should be careful about whether their interlocutor employs one concept or the other, and especially whether he or she switches tacitly between the two, thereby arriving at wrong conclusions.
If all speakers become careful in using the concept of conspiracy theory in this way, it would be a good result. However, we can go even further: after all, why should we use the concept of conspiracy theory at all? Suppose you agree with what I’ve been arguing. Then you should also agree that for any given theory — let it be about a conspiracy, an economic phenomenon, or the biology of frogs — all that we have to consider to know if it’s okay to believe that theory is whether it’s epistemically well-formed. There is nothing about theories concerning conspiracies that makes them intrinsically better or worse than the others. Irrational beliefs can be about all kinds of topics.
In fact, beliefs that a particular theory is unreasonable for the simple reason that it’s about a conspiracy are crystal clear examples of irrationality. Perhaps, dismissals of conspiracy theories are often supported by nonsensical motives just as those employed by conspiracy theorists (notice that here I’m using the concept in the narrow sense). For example, people might dismiss them for laziness in engaging the debate, a psychological indisposition towards acknowledging to have been deceived, and so on. Are people who dismiss theories with such motives in a better position than those believing irrational theories about conspiracies? Of course they are not. But then, there is no reason to be particularly concerned about conspiracies. Let’s just focus on irrationality and unreasonableness.
Key points
- The concept of conspiracy theory is used in inconsistent ways. This fact has negative effects: it can bring us to stigmatise legitimate worldviews and accept unreasonable ones.
- What makes our use inconsistent is that we unconsciously switch between two concepts of conspiracy theory. According to one, all theories about conspiracies are conspiracy theories. According to the other, only those having the additional property of being epistemically irresponsible are such.
- There are two solutions. First, we can be careful in discriminating (both in our use and in that of the people we speak to) between the two concepts. Second, we can stop talking about conspiracy theories completely and focus on whether the theories we are presented with are epistemically legitimate or not.
References
Byford, Jovan. 2011. ‘The Anatomy of the Conspiracy Theory’. In Conspiracy Theories. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
‘Conspiracy Theory’. 2020. In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Conspiracy_theory&oldid=971533867.
Douglas, Karen M., Joseph E. Uscinski, Robbie M. Sutton, Aleksandra Cichocka, Turkay Nefes, Chee Siang Ang, and Farzin Deravi. 2019. ‘Understanding Conspiracy Theories’. Political Psychology 40 (S1): 3–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12568.
Freeman, Daniel, and Jason Freeman. 2017. ‘Are We Entering a Golden Age of the Conspiracy Theory?’ The Guardian, 28 March 2017, sec. Science. https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2017/mar/28/are-we-entering-a-golden-age-of-the-conspiracy-theory.
Harambam, Jaron. n.d. ‘Why We Should Not Treat All Conspiracy Theories the Same’. The Conversation. Accessed 4 August 2020. http://theconversation.com/why-we-should-not-treat-all-conspiracy-theories-the-same-140022.
‘Misinformation Related to the COVID-19 Pandemic’. 2020. In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Misinformation_related_to_the_COVID-19_pandemic&oldid=971839178.
Sevastopulo, Demetri, and Katrina Manson. 2020. ‘Trump Says He Is Confident Covid-19 Came from Wuhan Lab’. 1 May 2020. https://www.ft.com/content/84935e17-b50e-4a66-9c37-e2799365b783.
Spring, Marianna. 2020. Coronavirus: How to Talk about Conspiracy Theories. British Broadcasting Corporation. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-53395619/coronavirus-how-to-talk-about-conspiracy-theories.
Venook, Jeremy. 2020. ’20 Conspiracy Theories Trump Has Pushed Before and During His Presidency’. Center for American Progress Action. 19 May 2020. https://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/democracy/news/2020/05/19/177746/20-conspiracy-theories-trump-pushed-presidency/.
