Abstract
This paper seeks to carve out a distinctive category of conspiracy theorist, and to explore the process of becoming a conspiracy theorist of this sort. Those on whom I focus claim their beliefs trace back to simply trusting their senses and experiences in a commonsensical way, citing what they take to be authoritative firsthand evidence or observations. Certain flat Earthers, anti-vaxxers, and UFO conspiracy theorists, for example, describe their beliefs and evidence this way. I first distinguish these conspiracy theorists by contrasting them with another group that has recently received a lot of attention from the media, philosophers, and academics more broadly. I then dig more deeply into the nature of these conspiracy theorists’ epistemic self-understanding, in order to give an account of the process by which one becomes such a conspiracy theorist. I conclude with some takeaways and implications: first, I explore the implications of my account for whether these conspiracy theorists’ beliefs are rational; then, I argue that my account has practical takeaways about counteracting beliefs in misinformation, since strategies appropriate to this kind of conspiracy theorist may not be the same ones that are appropriate for other kinds.
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Notes
On the minimal definition of “conspiracy theory” I’m adopting, belief in conspiracy theories is distinct from conspiracy theories themselves: the conspiracy theory is the explanation of a phenomenon, and to believe a conspiracy theory is to believe that explanation. While some accounts conflate these two (e.g., Napolitano, 2021), I’ll follow Duetz (2022) in keeping them distinct. Furthermore, while I’ll frame my arguments simply in terms of Rowbothian “belief” in conspiracy theories, the reader is free to understand “belief” in a fairly broad sense. This could be a matter of what epistemologists call “full” or “outright” belief, and/or a matter of having credence 1 in a conspiracy theory. It could also mean merely taking a conspiracy theory to be likely true, or to be more plausible than not. Actual Rowbothians likely fall along the spectrum between mere high likelihood and outright belief, but I’ll gloss over this nuance in what follows.
I’m not assuming that being “anti-establishment” is necessarily an epistemic problem. Specifically, I’m not assuming that merely failing to fully trust mainstream sources of information makes one irrational or vicious (for discussion on both sides of this issue, see Harris, 2018; Hagen, 2022). I’m merely gesturing towards the kind of conspiracy theorist on whom I’m primarily focused: Rowbothians who claim the establishment is tricking the masses by covering up some observable fact.
For popular discussions, see Graziosi (2021), Siddharth and Murphy (2021), and Smith (2021); for discussion amongst philosophers, see Ichino (2022), Smith (2022), Buzzell and Rini (2023), Clarke (2023), Munro (2023), Levy (2022a), and Ganapini (2022); for a small sampling of academic discussion in areas outside philosophy, see Rosenblum and Muirhead (2019), Packer and Stoneman (2021), McIntosh (2022), and Beyer and Herrberg (2023). One issue I’ll set aside concerns whether Esotericists genuinely believe their conspiracy theories. Some philosophers have recently argued that many instead merely imagine or pretend (Ichino, 2022; Munro, 2023; Levy, 2022a; Ganapini, 2022). This issue is somewhat orthogonal to my purposes, given that I’m mainly focused on differences in the kind of evidence to which each sort of conspiracy theorist appeals. It’s a further, interesting question exactly what cognitive attitude each forms on the basis of this evidence, whether belief, imagination, or something else (cf. Ichino and Räikkä 2021). I’ll follow the majority of philosophers of conspiracy theory in assuming the relevant attitude is belief.
However, I don’t claim that these two categories exhaust all possible kinds of conspiracy theorists (see fn. 6). I’m also not the first to argue that one can be a conspiracy theorist without subscribing to highly complex, far-fetched narratives—as per fn. 1, the minimal definition of “conspiracy theory” I adopted in this paper all but guarantees that some well-evidenced “official” narratives count as conspiracy theories.
This distinction between types of flat Earthers demonstrates that the class of non-Rowbothian conspiracy theorists is heterogeneous: it includes those who subscribe to specialized methods as in QAnon or Pizzagate, but it also includes those who simply defer to authorities like the Bible.
In describing three examples of Rowbothians, I’ve said that they claim to base their beliefs on firsthand experiences of phenomena like the harmfulness of vaccines. In some cases, these self-descriptions may be a bit misleading—for example, it may not be that one literally has an experience as of a vaccine causing injury, but instead that one sees one’s child get vaccinated, sees one’s child get sick, and then infers from these experiences that the vaccine caused the illness. However, as will become even clearer in later sections, my focus is primarily on Rowbothians’ own self-understanding of their evidence and beliefs. What matters for my purposes is that they conceptualize themselves as trusting firsthand experience, even if the psychological reality is more complex.
This brings out one respect in which Rowbothians depart from Basham’s (2001, p. 277) characterization of conspiracy theorists as questioning how things appear on the surface rather than simply trusting appearances (in a way akin to questioning the nature of the external world rather than accepting what our senses tell us). Instead, Rowbothians claim their starting point is relying on naïve appearances.
This isn’t to say they necessarily draw an inference to a detailed, full story about exactly what the conspiracy and coverup look like. It could be that they’re already aware of such a story from other conspiracy theorists, and that they infer the story must be true. It could be that they infer some kind of coverup must be taking place, after which they engage with other conspiracy theorists to fill out the details of what it looks like.
An archived version of the Gromowski’s website is retrievable from https://web.archive.org/web/20190408134955/http://www.iansvoice.org:80/. Its “Resources” bar includes links to various conspiratorial anti-vax organizations, such as the National Vaccine Information Center and the ThinkTwice Global Vaccine Institute.
A Rowbothian’s belief in a conspiracy thus sounds more like an auxiliary hypothesis to a core hypothesis about a phenomenon like the flat Earth, harmfulness of vaccines, or UFOs (cf. Lakatos 1970). In other words, the belief in such a phenomenon is more central and secure, while the belief in a conspiracy is more likely to be revised in the face of new evidence (e.g., when faced with proof that the establishment hasn’t conspired to cover up the flat Earth, they’ll be more likely to shift to believing the establishment is stupid or deluded than to believing the Earth is round). Following Clarke (2002), it’s at first natural to analyze conspiracy theorizing in terms of conspiratorial core hypotheses rather than auxiliary ones, which would make Rowbothians unlike other conspiracy theorists. However, Poth and Dolega (2023) discuss various examples which suggest beliefs easily recognized as beliefs in conspiracy theories occur as auxiliary hypotheses, too. Paraphrasing, their examples include: core hypothesis “Princess Diana is alive” with auxiliary “the government covered up her death”; and core hypothesis “5G is damaging our health” with auxiliary “the government installed 5G networks with nefarious aims.” Such examples suggest conspiracy theories often come as auxiliary hypotheses even for non-Rowbothians. I take it that what makes someone a conspiracy theorist isn’t believing in a conspiratorial core hypothesis but in a conspiracy theory in general.
At first glance, it’s natural to construe epistemic self-identities in terms of the way one actually forms beliefs, i.e., whether one actually forms beliefs based on scientific evidence, independent thinking, etc. However, this isn’t strictly correct. Although it may be true of many people that they form beliefs via the kinds of methods with which they self-identify, the actual belief forming methods one follows can come apart from how one perceives oneself as forming beliefs (the examples given in the next paragraph make this clear). As per fn. 7, my focus in this paper is primarily on how conspiracy theorists perceive themselves and their own epistemic positions, rather than on how they in fact form their beliefs.
Other philosophers have recently discussed notions that are related to, though slightly distinct from, that which I’m calling epistemic self-identity. For example, Callahan (2021) argues that our values can drive which “epistemic frameworks” we commit to, which then dictates how we form beliefs in response to evidence. Her proposal could be used to complement and flesh out my own in this subsection, as a way of more concretely understanding how our epistemic self-identities translate into particular belief forming practices. Another related notion is what Byrd (2022) calls “epistemic identity.” Byrd’s notion refers to “the phenomenon of treating certain beliefs as part of one’s identity” (57), such as one’s religious or political beliefs. In other words, while my notion of epistemic self-identity is defined in terms of belief forming processes one values, Byrd’s notion of epistemic identity is defined in terms of certain beliefs. Still, the two notions are related: we take certain individual beliefs to result from processes with which we self-identify. Plausibly, such beliefs are among those that constitute what Byrd calls one’s epistemic identity.
Of course, as Mahr and Csibra (2021) note, there are exceptions. Sometimes, one person’s expertise can outweigh another person’s firsthand evidence—you might say you saw a robin in your backyard, but, once you’ve described it to me, my ornithological expertise might result in more authoritative testimony that it was a thrush. Still, it seems like we typically default to treating firsthand testimony as authoritative.
Of course, there are disrespectful ways to correct people about domains on which they aren’t experts—it would be disrespectful for a philosophy professor to correct a student in a condescending way or in a public context where the correction leads to embarrassment. My point is just that, bracketing such considerations about tone and context, the mere act of correcting someone about things that fall well within their territory seems disrespectful, while the same isn’t true of domains about which one isn’t an expert.
In §3.1, I claimed it wouldn’t make much sense to base an epistemic self-identity around being the kind of person who forms beliefs based on perceptual experience, because everyone forms beliefs this way. Note that I’m not contradicting this claim when I describe how Rowbothians form new self-identities. They’re not merely coming to value being the kind of person who forms beliefs on the basis of firsthand experience. Instead, they’re coming to value being the kind of person who forms and remains tenacious in such beliefs despite attempts form the establishment to try to undermine them.
At least, those of us living in open, democratic societies do—his account is meant to apply to such societies.
On the question of Rowbothian rationality, it’s also worth further investigating the details of how different Rowbothian conspiracy theories get fully fleshed out—for example, when it comes to how they describe the exact nature of the conspiracy and coverup. It could turn out that Rowbothian theories are epistemically deficient qua theories—for example, perhaps they resemble “degenerating research programs” (Clarke 2002; Lakatos 1970).
Of course, most people don’t explicitly have the concept “epistemic self-identity,” so these conversations wouldn’t necessarily invoke that label. Still, they could involve discussion of one’s values, the kind of person one sees oneself as being, and the like.
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Acknowledgements
For helpful comments and discussion, thank you to Leena Abdelrahim, Brian Huss, Reiss Kruger, Jennifer Nagel, Regina Rini, Julia Jael Smith, Seyed Yarandi, audiences at York University and the Canadian Philosophical Association, and two anonymous reviewers for Synthese.
Funding
This research was financially supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, York University’s Vision: Science to Applications project, and the Canada First Research Excellence Fund.
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Munro, D. Conspiracy theories, epistemic self-identity, and epistemic territory. Synthese 203, 113 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04541-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04541-y