Abstract
I argue that that an influential strategy for understanding conspiracy theories stands in need of radical revision. According to this approach, called ‘generalism’, conspiracy theories are epistemically defective by their very nature. Generalists are typically opposed by particularists, who argue that conspiracy theories should be judged case-by-case, rather than definitionally indicted. Here I take a novel approach to criticizing generalism. I introduce a distinction between ‘Dominant Institution Conspiracy Theories and Theorists’ and ‘Non-Dominant Institution Conspiracy Theories and Theorists’. Generalists uncritically center the latter in their analysis, but I show why the former must be centered by generalists’ own lights: they are the clearest representatives of their views, and they are by far the most harmful. Once we make this change in paradigm cases, however, various typical generalist theses turn out to be false or in need of radical revision. Conspiracy theories are not primarily produced by extremist ideologies, as generalists typically claim, since mainstream, purportedly non-extremist political ideologies turn out to be just as, if not more responsible for such theories. Conspiracy theories are also, we find, not the province of amateurs: they are often created and pushed by individuals widely viewed as experts, who have the backing of our most prestigious intellectual institutions. While generalists may be able to take this novel distinction and shift in paradigm cases on board, this remains to be seen. Subsequent generalist accounts that do absorb this distinction and shift will look radically different from previous incarnations of the view.
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Notes
A reviewer asks why I choose to focus on generalist accounts that center Non-DITs when particularist accounts—such as Coady (2003) and Räikkä (2018)—also center Non-DITs. This is a fair question. The main reason I focus on generalist accounts is that the generalists believe there is something inherently epistemically defective about conspiracy theories and are therefore concerned to formulate analyses, summed up in claims (1)–(4), about who conspiracy theorists are, why they believe what they believe, and how resulting dangers should be combated. Because particularists believe the merits of any conspiracy must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, they do not pursue these kinds of generalizations. It is these generalizations and analyses, currently developed by prominent generalists, that I want to object to here. But, as I indicate in Sect. 4, I disagree with any account, generalist or particularist, that claims that we should build into the definition of ‘conspiracy theory’ that it cannot be “officially” issued.
These views are not necessarily in tension and are even complementary. Cassam, for example, endorses Sunstein & Vermeule’s claim that Conspiracy Theories are epistemically insulated, though he does disagree with some of their views on best practices for combatting them. These accounts are also not exhaustive of generalism, but they are—at least in terms of citation and uptake—two of the most widely discussed views. They allow me to draw out the overarching argumentative strategy I want to deploy against generalism that can then be used against other incarnations of this approach.
Napolitano’s position is discussed in more detail in Sect. 5.
Napolitano’s discussion is focused on the attitudes of conspiracy theorists, rather than the theories themselves (2021). To account for this possibility, my main distinction carves up cases as either Dominant vs. Non-Dominant Institution Conspiracy Theories or Conspiracy Theorists.
As far as I can tell, besides the very brief citing of the Iraq-Al Qaeda DIT, Cassam only discusses two other DITs: former South African President Thabo Mbeki’s rejection of antiretrovirals for HIV because he “believed that the American government was conspiring with drug companies to sell toxic drugs to Africans” (68). This example is also not returned to in the book, and its most salient feature for Cassam—the scale of the harm caused by this Conspiracy Theory—will turn out to be an important consideration for centering this kind of case in our analysis. The second example is of “Donald Trump and the Republican Party” promoting the Conspiracy Theory “that protestors against the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court were part of a conspiracy orchestrated by George Soros” (115). In the context of the latter example, Cassam cites the work of Kathryn Olmstead, and concedes “that governments themselves are responsible for so many Conspiracy Theories” (115). But these DITs play almost no role in his subsequent analysis, as we will see.
I am not claiming that those who are not part of such dominant institutions can never gain or exert power and influence. My point is that the power and influence that these institutions have are not contingent features; they are characteristic of these institutions either because of the explicit authority they have been given or because, given their institutional mission and history, they are perceived as nonetheless having informal (though still crucial) authority.
Pigden (2007) makes an observation that may explain why DITs have not been centered in generalist accounts: “When people say or imply that conspiracy theories ought not to be believed, what they actually mean…is that we should not believe theories that postulate evil schemes on the part of recent or contemporary Western governments (or government agencies) and that run counter to the current orthodoxy in the relevant Western countries” (229). But regardless of whether these motivations are animating such views, I argue that generalists are wrong not to center DITs. Thank you to a reviewer for drawing my attention to Pigden’s observation.
One might argue that the Sandy Hook Conspiracy Theory is a DIT because it was promoted by InfoWars, a media outlet with a substantial following and on which then presidential candidate Donald Trump appeared. The network also had connections to figures in the Trump administration. I would nonetheless characterize the Sandy Hook Conspiracy Theory as Non-DIT because it was never espoused or advocated for by political officials in their capacity as political officials, nor by mainstream, prominent media outlets, nor by the U.S. military or intelligence agencies, nor by any dominant intellectual or economic institutions. In fact, the Theory was regularly criticized by such institutions and outlets. This is not to deny that other Conspiracy Theories promoted by InfoWars may have crossed over into counting as, or been part of, DITs.
See Schmidt and Williams for a helpful overview of neoconservative ideology and its impact on the Bush administration’s foreign policy (2008).
It is also worth noting that a form of Global McCarthyism played a substantial role in the rise of climate denialism, which is itself often a DIT, as Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway have helpfully shown: “Our protagonists—Fred Seitz, Fred Singer, Bill Nierenberg, and Robert Jastrow”, institutionally successful and influential scientists, “were fiercely anti-Communist, and viewed science as crucial in helping to contain its spread […] When the Cold War ended, these men looked for a new great threat. They found it in environmentalism. Environmentalists, they implied, were ‘watermelons’: green on the outside, red on the inside” (2010, 248). Because of these scientists’ “earlier work in the Cold War weapons programs, these men were well-known and highly respect in Washington, D.C., and had access to power all the way to the White House” (Oreskes and Conway 2010, p. 7). Beyond political institutions, “[r]espected media outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and many others repeated [their] claims as if they were a ‘side’ in a scientific debate” (7). The explicit articulations of the views of this group of Conspiracy Theorists are, again, readily apparent from the institutional record. Climate change must be a fabrication of a conspiracy of activists and politicians with, as Fred Singer put it, “hidden agendas” because the policies this group argued were necessary to deal with the threat were intended “not just to ‘save the environment’ but to change our economic system” (249).
These are all examples of what Chomsky and Herman call ‘flak’, which “refers to negative responses to a media statement or program” (1988/2008, 24). They point out that “[t]he ability to produce flak, and especially flak that is costly and threatening, is related to power” (25). There are direct forms of flak, such as “phone calls from the White House to Dan Rather or William Paley…or from irate officials of ad agencies or corporate sponsors to media officials asking for reply time or threatening retaliation. The powerful can also work on the media indirectly by complaining to their own constituencies (stockholders, employees) about the media [and] by generating institutional advertising that does the same”, among many other measures (25).
One might object here that these external pressures demonstrate that DITs are not genuine Conspiracy Theories or Conspiracy Theorists because the Theories themselves are not genuinely believed and because they are often cynically (rather than sincerely) deployed, as opposed to Non-DITs. Such an objection, however, is of no help to Cassam, who rejects sincere belief as a necessary condition on someone being a Conspiracy Theorist: “Whatever [the Conspiracy Theorist’s] intentions, the actual function of his theory is to promote a political agenda” (2019, 11). More importantly, though, the notion that those in dominant institutions who fabricate and promote Conspiracy Theories are primarily doing so cynically is misguided. There are DITs who seem to be sincere believers, such as Wolfowitz and many of the commentators cited in this discussion who later explained their positions as products of sincere belief in the truth of the DITs. The external pressures I discuss here are also part of a larger, subtle process of shaping the beliefs of those who are members of such dominant institutions, as Chomsky and Herman document in the case of U.S. media in their (1988/2008). It is not, then, simply a matter of actors publicly going along with the DIT while privately disbelieving the Theory in the cases I discuss. The line is far more blurred, and intentions are extremely difficult to assess in these contexts.
If we accept Oreskes and Conway’s history of the connection between a kind of Global McCarthyism and the rise of climate denialism (mentioned in footnote 12 above), then the harms of this DIT are impossible to overstate: it threatens the very future of humanity.
After establishing their fundamentally political nature, Cassam discusses other aspects of Conspiracy Theories (ones I do not discuss in detail here because they are not as relevant): Conspiracy Theories are “speculative, contrarian, esoteric, amateurish and premodern” (28). It is worth pointing out that DITs are also speculative, contrarian (in that they insist that surface-level appearances are deceptive—e.g. that those espousing left-wing ideas might seem harmless, but may well be communists aiming to infiltrate an organization), esoteric (allowing for explanations no matter how bizarre as long as they hew to the relevant political line), and premodern in their facile explanatory outlook. I will, however, take issue with the feature Cassam focuses on most here in the paper’s next section: the purportedly “amateurish” nature of Conspiracy Theories.
A reviewer asks whether paradigm cases are relevant to conceptual engineering projects such as Napolitano (2021) and Napolitano and Reuter (2021). I discuss these views in more detail in section V, but note that paradigm cases do play a key role in both these specific conceptual engineering projects and in such projects in general. Sally Haslanger, for example, has critiqued her own earlier conceptual engineering project regarding the concept of gender for failing to vindicate the identities of various trans individuals—for, in other words, failing to capture what Haslanger takes to be a paradigm case (2020). Napolitano and Reuter (2021) use specific cases of conspiracy theories to draw out ordinary speakers’ usage of this term and have as a goal for their conceptual engineering project capturing this ordinary usage. Their engineering project therefore also aims to capture and remain accountable to specific cases.
A reviewer wonders whether an argument could be given for treating Non-DITs as paradigmatic because there seem to be many more of them. While interesting, this claim turns on the difficult question of how Conspiracy Theories should be quantified and individuated. Is, for example, Global McCarthyism a single Conspiracy Theory, or is its application to each country or government a different Theory? Furthermore, DITs often multiply given their political aims. For example, to facilitate Mossadegh’s overthrow, press “[a]rticles accused him not just of communist leanings and designs on the throne, but also of Jewish parentage and even secret sympathy for the British. Although Mossadegh did not know it, most of these tirades were either inspired by the CIA or written by CIA propagandists in Washington” (Kinzer, 2003, 6). Bevins discusses similar tactics at play in Brazil (2020, 103). It is not clear to me, then, that there is a substantial difference between the quantity of DITs and Non-DITs or precisely what the relevant measure would look like here, though I would welcome further argument on this question.
Dentith (2018a, p. 101) makes kindred observations about the movements of Theories from dominant to non-dominant institutional contexts.
Harris denies that his account advocates for a form of traditional generalism. He wants to show that we have “prima facie grounds for scepticism about the epistemic merits of conspiracy theorising even if certain instances of conspiracy theorising are epistemically unimpeachable” (2018, 240). Regardless of whether Harris’s position is itself distinguishable from generalism, my point here is that it cannot be invoked by generalists to defend their marginalizing of DITs absent additional argument and explanation since they themselves categorize certain DITs as Conspiracy Theories.
In my (2020) and (2021), I discuss the conditions for felicitous objections to stipulations, particularly in the context of conceptual articulation. Detailed argument concerning the relevant ends of inquirers and the weight of such ends is necessary, on my view, for endorsing an attempted stipulative articulation or rearticulation of a concept.
The history of antisemitism—as well as the history of various forms of racism and bigotry—provide an enormous number of examples of Dominant Institution Conspiracy Theories and Theorists. For discussion of the considerations involved in arriving at an adequate concept of antisemitism, see Klug (2013) and (2018) and Abicht et al. (2020). Though I do not have space to examine this aspect of his account in-depth here, Cassam’s discussion of antisemitism in his (2019) fails to engage with the contemporary literature on this subject.
Uscinski & Parent do pay more attention in their empirical work than other researchers to such possibilities (2014). But they also work with a broadly particularist view of conspiracy theories: “[W]e do not mean a pejorative connotation with our use of ‘conspiracy theory’ or its variants”, so they are not individuating and measuring DITs in quite my sense (2014, p. 31).
Thank you to a reviewer for pressing me to clarify my position on these points.
I discuss Napolitano and Reuter (2021) in-depth in my (forthcoming).
Napolitano echoes this point in her (2021): “The main advantage of understanding conspiracy theories as self-insulated conspiracy-beliefs rather than as mere theories involving conspiracies, is that it allows for empirical studies in the psychology of conspiracy theorists” (97).
Thank you to two anonymous reviewers at this journal and two anonymous reviewers at another journal for their very helpful and constructive comments. I also received very helpful feedback from audiences at the 2021 UCD Online Conference on the Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories, a PERITIA work-in-progress session, and Wake Forest University. For discussion and comments on drafts, many thanks to Michael Barnes, Drew Cohen, Brian Klug, and Benjamin Serby. A special thanks to Hailey Huget, who read and commented on multiple drafts and provided, as always, invaluable insight.
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Shields, M. Rethinking conspiracy theories. Synthese 200, 331 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03811-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03811-x