The Earth is flat. Obama’s a Lizard. Michelle is transgender. Pizzagate was real. The moon landing was fake. Mary Magdalen and Jesus were secretly lovers.
These are all claims I don’t believe. And they’re all made by conspiracy theorists.
If you ask philosophers, there are two approaches you can take to conspiracy theories: generalism and particularism. Generalism says: “Conspiracy theories? They’re irrational. When you hear a conspiracy theory, strongly assume it’s bogus.” Particularism says: “Wait a minute. Conspiracies sometimes happen! Ever heard of Watergate? When you hear a conspiracy theory, don’t rush to judgement. Ignore the stigmatizing “conspiracy” label. Assess the thing on its merits.”
My take? We need a drizzle of both approaches. There are good reasons to be wary of conspiracy theories in most cases. ‘Conspiracy theory = sus’ is a useful heuristic. But there’s nothing about conspiracy theories per se that makes them irrational. And in many individual cases, we should hold our initial suspicions loosely.
My favourite philosopher on conspiracy theories—M. R. X. Dendrith—lists four reasons people might have to treat most conspiracy theories as initially suspect. But, he argues, none of them are decisive reasons, or apply to every conspiracy theory in circulation. And even if they warrant initial suspicion of most conspiracy theories, they don’t warrant thinking that conspiracy theories are automatically irrational, prior to looking into them.
Maturity. Many conspiracy theories have been around for ages, but haven’t ever been vindicated. ‘Vindication’ can come in the form of widespread acceptance of the theory—in light of the evidence already available—or in the form of an evidential breakthrough, one proving the theory beyond reasonable doubt. The fact many conspiracy theories have hung around for decades unvindicated, collecting Cheeto dust in family basements, is a good reason to view them with initial suspicion. As Dentith writes: “‘Maturity’ is like a mouldy cheese, or an old egg; it stinks, and that stench is a reason to treat it with some suspicion.”1 Nevertheless: not all conspiracy theories are old. Some are brand spanking new. And as Dentith points out, among the ones that are old, many have an easy explanation for why no new breakthroughs have surfaced: conspiracy. If the theory in question is true, might not be super surprising that the smoking gun evidence never came into public view, given that the government or other conspirators might have destroyed the evidence or buried it away.
Recurrence. Sometimes, new conspiracy theories look exactly like the old ones. Next time there’s a major mass shooting, I bet people will say straight away that the shooting was a covert government operation—a Democrat-led attempt to gin up support for gun control. The trouble is, we heard people say that last time, and the claims were bunkum then. This should give us reason to treat the claims suspiciously the next time they’re made, before we look at the purported evidence. Nevertheless: as Dentith points out, “a theory can resemble a recurrent narrative we already think is suspicious, but if it relies on new evidence or novel arguments, then it ought to be analysed afresh.”2
Fantastical Claims. Some conspiracy theories make fantastical claims. It’s hard to classify what counts as ‘fantastical’, exactly, but claims that interdimensional lizard people run the White House are as good an example as any. The fantasticality of some conspiracy theories is a sensible reason to doubt them. Nevertheless: many conspiracy theories aren’t fantastical—they involve normal, secretive humans doing normal, secretive things. And even for the ones that are, there’s a difference between claims that go beyond our current understanding of the world and claims that contradict it. Oftentimes, it’s not initially obvious which of those buckets a given conspiracy theory falls into.
Defectibility. According to Pigden, “[a] conspiracy is defectible if the costs of defection are low and the rewards of defection are high.”3 In concrete terms: if the theory says lots of people are involved in a cover up, then so long as a co-conspirator could benefit themselves—through book tours, speaking fees, etc.—and avoid serious censure—exiling, assassination, etc.—by whistleblowing, the longer a conspiracy theory goes without a whistle-blower to corroborate it, the likelier it is to be false. Nevertheless: in many cases, the costs of defection might be pretty high. Look at Julian Assange. And for some conspiracy theories to make sense, you don’t need too many conspirators to actually know what’s behind the curtain. So the absence of defectors is rarely a decisive point against a conspiracy claim.
One more I’d add is:
Gamification. As Niel Levy has pointed out, many conspiracy theorist seem to treat their favoured theories like games4. Consider: conspiracy theory are entertaining and fun. People watch the “History” Channel, stream The Matrix, and read novels that sensationalize faux conspiracies. Like game-players, conspiracy theorists often seem ironically detached from their work, banding together on 4chan and sharing conspiratorial memes “for the lulz”. Q—the anonymous father (or fathers) of QAnon—was treated by Q theorists like a game-leader, dropping fun cryptic cyphers for followers to decode (cyphers which said things like: “shall we play a game once more?”, and: “This is not a game. Learn to play the game.”5) Plausibly, the way some conspiracy theories seem to rise out of a desire for play is at least some reason to treat them suspiciously. When I was a kid, my friend Katie and I half-deluded ourselves into believing there was a conspiracy afoot (headed by a criminal named “Delphi Rape”—a “name” I’d swiped from the front page of a newspaper, which I now know was detailing a horrible sex crime) to kidnap the village dogs. As we looked for confirmatory evidence, the evidence piled up: when we passed a man in the street who I could’ve sworn was the criminal mastermind, Katie dashed behind me in his direction while I wasn't looking and came back with a small, child’s hairbrush—his—hair caught between the bristles (Katie’s hair colour, sure, but clearly the hair of a kidnapped golden retriever.) And one evening, as we spied for criminal activity through my bedroom window, we noticed a trickle of cars (about one every few minutes), almost all of them with a dog in the back. My brother pointed out that this might be better explained by the fact that it was dog walking time—but I wasn’t so naïve.
Obviously, this was an unreliable—albeit fun—way to form beliefs. It wasn’t rational to believe in a conspiracy of dognapping. In a similar way, the fact many conspiracy theories seem to bubble up from online communities that seem more interested in play than in truth should give us reason to doubt some conspiracy theories. Nevertheless: not all conspiracy theories originate in a spirit of play, even if later adherents accept it in a playful spirit. And a detached, playful spirit can sometimes be epistemically useful: by trying on new ideas in a spirit of play, we can avoid entrapment in old ways of thinking, and question paradigms we might not otherwise have questioned.
The take-home message is this: there’s no way to automatically rule out all conspiracy theories as irrational. Oftentimes, to be confident a conspiracy theory is false, you need to do the heavy lifting and look at the evidence yourself. Also, though, it’s right to view conspiracy theories with initial suspicion: red flags are red flags. You don’t have to treat Pizzagate like Watergate.
(This article was inspired by Matthew Adelstein’s recent piece, Conspiracy Theorists Aren’t Ignorant. They’re Bad at Epistemology. Check it out!)
Dentith, M. R. X. (2022)."Suspicious conspiracy theories." Synthese 200, (3)243: p.
Ibid. p. 8.
Pigden, C. (2018). Conspiracy theories, deplorables and defectibility: a reply to patrick stokes. M.R.X. Dentith (Ed.), Taking Conspiracy Theories Seriously (p. 203-15). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc: p. 209.
Levy, N. (2022). Conspiracy theories as serious play. philosophical topics, 50(2), 1-20.
Quoted in: Ibid. p. 4.
I choose to defer to the experts.
A much better take than most analyses of CP's, though still flawed.