(I seem to be losing my touch when it comes to post titles…)
So, work. I’ve been at it like a… well, someone working away at a thesis. The last few weeks have seen me editing my sixty-five page chapter 1 (provisionally I call it chapter one; it might be chapter 2, actually) where I go through the terminology in use by philosophers in respect to `Conspiracy Theories’ and draw out the common threads and intuitions they use to define the term. This is going to lead to my definition (which is next week’s work), of which I have a fairly good vague idea of (but actually making it concrete; well, there’s the rub). Which should hopefully justify the following sentence (which occurs on page sixty of this section):
Once my definition is stated (and defended) I will then move on to the question of what kind of explanations are Conspiracy Theories, how they are transmitted (and their relation to other kinds of social transmitted knowledge claims, like Gossip and Rumour) and how we can explain what appears to be a rather peculiar tension on our beliefs about Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories, to whit the fact that we know Conspiracies do occur and yet it seems we have \textit{prima facie} ((TeX Markup)) warrant to our suspicion of (contemporary) Conspiracy Theories.