The website of Associate Professor of Philosophy M R. X. Dentith
Well, it’s the season to be lazy and I plan to live up to it. I have Wii games galore to complete, books to read inbetween and a stomach to enlarge with cake.
I wouldn’t expect much between now and the New Year.
Still, I wouldn’t like to leave you with nothing of note, so I’m setting up some auto-posts between now and then with linky goodness. Today: either a vapid Conspiracy Theory implicating China as a baddie and America as misunderstood, or the truth.
One of the complaints about the paper I’ve taken to heart is that it features too much terminology too quickly. My taxonomy of Conspiracy Theories and non-Conspiracy Theories, which comes out of the three questions ends up producing this (somewhat) bewildering array of options:
Now this is problematic because:
a) Having to explain the difference between a Unwarranted Sneer Conspiracy Theory and a Unwarranted Unendorsed Conspiracy Theory in the matter of a few minutes is tricky, given the time I have to spend on the really interesting contrast between Warranted Sneer Conspiracy Theories and Unwarranted Endorsed non-Conspiracy Theories, and
b) It turns out the real issue really isn’t the contrast between Warranted Sneer Conspiracy Theories and Unwarranted Endorsed non-Conspiracy Theories but rather the role of Unwarranted Endorsed Explanations.
The first half of the paper introduces a much too complex taxonomy for the task at hand. When its simplified it produces a much more elegant taxonomy and, crucially, makes it easier to give examples of the kinds of explanations I am concerned with:
I do not think I need to say much about Unwarranted Unendorsed Explanations, explanations which have no epistemic credentials and have neither positive or negative institutional status. However, the range of possibilities between these and Warranted Endorsed Explanations do present some interesting options.
Warranted Unendorsed Explanations
Some explanations will have the right kind of epistemic credentials but have neutral institutional status, in that they will be neither endorsed (have positive institutional status) nor sneered at (have negative institutional status).
New explanations of a phenomena, for example, might well fall into this category; the individual scientist generates her explanation of an event, using her best inferences, and, before submitting the explanation to the process of peer review, has an explanation which does not yet have institutional status.
Warranted Sneer Explanations
Some explanations will have the right kind of epistemic credentials to be considered warranted but will have negative institutional status.
There are numerous examples of such explanations in the Natural Sciences. Whilst we all now accept Tectonic Plate Theory as an explanation for the shape and motion of the continents we must admit that when it was first proposed it was sneered at, despite its epistemic credentials being good. The same story can be told about the explanation that H. pylori causes peptic ulcers ((With regard to both of these examples of Warranted Sneer Explanations I think we can tell a reasonable story as to why the warranted explanations were sneered at; in both cases the new explanation went against the “received wisdom” of its day and thus the new theories had to shoulder and discharge the Burden of Proof, which they did.)).
Unwarranted Sneer Explanations
Some explanations have no epistemic credentials but may have negative institutional status.
For example, that thesis that the events of 9/11 were caused by a Conspiracy by the Executive Branch of the Government of the United States of America using ultra-sonic weaponry and hologrammatic representations of two Boeing 747s to bring down the Twin Towers is an explanation that has no epistemic credentials and has negative institutional status, in that it is sneered at by the relevant authorities.
Warranted Endorsed Explanations
Some explanations have both the right epistemic credentials and have positive institutional status.
The explanation of the events of 9/11 that cite a Conspiracy on the part of Al-Qaeda to commit a terrorist attack on the Twin Towers with Boeing 747s has the right epistemic credentials and has positive institutional status.
Unwarranted Endorsed Explanations
Some explanations have no epistemic credentials yet positive institutional status.
One version of the explanation as to why it was necessary to invade Irag in 2002 was that the Saddam Hussein regime were said to be making Weapons of Mass Destruction; some senior figures in both the Bush and the Blair Governments argued that Hussein and his regime were conspiring to hide that fact. This explanation was, it turned out, a Unwarranted Endorsed Explanation; it had no epistemic credentials but was endorsed by two relevant institutions, in the matter of authorising invasions, the Governments of the USA and the UK.
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(Click on the above image to get the video to play)
Short version: It was received very well, I think.
Long version: The philosopher I was most concerned with, with regards to the general tenor of the paper, was Charles Pigden. I know Charles and get along with him very well; he’s a smart, erudite, well-respected philosopher and one of the few who can be said to also:
a) be working on Conspiracy Theories, and
b) doesn’t treat them as an insignificant topic in Philosophy.
He’s also slightly more sympathetic to Conspiracy Theorists (although not to any particular Conspiracy Theory) than most of our peers, so any paper running a (very) qualified defense of “Official Stories” over Conspiracy Theories was surely going to have to do some work to be acceptable to him.
It seems, all things considered, that it was.
I flagged, as footnotes, a couple of sections in the paper as “I wonder what Charles’ response to this will be” and, in most cases, I now have an answer. Charles, quite rightly, came up with a lot of examples that show that the trust I am advocating in official sources, cannot be much more than naive, but naive trust is sometimes sufficient for particular kinds of beliefs to be justified.
One of my supervisors, Justine Kingsbury, had dinner with Charles post the paper and I will be getting some of his suggestions, via her, come the beginning of the week. Looking forward to those.
It is, I suppose, a bit strange to be so pleased that one particular person liked the paper, but that is a consequence of this academic lark. Some voices are louder and more important on certain issues.
Which is not to say that I just blithely ignored the other comments I received, which were also largely positive. I might comment more fully on them all come Monday; at the moment I’m just tired and drained from five days of boozy socialising and hours of ‘big thinking.’
Which will also mark the process of making the paper an article. I think I can devote a week to that before Christmas and/or starting the final chapter before the end of the year.
The AAP paper is motivated by three questions we can ask about rival explanations when it comes to Conspiracy and non-Conspiracy Theories:
1. To what extent is the explanation conspiratorial?
2. What are the explanation’s epistemic credentials?
3. What is the explanation’s institutional status?
I’m trying to give an argument as to why the average 1930s Moscovite should have (or had good reason to have) believed the official stories ((This is no longer my terminology in the paper, but that’s probably another post.)) of the Moscow Show Trials and Lysenkoism.
One way to argue that is with reference to how we construe a legitimate Appeal to Authority; academic theories, for example, are usually only endorsed if they have the right credentials, but we don’t necessarily think that is the case with political theories. Sometimes, as we both know, politicians endorse theories because the populace wants them to, or they are mistaken, misguided et cetera.
My two examples, however, are clear cases of duplicitous political endorsement, so, really, what I need (and I think this is a clever bit) a fourth question:
Was the explanation postulated sincerely?
Now, because we think that insincere endorsements of unwarranted theories are rare, we have a prima facie case for thinking that we should, at least on first glance, accept the Official Story when it is up against a Conspiracy Theory.
It gets more complex than that, of course, in the six thousand words, but I think this, as the gist, kind of works
Well, I went and did it, I spent another three hours in the company of Richard Gage and his cohort of Truthers. In the process I learnt something new about myself.
1) I’m a glutton for punishment.
2) Apparently I’m one of the country’s top debunkers ((Or, at least, that is what Will Ryan, the organiser, believes.)).
It’s hard to know where to start with Gage’s version of the ‘Inside Job’ thesis of 9/11. He certainly seems sincere in his belief, even when he was asking for money towards the end. It might just be my impoverished student state, but when a man complains that he’s only on half the income he had as a ‘prestigious’ architect that doesn’t really cry poverty to me.
Anyway, some thoughts, culled from both presentations.
1. The Truthers claim they are not a fringe group, but with only 960 architects and engineers in their group and 4,000 non-professional members, they certainly seem fringe-sized.
2. Gage’s 90% conversion rate seems to be fair. At the Wellington event there were 340 in the Soundings Lecture Theatre. 27 of us were supporters of the Official Story at the beginning, 97 were unsure and the remaining 216 were Truthers. By the end there were 3 of us Official Story supporters left and 67 unsure (including Hugh Young, of the New Zealand Skeptics, I might add). That meant that 270 people were Truthers by the end. Auckland was pretty similar; of the 125 people, 12 were supporters of the Official Story at the beginning; 2 were left at the end.
3. You could play ‘M(ain)S(tream)M(edia) Bingo’ based upon the number of times he says ‘Mainstream Media’ in a derogatory fashion.
4. Apparently, even given the MSM, the media attention here is much better than anything they’ve had in the States for years.
5. He really emphasises his love of the Scientific Method. Pity he gets it a bit backwards. He says we have to collect data before we decide on an hypothesis to test, but that gets it backwards. If you collect data you are already collecting data with respect to some hypothesis; he assumes the truth of his Controlled Demolition Thesis, essentially before he hypothesises it.
6. I would really like to see some work on the reliability of the eye-witness testimony he keeps referring to with regards to claims of heard explosions and the like. Psychologists will tell you that you have to take most of this stuff with a grain of salt; memories are being changed within minutes of the event happening and pre-conceptions get filtered in immediately; we expect explosive sounds to go with big events like collapses so people ‘read in’ that sound. Now, this doesn’t mean the testimony is actually unreliable, but it certainly is not beyond reasonable doubt.
7. Given a choice between someone being incompetent or someone being a liar, Gage goes with the liar thesis every time, it seems.
8. I don’t think he understands that the kind of analogies he uses don’t give him entailment (A is B) but rather, at best, strong suggestion (A is probably B). He argues by analogy a lot and always overstates the strength of the logical inference. Indeed, he’d have a half-decent thesis if he simply said ‘All I’m doing is arguing that controlled demolition might the case’ rather than insisting that it is.
9. Also, the low probability of an event seems to mean that the event cannot have occurred that way, which is also a problem for him. Low probability events happen all the time; they just aren’t as common as mid to high probability events.
10. Related: He really needs to stop asserting as fact controversial premises (such as the claim the jets of material preceding the collapsing floors are ‘squibs’ when, really, they could well be pressure exhausts ((His understanding of the way some windows pop when others do not is really remarkable primitive.)). Controversial premises and overstated inferences a bad argument make.
11. He has to touch on the Official Story from time to time to make his, excuse the potential pun, thesis fly, but whenever he presents the Official Story of, say, the destruction of the Twin Towers he presents a simplified version. He talks about the fire but not the damage caused by the impact. It’s easy to make the Official Story sound implausible if you don’t mention all of its salient points.
12. For someone who claims he isn’t a Conspiracy Theorist he certainly advocates them. In his list of things caused by 9/11 he has ‘World Financial Meltdown.’ He also makes caged references to a link to the Oklahoma City Bombing.
13. Gage wants it both ways; he wants to merely argue that he thinks another investigation, based upon new evidence, is warranted, which is an admirably weak conclusion which might be worthy of discussion, but then he asserts it is an ‘Inside Job,’ which means he’s already prejudiced in regard to the outcome, which means he’s not open to an enquiry that might just confirm the Official Story (which, if we really are arguing what happened that day, might still be the case even if some of his points are taken on board).
14. Apparently it would only require 100 people to be in the know to pull off the controlled demolition.
15. He hasn’t actually read the NIST report on 9/11. For someone who keeps telling people ‘Don’t believe what I tell you; research it for yourselves’ this seems a terrific oversight on his part.
16. There is a clever aspect to his argument, in that he argues by analogy that if WTC7 was destroyed by a controlled demolition, then the Twin Towers must have been as well. WTC7 is the little known third high-rise destroyed on the 11th of September; Gage focuses most of his efforts to persuade you that it was a planned destruction rather than mere gravitational collapse. Because so little is said about WTC7, he can argue more directly for a rival candidate explanation of the event and, once he has persuaded his audience, claim that the Twin Towers show the same features.
Now, to do the latter he has to make a particularly interesting claim. In the WTC7 case he argues that the buidlings started to collapse from the base, which he takes to be a sign of controlled demolition, but he can’t do the same with the Twin Towers because they, quite evidently, started to collapse from the point of the airliner impacts. To get around this obvious disimilarity he pulls a move that, really, is very clever and yet is also a quite significant weakness if you think about it. The point of impact is the base for the controlled demolition of the upper half of each building; once that starts ‘they’ then begin to set off the charges in the lower part of the building.
Which raises the question “How did they manage to get the planes to impact exactly where they wanted them to?”
Of course, that question can be answered, but it makes for a spectacularly complex plot on the part of the conspirators, one that almost beggars belief.
17. Penny Bright might be concerned about your water bills but she is a Climate Change Skeptic.
I haven’t even touched on the nano-thermite; I’ll try to collect my thoughts on that topic before the show this coming Sunday.