Tag: Thesis Writing

Chapter 5 (or 6 or 7) – The Inference to the Existence of a Conspiracy

The final chapter of my thesis, which is number 7 (in the file directory), number 6 (according to the PDF) or number 5 (as my supervisors would have it) is my third peg, so to speak, in why I think we have a prima facie case for our suspicion of conspiracy theories; they are typically examples of Inferences to Any Old Explanation (which you might know better as “Just So” stories, ala Mr. Kipling ((And his marvellous cakes.)) ).

Originally I was going to base this chapter on large chunks of Peter Lipton’s book on the Inference to the Best Explanation (which, funnily enough, is called “Inference to the Best Explanation” and was published in 2004 (the second edition) by Routledge), and not just because he specifically mentions (and then glosses over) conspiracy theories on page 60.

“Perhaps some conspiracy theories provide examples of this. By showing that many apparently unrelated events flow from a single source and many apparent coincidences are really related, such a theory may have considerable explanatory power. If only it were true, it would provide a very good explanation. That is, it is lovely. At the same time, such an explanation may be very unlikely, accepted only by those whose ability to weigh evidence has been compromised by paranoia.”

Lipton runs a contrast between the loveliness of explanations (just how powerful they are as explanatory hypotheses, essentially) and the likeliness of such explanations (i.e. just how probable is the explanatory hypothesis); he thinks ((Well, thought; Peter Lipton is dead.)) that conspiracy theories were good explanations only in the lovely sense as they were unlikely.

Lipton doesn’t come back to conspiracy theories, which is useful for me, because, in some important respects, it rather gives away the kind of analysis I have in kind for chapter 5/6/7.

As I wrote, my original intention was to develop Lipton’s view with specific respect to conspiracy theories, but that is no longer the case. Instead, I am developing the Inference to Any Old Explanation analysis that Dr. Jonathan McKeown-Green and I worked up for our Critical Thinking course (PHIL105 to the fans) at Auckland. The Lipton material is useful in talking about when the inferential practices of epistemic agents can be said to `go right’ but my analysis is really about when such practices `go wrong.’ It is much easier to work up a bespoke philosophy/epistemology than it is to try and make the work of someone else fit your particular analysis (ask me about my MA thesis for detailed reasons as to how that doesn’t necessarily work out for the best).

Still, I should point out that whilst I was writing this post I realised that there was a particular part of Lipton’s analysis of IBE (as the cool kids these days call “Inference to the Best Explanation”) which I could use to fill this particular hashed out section of the chapter (the “%” marks are playing the role of hashes in my LaTeX documents):

%However, we should also be aware that there is a kind of tradeoff between the probability of an hypothesis and the extent to which said hypothesis suggests the explanans.

%[This is the stuff that motivates Bayesianism. We might need to say a bit about it somewhere to help set up this discussion of the Inference to Any Old Explanation.] – Will need my Goldman…

I’m no Bayes scholar; I know how the theory works and the difference between prior and posterior probabilities (which it is important never to confuse), but the specific details… Well, I’d need to spend quite some time with a primer and a notepad to get myself sufficiently up to speed on Brother Bayes and his mathematical theorems. However, Lipton has a gloss on Bayes, since Bayesianism is often trotted forth as a contender for a theory of the Inference to the Best Explanation, and so I might use the Lipton gloss (which I’ve partially written up) after all.

Which goes to show that this new “thesis-centric” blog ethos is already delivering. Huzzah.

Next time: What it is I am actually trying to say in chapter 5/6/7.

The Future: My Role In It

I really haven’t been giving this blog the attention it requires for it to be something people will want to regularly read, digest and generally say “I like this; you should read it to.” My intention was to use the blog to chronicle my thesis writing as well as providing me with a place to place all my notes, in case of emergency. I’ve stopped doing the former and the latter… well, I found a more effective way of ensuring my thesis and related notes survive the required three fatal hard-drive crashes (or all of Auckland going up in an unexpected volcanic eruption).

Now, normally starting a post in this manner strongly suggests, to the reader, that the next paragraph will start something like:

“So, this is why I’ve decided to close the blog down.”

The author might then say:

“Of course, I do this with regret…”

or:

“In other news, I’m joining my brothers and sisters on their astral voyage the comet we call ‘The Fathervessel.'”

but this would be too predictable.

No. I’m in the endgame of the thesis and, really, I should be doing an awful lot of work over the coming months and it would be quite helpful for me, both during the process and after the event, to have a record of what I did when, how I did what, why I did how and… well, what parts of the process my future therapist will want to know about.

So, future updates will hopefully not be all about the snark but rather the work.

Or lack thereof. At the moment I’m in a bit of a bind; one of the courses I am teaching this semester has proven to be a lot more work than anticipated, what with the class size being incredibly small and the course being designed for a student population several magnitudes larger in number. I’m rewiring lectures and rethinking the very structure of the course, session by session, and I’m not finding all that much time to devote to my thesis writing. Things will improve in a few weeks, but for the moment, work on the ‘Inferences’ chapter goes slowly (and not entirely ‘surely’).

I’ll talk about that in the next post.

An Update on the Thesis

This week has been all about getting the rough draft of the thesis into some semblance of a final product.

It has been a rather productive affair.

LaTeX has some rather useful features, most of which I’ve not been using. Cross-referencing, the use of the \include command, automagical page numbering… Now, given that this is the final year, these are the kind of things that it would be useful to start inputting now so as to save me time and effort in three months time. Luckily, I’ve been somewhat aware of this need for the last two years, so I’ve been marking what needs to cross-references to what. Still, that was a lazy solution; to paraphrase Wodehouse, it would have been the work of a moment to have done it properly from the beginning.

Mostly, though, I’ve been rewriting. Last week it was chapter 2, which presents my definition of that most amorphous of things, the conspiracy theory. The original chapter. written about two years ago, turned out to be almost risibly out of touch with subsequent chapters; issues I thought would be important at the time have turned out not to be. For example, I thought I would make a lot out of the distinction between ‘narrow’ and ‘wide’ notions of the endgoal of conspiracy theories, but it turns out one of my footnotes was right; it’s just a definitional game that really ends up doing the discourse no favours.

Which brings me to this week. Chapter 2 used to be chapter 3, but the original chapters 1 and 2 seem to do almost exactly the same job. I need to unify them.

Which may well be the best thing ever. At the moment I have 94,000 words in my thesis and it’s not meant to be any more than 100,000. I’ve not written the final chapter or the conclusion, so I need to start finding things to cull. Two introductions is a good place to start, but I’m going to need more. Luckily, that chapter on the transmission of conspiracy theories has a lot of dead wood in it.

More news as it comes to hand.

Five Minutes of Thesis

Due to being a little bored and wanting to play with Quicktime X’s screen recording mode I decided to make a little move about my thesis. In essence, give minutes of me editing the bally thing with a voiceover. It’s not Shakespeare, or even Dickken’s (with two ‘K’s), but it is my voice doing what it does best; excellent work ((Thank you, Newsradio.)).

Five trivial items of notes in re my thesis

1. On Friday, after using yet another example culled from the death of Julius Caesar, I changed the title (temporarily) of the thesis to “A thesis on the Death of Julius Caesar, plus occasional musings about the Epistemology of Conspiracy Theories.”

2. Half my footnotes are mere reminders to myself to make sure the thesis cross references itself in the final edit. About half of the remaining non-reference-y footnotes will likely not survive the final cull.

Except for the Bibiography footnote. That stays.

3. Sometimes, to avoid criticism from my supervisors, I pre-empt the critique with a square-bracketed section explaining that I know the section is awkward/incomplete or frustratingly vague. From time to time I think this is cheating on my part, although it can be due to not knowing how else to express something at the time.

4. I think I know how to turn this into a publishable book, long-term; I’ve already got short snippets (% out in the actual LaTeX files) of extension material in the main body of the thesis sections for careful elaboration at some future date.

Of course, by the time I finish this thesis I probably won’t want to expand on these sections ever again.

5. All my previous work has had references to aardvarks. The current work does not. This displeases me.

Thesis Deadline

Well, here’s my provisional timetable for completing the thesis.

4th of May – The ‘Curious Tension’ chapter (in complete draft form).

10th of July – Conspiracy Theories as Explanations chapter (in complete draft form).

4th of December – Inference to a Conspiracy chapter (in complete draft form).

5th of March – Conclusion (in complete draft form).

7th of July – Submit thesis. Celebrate birthday a day later.

To quote Ghandi, “Let’s rock on!”