‘Conspiracy Theory’ as a Tonkish Term: Some Runabout Inference-Tickets from Truth to Falsehood

ABSTRACT

I argue that ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘conspiracy theorist’ as commonly employed are ‘tonkish’ terms (as defined by Arthur Prior and Michael Dummett), licensing inferences from truths to falsehoods; indeed, that they are mega-tonkish terms, since their use is governed by different and competing sets of introduction and elimination rules, delivering different and inconsistent results. Thus ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘conspiracy theorist’ do not have determinate extensions, which means that generalizations about conspiracy theories or conspiracy theorists do not have determinate truth-values. Hence conspiracy theory theory – psychological or social scientific research into conspiracy theorists and what is wrong with them – is often about as intellectually respectable as an enquiry into bastards and what makes them so mean.

KEYWORDS:

• Tonk
• Prior
• Dummett
• conspiracy theories

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the audiences at a range of (mostly virtual) conferences and colloquia who have helped me to polish up this paper. These include the Otago Staff Seminar, the Pitzer College International Conference on the Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories, the University College Dublin Online Conference on Conspiracy Theories, and the Midwest Philosophy Colloquium. Thanks too to the members of the CTTSC online conspiracy seminar (headed by M Dentith) for keeping me up to the mark with current research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Personal communication.

2. A problem that beginners have with Or-Introduction is that it looks like a rule that you would never want to employ in real life. What on earth is the point of inferring some random disjunction from one of its disjuncts? We can grant that if Biden is old, it is true that either Biden is old or Trump is honest, but why bother to make such an uninformative inference? But the fact that Or-Introduction is usually rather pointless – and even, as Grice (1989) pointed out, that it sins against our conversational conventions – does not mean that the inferences it licenses are not logically valid or (to put another way) that every disjunction is not a logical consequence of each of its disjuncts.

3. ‘What is essential to an hypothesis is that it arouses an expectation, i.e. its confirmation is never completed. It has a different formal relation to reality from that of verification. Belief in the uniformity of events. An hypothesis is a law for forming propositions’; ‘The point of talking of sense-data and immediate experience is that we’re after a description that has nothing hypothetical in it. If an hypothesis can’t be definitively verified, it can’t be verified at all, and there’s no truth or falsity for it’ (Wittgenstein 1975, 44 and 283). See also Stern, Rogers, and Citron (2016): ‘A proposition can be verified or falsified, & is equivalent to a method of verifying or falsifying. Hypotheses are not verifiable or falsifiable in the same sense [hence not propositions]’.

4. See for instance Popper (1972a, 1972b).

5. Ryle (1950).

6. The most distinguished contemporary representative being Brandom (1994).

7. Prior attributes this thesis to Hare, Strawson and Kneale, and accurately but surprisingly to Popper: accurately, because as Binder, Thomas, and Peter (2022) make plain, Popper definitely believed that the meanings of the logical connectives are wholly determined by their introduction and elimination rules; surprisingly, because Popper’s critical realism affords what seems to me a decisive argument against the logical inferentialism that he also apparently espoused.

1) If ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘if-then’ etc. are to be understood in terms of the inferences that they license (and not in terms of the truth-conditions of the sentences in which they appear), then disjunctions, conjunctions and conditional claims are to be understood as inference-tickets (and not in terms of their truth-conditions).

2) If disjunctions, conjunctions and conditional claims are to be understood as inference-tickets, then large scale-theories (including scientific theories) composed (at least in part) of disjunctions, conjunctions and conditional claims are to be understood as inference-tickets (and not as representations of reality).

3) But (so Popper and his disciples such as Alan Musgrave insist) large scale theories and in particular scientific theories are not to be understood as inference-tickets, but as representations of reality.

4) So it is not the case that ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘if-then’ etc. are to be understood in terms of the inferences that they license (rather than the truth-conditions of the sentences in which they appear).

See Popper (1972a), Chapters 1 & 10 and (Popper 1972b), Chapters 2, 8 & 9 for Popper’s robustly realistic understanding of scientific theories, and Musgrave (1980) for a brilliant refutation of Wittgensteinian instrumentalism.

8. See for example, Keeley (1999), Coady (2003), Basham (2003), Hagen (2020), and Dentith (2014).

9. Tsapos (2023) and Duetz (2023) in this issue also argue that there are problems with conceptualizations of the terms ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘conspiracy theorist’ in the social science literature. Shields (2023) argues that attempts to develop such a conceptualization risk becoming a form of problematic conceptual domination.

10. There are exceptions of course. My Father remembered a WWII drill sergeant who endeavoured to intimidate his charges by proclaiming in stentorian tones ‘THEY CALL ME THE BASTARD – BECAUSE I AM!’. It didn’t work. The young recruits concluded that if he was going to come on like a pantomime villain, they would treat him as such, and responded with a chorus of ‘boos’. Also, some people use ‘bastard’ in a minimally pejorative way such that all men are potentially bastards without any implication that they are vindictive, arrogant or mean. Witness General Patton’s famous maxim: ‘No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country’. A more interesting case involving subtle shifts of pejorative meaning occurred during the Bodyline Bowling Tour in 1932. The captain of the English cricketing team, Douglas Jardine, developed the tactic of bowling at the bodies of the Australian batsmen rather than the wicket and was denounced as a bastard in consequence. He went to the Australian changing rooms to complain, only to be met at the door by the Australian vice-captain, Vic Richardson, who turned to his teammates and said: ‘OK, which of you bastards called this bastard a bastard?’.

11. Should I name and shame? Well, why not? Here are some papers that I came across after five minutes’ googling.

‘Meta-analytical evidence indicates the robust association between collective narcissism and conspiracy theories is moderated by the content of conspiracy theories’ (de Zavala, Bierwiaczonek, and Ciesielski 2022). But how can any evidence, whether meta-analytical or otherwise, indicate a robust association between collective narcissism and conspiracy theories, if it is indeterminate whether something is or is not a conspiracy theory? And if a conspiracy theory is simply a theory which posits a conspiracy, I very much doubt whether such a robust association holds.

‘Conspiracy beliefs are often viewed as a form of psychopathology, closely linked to anxiety, paranoia, and maladaptive traits. … This article presents a framework for understanding conspiracy beliefs as a paradoxical adaptation to historical trauma’ (Bilewicz 2022). But if we are defining ‘conspiracy beliefs’ as beliefs positing a conspiracy then there are many conspiratorial beliefs that are neither due to anxiety and paranoia nor adaptive responses to historical trauma, but are simply the products of historical and political literacy. If not, then the term ‘conspiracy belief’ does not have a determinate extension. Of course, it is no doubt true that some conspiracy beliefs (as non-tonkishly defined) are adaptive, but false, responses to historical trauma but it is equally true that many are not.

‘Conspiracy thinking can be viewed as a form of narrative comprehension … Comprehenders routinely favor information that is consistent with their perspective, but conspiracy thinkers likely do this to a greater extent, due to the low levels of cognitive reflection they exhibit. Conspiracy thinkers do this as well, but their knowledge base deviates from that of the mainstream, as a result of exposure to large amounts of misinformation’ (Zwaan 2022). Zwaan appears to be employing ‘conspiracy thinkers’ (aka ‘conspiracy theorists’) in accordance with something like Tonkish rules 2, since he assuming that theories which posit a conspiracy are ipso facto irrational, exhibiting ‘low levels of cognitive reflection’ because of an exposure ‘to large amounts of misinformation’. If conspiracy theorists are people who believe in theories that posit conspiracies, then this claim is false, since many conspiracy thinkers are perfectly rational, exhibiting high levels of cognitive reflection as a result of exposure (including self-exposure) to large amounts of accurate information, in the form of reputable histories and biographies. Of course, if he is deriving his conception of ‘conspiracy thinkers’ from common usage then his claims are untestable (and hence prima facie unscientific) since there is no fact of the matter about whether someone is or is not a ‘conspiracy thinker’. And if there is no fact of the matter about whether somebody is a ‘conspiracy thinker’ then his generalizations about all or most conspiracy thinkers, won’t have determinate truth-values.

Zwaan is assuming that conspiracy thinkers are (mostly?) irrational and is then developing a theory about what makes them irrational (‘low levels of cognitive reflection’ because of an exposure ‘to large amounts of misinformation’). The trouble is that the claim that conspiracy thinkers are mostly irrational, is either false (if conspiracy thinkers are simply people who subscribe to conspiracy-positing theories) or too indeterminate to be testable. Worse, it may be tautologous if he implicitly defining a ‘conspiracy thinker’ as somebody who subscribes to a theory that it is irrational to believe. In that case the claim that conspiracy thinkers are mostly irrational will be tautologically true, but his explanation of what it is about conspiracy thinkers that makes them irrational will be untestable without independent criteria for determining whether somebody who subscribes to a conspiracy theory does so irrationally and therefore qualifies as a ‘conspiracy thinker’.

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Charles Pigden

Charles Pigden is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, where he as taught since 1988. Though he thinks of himself primarily as meta-ethicist, he has publications on many subjects including logic Lakatos, the philosophy of religion, conspiracy theories, metaphysics, Hume, Jane Austen, Dostoevsky and Bertrand Russell.