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ABSTRACT
In an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times (08/06/2022), entitled Alex Jones is no kind of ‘theorist’, LZ Granderson writes that although the ubiquitous recent ‘conspiracy theorist’ of American journalism is Alex Jones, that appellation is not appropriate. He argues that Jones rarely ‘theorizes’ about events; he simply lies about them. In past work, I have argued that the starting points of many conspiracy theories are two forms of errant data: ‘unaccounted for’ data and ‘contradictory’ data. But Granderson’s critique raises two additional starting points, both of which are forms of falsehood: lies and what I call fabricated facts. Many conspiracy theories take as their starting point various forms of falsehood; this source points to a kind of conspiracy theory that is pernicious precisely because it is not offered in good faith as a theoretical explanation of events. I compare conspiratorial explanations to scientific explanations to see whether similar erroneous starting points exist there. I conclude that they do, and as with conspiracy theories, they often reflect a guiding influence of value-laden agenda that go beyond a mere attempt to accurately explain target phenomena.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Pitzer College for funding aspects of this research. Thanks to the organizers and attendees of both the 2nd International Conference on the Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories and The Second International Conspiracy Theory Symposium at the University of Miami where earlier versions of this paper were presented. Special thanks to Melina Tsapos, Rico Hauswald, and Will Mittendorf for their helpful comments on this essay.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
4 Though see (Duetz Citation2023) for a discussion of the different senses of 'theory' in which conspiracy theories are understood.
6 For more on the history of Protocols, see Pipes (Citation1997); Bronner (Citation2000).
8 The difficulty in determining the precise motives and mental state of the unknown originator(s) of this chain email need not concern us too much. Although it is hard to see how the mistake could have been innocent (perhaps they misremembered one of the flight numbers), even in that case, the originator seems to at least be guilty of undue negligence. The issue here is not unrelated to the question as to whether a conspiracy theorist has to harbor explicit racist beliefs in order to author a racist conspiracy theory. For more on this, see Will Mittendorf (Citationin press) contribution to this volume: 'Racist and Antiracist Conspiracy Theories'.
9 For more on this historical episode, see Dentith (Citation2014, 87ff).
10 A hallucinogenic compound derived from the roots of a West African shrub, Tabernanthe iboga.
11 Both social scientists (e.g., Pennycook et al. (Citation2021); Ren, Dimant, and Schweitzer (Citation2021)), as well as philosophers (e.g., O’Connor and Weatherall (Citation2019) and Verbrugge and Genot (Citation2023) have recently investigated how falsehoods are spread on social media, even by those who know or at least credibly suspect that this information is fictional. My thanks to Melina Tsapos for bringing this work to my attention.
12 Yet another recent example might be justifications given for slowing down the certification of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election. As political reporter Jerusalem Demsas described it at the time, eleven U.S. Senators ' … led by Sen. Ted Cruz announced that they would ‘reject the electors from disputed states’ unless an 'emergency 10-day audit’ of the election results was completed. Their argument largely rests on the fact that lots of people have questions about the legitimacy of the election – conveniently ignoring any role the president and prominent Republicans played in sowing doubt by peddling conspiracy theories that have been widely debunked' (https://www.vox.com/2021/1/4/22213246/republican-senators-hawley-cruz-cotton-trump-electoral-college-presidential-election-joe-biden).
13 See, for example, Boudry (Citation2023); Boudry and Hofhuis (Citationforthcoming); Clarke (Citation2002); Keeley (Citation2018).
14 Note that if the hoax were the sole work of Dawson, then there would not be a conspiracy here, strictly speaking. However, this is beside the point. The comparison I am exploring here is not conspiracies in science versus conspiracies in non-scientific settings. Instead, I wish to compare errant data as starting points for conspiratorial explanations to errant data as starting points in scientific explanations (whether conspiratorial or not). Thanks go to Melina Tsapos for encouraging me to make this clarification.
15 And if one is tempted to a read a case such as this as an example of science appropriately honing in on a preexisting reality – of coming to 'carve nature at its joints' in Plato’s sense – then there’s a way in which the lack of a diagnosis of clinical depression in the years prior to the updated criteria represents the fabricated fact, instead. My thanks to Rico Hauswald for bringing this example to my attention.
16 Consider, for example, Hauswald's (Citation2016) discussion of what Ian Hacking calls 'interactive kinds,' intended as the social science counterpart to natural science’s 'natural kinds.' Where natural kinds are to some degree fixed relative to human investigation, as the name indicates, the kinds of the human sciences can change in interaction with the sciences that investigate them. For example, the kinds of economics exhibited in the world may well change as economic actors change their behavior in response to the reported findings of researchers in economics. (As Hauswald discusses, Hacking himself ceased advocating for this concept later in his career, but he argues that Hacking’s disavowal was premature.) This openness to change opens the door for the fabrication of facts as the actions of social scientists may well change the facts on the ground, not unlike how Hunter S. Thompson changed the facts on the ground in Milwaukee.
17 My thanks to Matthew Hannah for making this suggestion at the 2nd International Conspiracy Theory Symposium in Miami.
18 However, even on Frankfurt’s account, even if Jones turns out to be better described as a bullshitter, Granderson’s point that he is no kind of conspiracy theorist still stands.
19 My thanks to Will Mittendorf for helping me think through the points of this paragraph.