Edward Feser on Counterknowledge and Conspiracy Theories

1. Conspiracy Theories

Edward Feser is a teacher of and writer on philosophy, who has written a couple of articles on 'conspiracy theories', one on the counterknowledge website, one not. 

Feser summarises his views on the possibility of treasonable or similarly criminal conspiracies carried out by members of the government and government agencies as follows:

First, that while conspiracies of a small-scale nature do sometimes occur, the nature of modern bureaucracies makes it practically impossible for would-be conspirators secretly and effectively to engineer anything on the scale of a 9/11 “inside job” or JFK assassination scenario. Second, while liberal democratic societies are capable of great evil, the adversarial nature of their institutions and the diverse ends and belief systems of the people staffing these institutions make it practically impossible for would-be conspirators to organize enough relevant personnel to do evil of the specific sort involved in 9/11 “inside job” or JFK assassination scenarios. Third, the scale of deception posited in conspiracy scenarios of this scale is so all-encompassing that it effectively undermines the very evidential base that conspiracy theorists themselves must rely on to support their theories.

The first two of these are notable mainly for the way in which they appear to place a JFK 'inside job' assassination (which would, in order to be reliable, presumably require more personnel than just the lone gunman, but not necessarily many more ) in a similar class as 9/11 'inside job' theories (presumably those involving such elements as controlled demolition, faked phone calls and planes 'disappeared' in the manner described in the Operation Northwoods plans). Some may share Feser's faith in the strong claim that the various vague considerations he gestures at would make a Northwoods-like scenario effectively impossible. To suggest that an assassination is impossible seems quite simply risible. (And of course neither of these involves the 'vast, all-powerful' conspiracy that is so convenient to conspiracy-deniers as to have become a cliché.)

The third point is uncompelling for an additional and slightly more interesting kind of reason. I'll ignore hyperbole about universal doubt and Matrix-style scenarios; and assume that the intention at least is not to refer merely to psychological or cognitive barriers to acceptance of new doubts or awkward claims. Addressing instead the most reasonable position that I can make of this idea, I get this: since 'conspiracy theories' require extensive distrust of official sources of information, they undermine themselves, because they have to rely for their plausibility on at least some official sources. 

Two main points immediately occur: first, one may take a default position of trusting certain sources, and reject the information they provide only when there is some positive reason to do so. Such a reason need not involve any positive grounds for mistrust: for example strong countervailing evidence. even when the reason for rejecting certain information does involve positive mistrust, that is likely to involve the imputation of bias, not radical unreliability applying across the board.

Second, the objection presupposes that 'conspiracy theories' are positive claims, put forward with the same kind of certainty as the official accounts to which they are opposed. Such an argument will not apply to 'conspiracy theories' which merely deny official accounts, or assert in general terms that something fishy happened. This perhaps explains the sythetic derision that's often aimed at claims to be just asking questions, or pointing out inconsistencies, or even denying the official account. After all, it would be rather unfair for the conspiracy theorists to claim the vast middle ground of doubt and uncertainly for themselves, wouldn't it? Of course ot doesn't rally work that way: defenders of official stories have ceded that ground, and declared it off limits, so whoever occupies it becomes the opposition and a 'conspiracy theorist'. At that point 

Counterknowledge

A friend, on his own initiative, directed Feser to my review of Counterknowledge and received comments on it by return of email. I replied in the below email, which includes Feser's remarks in their entirety, and which my friend, having taken on the role of debate broker, forwarded to Feser.

From: Tim Wilkinson
Date: 2009/1/27
Subject: Re: Philosopher Edward Feser on your Counterknowledge review.

More complete response to F's comments:

The writer complains about the psychologizing of conspiracy theorists on the part of the book he's reviewing, while the whole time psychologizing the author of that book, i.e. speculating about his purported toadying to authority. 

Not at all - while I mention the authoritarian nature of the book's approach and of some of Thompson's comments: 
1. I don't make it personal, e.g. by speculating about his motives or in particular by'psychiatrising' his remarks, which is what I observe ('compain') is done to CTists.
2. I certainly don't work backwards from supposing psychological flaws Thompson may to the falsity of his claims, as anti-CT 'psychologisers' tend to. I criticise the content, then categorise the mistakes I find as in themselves exhibiting excessive deference to authority.

(This seems to me common among conspiracy theorists -- they complain about a tactic and then employ it themselves.)  

Or perhaps some of them complain about it, others decide to meet fire with fire, and yet others try and have their cake and eat it in the way described. But then CTists form a single aggregated unity, hence the endless articles pointing out how the they contradict 'themselves'.So the faults of one infect all. In any case, it is legitimate to complain about a tactic being abused or used excessively or inaccurately while at the same time using it moderately and accurately oneself. There's also the possibility of turning a tactic back on its originators as a demonstration of its unfairness (how do you like it?) or as a reductio/tu quoque ('if that's the kind of thing that can discredit a case, then you are on thin ice yourself'). Still, I don't have any specifics to go on, and I don't want to defend the generality of those described as CTists, so I leave it there.

The point has nothing at all to do with any love for authority, though.  No, but some manifest bias can be identified as in favour of authorities. The point (as I argue in the blog post) is rather that, however bad the motives of certain authorities, there are certain actions that there is no remotely plausible way for them to carry out. No, that's some other point, and often a good one - but it has to be argued case by case on their merits.

The author also implies that the fact that a single black swan falsified the claim that all swans are white shows that a single apparent anomaly, or at least a handful of such anomalies, can falsify an "official story" of the sort conspiracy theorists attack.  But the analogy is bad.  The reason the single black swan suffices to falsify the claim in question is because the claim was a claim about what properties swans necessarily will have by virtue of their essence, unless somehow impeded.  (And even then, it had first to be established that the black swan wasn't a mutant or in some other way abnormal -- in other words, even here an alleged anomaly had first to be proved to be a real anomaly before it could be judged to be genuine counterevidence.)  But there is nothing like that going on in the case of the "official stories" -- no attempt to get at the essence of a natural object, discover what properties necessarily flow from the essence, etc.  Moroever, such "stories" concern extremely complex sets of events, not individual objects or kinds of objects.  So there is simply not going to be anything close to the sort of clear and direct connection between a purported anomaly and the falsity of the "story" that one finds in the swan example.  It's apples and oranges.

Quotation from my review: 

Of course there may be some debate about whether a given experience is actually an observation of certain facts - for example whether the black animal observed is in fact a swan, or whether its apparent colour is caused by a trick of the light. The reference to 'unexplained' anomalies might be intended to suggest this kind of  explaining away of an apparent anomaly[18]. Even if so, cases in which this can be done - in which the observations are false, misleading or misinterpreted - have nothing to do with the kind of general methodological error of which Thompson accuses 'conspiracy theorists'.

Not only can a single observation (if unambiguous and reliable) falsify a well-established scientific theory, it can even more obviously disprove a hypothesis about particular facts. The existence of the term 'alibi' in English shows how commonly this happens. What is more, it is unclear whether any theories about specific concrete facts such as exactly what happened to JFK or to the three WTC towers are 'well-established' in any sense other than being accepted by many people or the right people, or officially endorsed, or unquestioned in the mainstream media.

I think this answers all the points he makes. The analogy with disproving laws of nature is indeed not useful, but it is Thompson's, not mine (as is the wider use of analogies between scientific methiod and forensic or historical investigations - which are apparently appealed to in the attempt to cut the Gordian knot - which was itself cheating anyway - with a knockdown a priori argument). 

An 'anomaly' (not actually an anomaly, just a contradicting proposition) can indeed establish the falsity of a specific factual hypothesis, hence the point about 'alibi' .