Crooked Timber comment overflow: Wikipedia on Conspiracy Theories (via the New York Times)

Comment overflow from Crooked Timber, on this article by Paul Krugman in the New York Times (reproduced at the end):

Krugman quotes from Wikipedia:

A conspiracy theory, says Wikipedia, "attempts to explain the cause of an event as a secret, and often deceptive, plot by a covert alliance."

I think there are problems here - one is the assumption of pragmatic explanatory status (previously discussed), in which the word 'theory' plays a role, since it is capable of suggesting a parallel with paradigmatically explanatory endeavours like scientific theories. (The word often also, or instead, imports a presumption of mere speculation, or of  a lack of adequate evidence. I note with approval that Wiki doesn't include any such evaluative element in its definition.)

Relatedly, the assumption that some reasonably compact and dicrete event must be involved is inaccurate, though as a defender of 'good' conspiracy theories, and strategically an aspiring rehabilitator of the term 'conspiracy theory', I don't mind this too much since those 'conspiracy theories' which are short on determinate and significant events obviously tend to be vague about all sorts of things, as well as defective in other ways - and if they are booted out of the nominal category 'conspiracy theory' so much the better.

Another more substantive problem is the 'covert alliance' bit - secrecy and/or deceptiveness of the plan is one thing (though it can be challenged as inessential to conspiracy both as a matter of definition and as a matter of salience in this context; the same goes, less plausibly and importantly, for the requirement that an 'alliance' be involved). But specifying that the 'alliance' itself must be covert is wrong - especially on a natural reading which places 'covert' at the extreme end of the secretiveness spectrum (the Bilderberg Group provides a good illustration of this spectrum with its progressive relaxation of secrecy, thanks largely to the efforts of 'conspiracy theorists').

A covert alliance is a feature of various stereotypes of the Illuminati or Da Vinci Code type, but rarely of the actually contested specimens of 'CT'. This disjuncture of stereotype from actually central case is of course deeply dodgy. Very often, the alleged perpetrators of an event are members of a well-known group - often indeed one whose activities are well-known to include covert action as a major component! There is some room to argue that often a covert alliance, in the abstract sense of agreement, exists within, or even throughout, a known organisation - but (a) that's far from always the case; (b) can become a pretty fine distinction which shades into mere internal politics, depending to some extent on whether the agreement or plan is secret only from the outside world or also from other members of the organisation - especially superiors; the 'rogue elements' that can provide a last-ditch fallback position for damage limitation or 'limited hangout' purposes; (c) at the least such ambiguity ought to be resolved.

Claims that global warming is a hoax and that the liberal media are suppressing the good news from Iraq meet that definition. In each case, to accept the claim you have to believe that people working for many different organizations — scientists at universities and research facilities around the world, reporters for dozens of different news organizations — are secretly coordinating their actions.

The rhetorical aims may be congenial enough, but that's really the problem with the term 'conspiracy theory' -  the defective nature of the concept - if it is one concept - is of course due to its being inherently political. So leaving aside partisan allegiances, I observe that the first example sets off an alarm with '...you must/(would) have to believe...'.

Philosophically relevant here is the  interpretative or conceptual/metaphysical question of 'principles of closure', in this case wrt belief - does {believe(p), p implies q} - or, more plausibly, {believe(p), believe(p implies q)}- entail {believe(q)}? I think it is generally accepted, and I'd say pretty obvious, that at the level of occurrent or explicit or attentive belief, it is not the case that either of these principles hold.

This is slightly different from a similar and very common way of discrediting a claim: inflating it into (excuse metaphor issues) a straw man, by asserting some supposed corrollary of a conspiracy allegation and attacking that. This can be a legitimate tactic, depending on the merits of the case. Very often the tactic fairly blatantly fails because the supposed consequence of the theory is no such thing - and it may be that this is the case here, in a well-disguised way (again note I'm looking atthe argument and bracketing both the substantive and rhetorical issues that might arise from apparently defending the denialists. If specific arguments against then should turn out to be bad, that;s not my fault).

But here I think there is a different error which is commonly and sometimes advertently made - that of confusing actually, or - more often, as I think here - supposedly, ineluctable consequences of a claim with the claim itself. This is significant when it means changing the subject. Attacking the consequence of a theory is one thing - a modus tollens, or informally reductio ad absurdum tactic can be legitimate - but ignoring the thesis and focussing only on some consequence taken in isolation can mess up the Bayesian priors in a prejudicial way. If the claim is that global warming is false, and if there were good evidence for that, then that would have a pretty important effect on our assessment about how likely it is that the scientists who assert it are mistaken. (I am trying to formalise this general idea but haven't yet done so). If we simply ask 'how likely are scientists to be mistaken', and treat the answer to that general question as dispositive of the issue, we have begged the question in an important way.

Here, the global warming 'denialist' claim is identified with a collateral or ancillary - epiphenomenal, you might say - claim explaining how or why the denialist thesis is not widely accepted. The issue's blurred a bit (well, a lot) since Krugman explicitly references claims about a 'hoax', but the general point stands. Very often, as here, this move is the only thing which even allows a claim to be classified as a CT., since the primary claim is not essentially conspiratorial. In an important subclass of such cases, the credibility bottle neck is not in the additional 'coverup' element, but in the primary claim:  aliens landed, the bloodline of Christ is preserved. Unfortunately these gerrymandered examples provide some of the central stereotypes for the concept of 'conspiracy theory'.

But the administration officials who told us that Saddam had an active nuclear program and insinuated that he was responsible for 9/11 weren't part of a covert alliance; they all worked for President Bush. The claim that these officials hyped the case for war isn't a conspiracy theory; it's simply an assertion that people in a position of power abused that position. And that assertion only seems wildly implausible if you take it as axiomatic that Mr. Bush and those around him wouldn't do such a thing.

this I think makes two mistakes: the 'covert alliance' requirement - in particular, with 'alliance' meaning concrete group - and the importatiobn of an evaluative component into 'conspiracy theory' - this is understandable when defending a claim in current circumstances, in which 'CT' is a loaded term, but it does pander to the ideological abuse of the term itself, and that abuse can cut both ways. I would prefer to admit that the Bent War thesis is indeed a conspiracy theory, but argue that it is an obviously true one. Its status as a 'CT' or not is irrelevant to the facts.

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New York Times

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Who's Crazy Now?

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: May 8, 2006

Some people say that bizarre conspiracy theories play a disturbingly large role in current American political discourse. And they're right.

For example, many conservative politicians and pundits seem to agree with James Inhofe, chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, who has declared that "man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."

Of more immediate political relevance is the claim that the reason we hear mainly bad news from Iraq is that the media, for political reasons, are conspiring to suppress the good news. As Bill O'Reilly put it a few months ago, "a good part of the American media wants to undermine the Bush administration."

But these examples, of course, aren't what people are usually referring to when they denounce crazy conspiracy theories. For the last few years, the term "conspiracy theory" has been used primarily to belittle critics of the Bush administration — in particular, anyone suggesting that the Bush administration used 9/11 as an excuse to fight an unrelated war in Iraq.

Now here's the thing: suppose that we didn't have abundant evidence that senior officials in the Bush administration wanted a war, cherry-picked intelligence to make a case for that war, and in some cases suppressed inconvenient evidence contradicting that case. Even so, it would be an abuse of the English language to call the claim that the administration misled us into war a conspiracy theory.

A conspiracy theory, says Wikipedia, "attempts to explain the cause of an event as a secret, and often deceptive, plot by a covert alliance." Claims that global warming is a hoax and that the liberal media are suppressing the good news from Iraq meet that definition. In each case, to accept the claim you have to believe that people working for many different organizations — scientists at universities and research facilities around the world, reporters for dozens of different news organizations — are secretly coordinating their actions.

But the administration officials who told us that Saddam had an active nuclear program and insinuated that he was responsible for 9/11 weren't part of a covert alliance; they all worked for President Bush. The claim that these officials hyped the case for war isn't a conspiracy theory; it's simply an assertion that people in a position of power abused that position. And that assertion only seems wildly implausible if you take it as axiomatic that Mr. Bush and those around him wouldn't do such a thing.

The truth is that many of the people who throw around terms like "loopy conspiracy theories" are lazy bullies who, as Zachary Roth put it on CJR Daily, The Columbia Journalism Review's Web site, want to "confer instant illegitimacy on any argument with which they disagree." Instead of facing up to hard questions, they try to suggest that anyone who asks those questions is crazy.

Indeed, right-wing pundits have consistently questioned the sanity of Bush critics; "It looks as if Al Gore has gone off his lithium again," said Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post columnist, after Mr. Gore gave a perfectly sensible if hard-hitting speech. Even moderates have tended to dismiss the administration's harsh critics as victims of irrational Bush hatred.

But now those harsh critics have been vindicated. And it turns out that many of the administration supporters can't handle the truth. They won't admit that they built a personality cult around a man who has proved almost pathetically unequal to the job. Nor will they admit that opponents of the Iraq war, whom they called traitors for warning that invading Iraq was a mistake, have been proved right. So they have taken refuge in the belief that a vast conspiracy of America-haters in the media is hiding the good news from the public.

Unlike the crazy conspiracy theories of the left — which do exist, but are supported only by a tiny fringe — the crazy conspiracy theories of the right are supported by important people: powerful politicians, television personalities with large audiences. And we can safely predict that these people will never concede that they were wrong. When the Iraq venture comes to a bad end, they won't blame those who led us into the quagmire; they'll claim that it was all the fault of the liberal media, which stabbed our troops in the back.