The Philosophy of Conspiracy - by David Coady
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2251734.htm
From the ABC:
In our final installment on conspiracy theories, David Coady looks at the philosophy of conspiracy...
22 May 2008, 10:00
People in the "9/11 truth movement" are often dismissed as "conspiracy theorists". They typically respond by saying that there's nothing wrong with being a conspiracy theorist, since, after all, conspiracies do happen. This is a reasonable response.
But a little reflection reveals the expressions "conspiracy theory" and "conspiracy theorist" do not deserve their bad reputation.
After all, "a conspiracy" is simply a secret plan by a group of people to bring about some shared goal, "a conspiracy theory" is just a theory according to which such a plan has occurred or is occurring, and "a conspiracy theorist" is just a person who is disposed to believe conspiracy theories.
Most people can cite numerous examples of conspiracies from history books, the media, or their own personal experience. Hence most people believe numerous conspiracy theories, and so are, to one degree or another, conspiracy theorists.
But very few people would actually describe themselves as conspiracy theorists, nor would they describe any of the things they believe as conspiracy theories.
When asked to identify examples of conspiracy theories most people immediately think of theories that are clearly irrational.
Some will refer to theories involving conspirators who are virtually all-powerful or omniscient. Others will mention theories involving alleged conspiracies that have been going on for so long or which involve so many people that it would implausible to suppose that they could have remained undetected. Others cite theories involving conspirators who appear to have no motive to conspire - unless perhaps the desire to do evil for its own sake can be thought of as a motive. The theory that the United States' government planned the September 11th attacks appears to be irrational in each of these ways.
This theory, and others like it, are irrational conspiracy theories, but it does not follow, and it is not true, that they are irrational because they are conspiracy theories.
Thinking of such irrational theories as paradigms of conspiracy theories is like thinking of numerology as a paradigm of number theory, or astrology as a paradigm of a theory of planetary motion. The subject matter of a theory does not generally determine whether belief in it is rational or not.
But conspiracies not only exist, they are widespread. Most people conspire some of the time (think of the things we tell our children about Santa Claus) and some people conspire most of the time (think of the intelligence organizations of any country).
Furthermore, many events cannot be explained without appealing to a conspiracy. The only question in such cases is "Which conspiracy theory is correct?"
In the case of 9/11 the question is "Who are the conspirators, Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, or George Bush and the American security services?" The correct answer to this question is so well established by now that nothing further I can say here could be expected to convince the 9/11 truthers.
The problem with the 9/11 truthers is that they are committed to an irrational and false theory (a theory which happens, like its true rival, to be a conspiracy theory).
Of course it seems strange to think of the "official" explanation of 9/11 (or the official explanation of any event) as a conspiracy theory. We are accustomed to contrasting conspiracy theories with the official non-conspiratorial version of events, but quite often, the official version of events is just as conspiratorial as its rivals.
When this is the case, it is the rivals to the official version of events that are inevitably labeled dismissively as "conspiracy theories". So, "conspiracy theory" has come to refer to virtually any belief which conflicts with an official version of events.
It should be clear what is wrong with using the expression in this way. It allows politicians, bureaucrats, and more generally defenders of officialdom the world over to abuse and ridicule anyone who doubts their truthfulness.
Yet it is vital to any open society that there are respected sources of information which are independent of official sources, and which can freely contradict them and not be dismissed without argument. The widespread view that conspiracy theories are always, or even typically, irrational is not only itself irrational, it is dangerous.
It promotes complacency in the face of official or institutionally endorsed versions of events, which makes it easier for conspirators in positions of power to remain undetected.
I am not denying that there are people who have an irrational tendency to see conspiracies everywhere. And we could restrict the expression "conspiracy theorist" in such a way that it only referred to such people.
But if we do this, we should also remember that there is another widespread form of irrationality, namely the failure to believe in conspiracy even when confronted with powerful evidence for it.
We need a name for people who irrationally reject evidence of conspiracy, to give our political discourse some much needed balance. The expression "coincidence theorist", which has gained some currency on the Internet, goes some way to meeting this need.
A coincidence theorist fails to connect the dots, no matter how suggestive of an underlying pattern they are.
A hardened coincidence theorist can watch a plane crash into the second tower of the World Trade Centre without thinking that there is any connection between this event and the plane which crashed into the other tower less than an hour earlier.
Similarly, a coincidence theorist could be aware that all 175 editors of Rupert Murdoch's publications around the world endorsed the invasion of Iraq, without seeing any connection between their expressed views and those of their boss.
Coincidence theorists are just as irrational and at least as widespread as conspiracy theorists. They are equally prone to error, though their errors are of different and opposing kinds. The errors of the conspiracy theorist, however, tend to be less dangerous than the errors of the coincidence theorist.
The conspiracy theorist usually only harms himself. The coincidence theorist can harm us all by making it easier for those in power to conceal their conspiratorial machinations.