What, if anything, is wrong with conspiracy theories (CTs)? A conspiracy refers to a group of people acting in secret to achieve some nefarious goal. Given that the pages of history are full of such plots, however, why are CTs often regarded with suspicion and even disdain? According to “particularism,” the currently dominant view among philosophers, each CT should be evaluated on its own merits and the negative reputation of CTs as a class is wholly undeserved. In this paper, I (...) defend a moderate version of “generalism,” the view that there is indeed something prima facie suspicious about CTs, properly defined, and that they suffer from common epistemic defects. To demarcate legitimate theorizing about real-life conspiracies from “mere conspiracy theories” (in the pejorative sense), I draw on a deep asymmetry between causes and effects in the natural world. Because of their extreme resilience to counterevidence, CTs can be seen as the epistemological equivalent of black holes, in which unwary truth-seekers are drawn, never to escape. Finally, by presenting a generic “recipe” for generating novel CTs around any given event, regardless of the circumstances and the available evidence, I rescue the intuitions beneath colloquial phrases like “That's just a conspiracy theory.”. (shrink)

Some examples suggest that religious credences respond to evidence. Other examples suggest they are wildly unresponsive. So the examples taken together suggest there is a puzzle about whether descriptive religious attitudes respond to evidence or not. I argue for a solution to this puzzle according to which religious credences are characteristically not responsive to evidence; that is, they do not tend to be extinguished by contrary evidence. And when they appear to be responsive, it is because the agents with those (...) credences are playing what I call The Evidence Game, which in fundamental ways resembles the games of make-believe described by Walton's theory of make-believe. (shrink)

Finding the demarcation criterion for the identification of scientific knowledge is the most important task of normative epistemology. Pseudoscience is not a harmless leisure activity, it can pose a danger to the functioning of liberal democratic societies and the well-being of their citizens. First, there is an outline of how to define science instrumentally without slipping into the detrimental heritage of conceptual essentialism. The second part is dedicated to Popper’s falsification criterion and the objections of its opponents, which eventually led (...) to the abandonment of “naïve” falsificationism. Then I present two promising solutions to the problem, namely the ostensive definition of pseudoscience and the cognitive research of pseudoscientific thinking. In conclusion, I suggest to further extend the typology of alternatives to science to include parascience. (shrink)

The demarcation of pseudoscience has been one of the most important philosophical tasks since the 1960s. During the 1980s, an atmosphere of defeatism started to spread among philosophers of science, some of them claimed the failure of the demarcation project. I defend that the more auspicious approach to the problem might be through the intellectual character of epistemic agents, i.e., from the point of view of vice epistemology. Unfortunately, common lists of undesirable character features are usually based on a priori (...) reasoning, and therefore might be considered artificial or too vague. When we base our position on contemporary behavioural sciences, we can see that the epistemic character of believers in pseudoscience is for the most part determined by two related factors. Firstly, these epistemic agents show a higher level of cognitive laziness. By this I mean an inability or unwillingness to engage in reflective thinking and a reluctance to account for counterevidence. Secondly, they yield more easily to metacognitive overconfidence. This can be broadly understood as so-called “knowledge illusion”, the inability to recognize one’s own intellectual limits. The deficiency usually stems from a misunderstanding of the division of cognitive labour and of the agent’s role in epistemic society. I find the proposed epistemological approach to pseudoscience crucial. Only if we understand the descriptive aspects of the problem, can we think of normative solutions to it. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker’s book Epistemic Injustice calls attention to an important sort of moral and intellectual wrongdoing, that of failing to give others their intellectual due. When we fail to recognize others’ knowledge, or undervalue their beliefs and judgments, we fail in two important respects. First, we miss out on the opportunity to improve and refine our own sets of beliefs and judgments. Second—and more relevant to the term “injustice”—we can deny people the intellectual respect they deserve. Along with describing the (...) wrong of epistemic injustice, Fricker proposes that epistemic justice is a virtue we “can, and should, aim for in practice”. But I argue that there are two major problems. First, it is not clear that it is reasonable to imagine there is any such stable disposition—that is, any such virtue—as the sort of justice she imagines. Second, even if there could be such a virtue, her theory of epistemic justice does not provide good guidance for avoiding epistemic injustice. While it could.. (shrink)

There has never been a time in history that we have been bombarded with so much information in the media and on the internet, especially information that may inhibit thoughtful reflection. In conte...

The paper points to gaps in the conceptualization of bullshit as offered by Harry Frankfurt and Jerry Cohen. I argue that one type of bullshit, obscurantism, the deliberate exercise of making one’s text opaque for the purposes of deceiving the readership in various ways, escapes Frankfurt’s radar in tracking those judgments that are unconcerned with truth, and is not given distinct status in Cohen’s framework, which pays more attention to the product of bullshit than its producers and their techniques. First, (...) I offer on overview of the expanding literature on bullshit, with special attention given to accounts by Frankfurt and Cohen. I claim that Frankfurt’s essentialism and Cohen’s product-oriented account are not successful in exhausting our common understanding of what bullshit entails, neither separately, nor in conjunction. In particular, I claim that obscurantist bullshit pushes the envelope of the current conceptual frameworks. Second, following Boudry’s and Buekens’s work on obscurantism, I discuss the usual mechanisms utilized by obscurantists. Third, I reflect on an objection to my argument based on tweaking the permissibility for producing obscurantism by placing the production of obscurities into different contexts of writing style. I argue that there is an important normative difference between being an obscurantist and someone who merely writes obscurely, and that the distinction should bear weight regardless of constraining our capacities to tell between the two. I finish by discussing whether our understanding of obscurantist bullshit aids us in following a principle of clarity. (shrink)

El marco teórico desde el cual se llevan a cabo investigaciones acerca de la pseudociencia es deficiente, dado que suele incluir otros tipos de creencias carentes de garantía epistémica. En este artículo, se repasarán los mecanismos de explotación de la autoridad científica por parte de la pseudociencia, desarrollando así un marco psicocognitivo más refinado para caracterizar el fenómeno. Se analizará la psicología del engaño pseudocientífico, las raíces cognitivas que posibilitan la epidemiología de este tipo de ideas y sus mecanismos de (...) autolegitimación, como la superioridad dialéctica, el falso apoyo externo o la falsa superioridad ética y/o epistemológica. (shrink)

Judgments of the rationality of beliefs must take the costs of acquiring and possessing beliefs into consideration. In that case, certain false beliefs, especially those that are associated with the benefits of a cohesive community, can be seen to be useful for an agent and perhaps instrumentally rational to hold. A distinction should be made between excusable misbeliefs, which a rational agent should tolerate, and misbeliefs that are defensible in their own right because they confer benefits on the agent. Likely (...) candidates for such misbeliefs are to be found in the realm of nationalism and religion, where the possession costs of true beliefs are high, and where collective beliefs in falsehoods may allow for a cohesive community. We discuss the paradoxes of reflective awareness involved in the idea of deliberately embracing falsehoods. More rigorous, fully reflective concepts of rationality would still disallow false beliefs, but such demanding versions of rationality would commit agents to pay large costs, thereby weakening the motivation for acquiring true beliefs. (shrink)

What, if anything, is wrong with conspiracy theories? A conspiracy refers to a group of people acting in secret to achieve some nefarious goal. Given that the pages of history are full of such plots, however, why are CTs often regarded with suspicion and even disdain? According to “particularism,” the currently dominant view among philosophers, each CT should be evaluated on its own merits and the negative reputation of CTs as a class is wholly undeserved. In this paper, I defend (...) a moderate version of “generalism,” the view that there is indeed something prima facie suspicious about CTs, properly defined, and that they suffer from common epistemic defects. To demarcate legitimate theorizing about real-life conspiracies from “mere conspiracy theories”, I draw on a deep asymmetry between causes and effects in the natural world. Because of their extreme resilience to counterevidence, CTs can be seen as the epistemological equivalent of black holes, in which unwary truth-seekers are drawn, never to escape. Finally, by presenting a generic “recipe” for generating novel CTs around any given event, regardless of the circumstances and the available evidence, I rescue the intuitions beneath colloquial phrases like “That's just a conspiracy theory.”. (shrink)

What makes beliefs thrive? In this paper, we model the dissemination of bona fide science versus pseudoscience, making use of Dan Sperber's epidemiological model of representations. Drawing on cognitive research on the roots of irrational beliefs and the institutional arrangement of science, we explain the dissemination of beliefs in terms of their salience to human cognition and their ability to adapt to specific cultural ecologies. By contrasting the cultural development of science and pseudoscience along a number of dimensions, we gain (...) a better understanding of their underlying epistemic differences. Pseudoscience can achieve widespread acceptance by tapping into evolved cognitive mechanisms, thus sacrificing intellectual integrity for intuitive appeal. Science, by contrast, defies those deeply held intuitions precisely because it is institutionally arranged to track objective patterns in the world, and the world does not care much about our intuitions. In light of these differences, we discuss the degree of openness or resilience to conceptual change (evidence and reason), and the divergent ways in which science and pseudoscience can achieve cultural “success”. (shrink)

Religious people seem to believe things that range from the somewhat peculiar to the utterly bizarre. Or do they? According to a new paper by Neil Van Leeuwen, religious “credence” is nothing like mundane factual belief. It has, he claims, more in common with fictional imaginings. Religious folk do not really “believe”—in the ordinary sense of the word—what they profess to believe. Like fictional imaginings, but unlike factual beliefs, religious credences are activated only within specific settings. We argue that Van (...) Leeuwen’s thesis contradicts a wealth of data on religiously motivated behavior. By and large, the faithful genuinely believe what they profess to believe. Although many religions openly embrace a sense of mystery, in general this does not prevent the attribution of beliefs to religious people. Many of the features of religious belief that Van Leeuwen alludes to, like invulnerability to refutation and incoherence, are characteristic of irrational beliefs in general and actually betray... (shrink)

Why do irrational beliefs adopt the trappings of science, to become what is known as “pseudoscience”? Here, we develop and extend an epidemiological framework to map the factors that explain the form and the popularity of irrational beliefs in scientific garb. These factors include the exploitation of epistemic vigilance, the misunderstanding of the authority of science, the use of the honorific title of “science” as an explicit argument for belief, and the phenomenon of epistemic negligence. We conclude by integrating the (...) various factors in an epidemiological framework and thus provide a comprehensive cultural evolutionary account of science mimicry. (shrink)

Pseudoscience spreads through communicative and inferential processes that make people vulnerable to weird beliefs. However, the fact that pseudoscientific beliefs are unsubstantiated and have no basis in reality does not mean that the people who hold them have no reasons for doing so. We propose that, reasons play a central role in the diffusion of pseudoscience. On the basis of cultural epidemiology and the interactionist theory of reasoning, we will here analyse the structure and the function of reasons in the (...) propagation of pseudoscience. We conclude by discussing the implications of our approach for the understanding of human irrationality. (shrink)

The demarcation between science and pseudoscience is a long-standing problem in philosophy of science. Although philosophers have been hesitant to engage in this project since Larry Laudan announce...

Why do people share or publicly engage with fake stories? Two possible answers come to mind: (a) people are deeply irrational and believe these stories to be true; or (b) they intend to deceive their audience. Both answers presuppose the idea that people put the stories forward as true. But I argue that in some cases, these outlandish (yet also very popular) stories function as signals of one's group membership. This signaling function can make better sense of why, despite their (...) unusual nature or lack of a factual basis, some of these stories are so widespread. (shrink)

This paper presents the concept of ‘religious certainty’ I have developed by drawing inspiration from Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘certainty’. After describing the particular traits of religious certainty, this paper addresses two difficulties derived from this concept. On the one hand, it explains why religious certainty functions as such even though all its consequences are far from being absolutely clear; on the other hand, it clarifies why, unlike the rest of certainties, the loss of religious certainty does not result in the (...) collapse of the world-picture made up of all certainties. Subsequently, it analyzes to what extent the teacher can teach religious certainty by acting as a facilitator for its acquisition–if desired—particularly bearing in mind that religious certainty cannot be attained at will. These basic teaching guidelines have several advantages. First, they make it possible to know the nature of religious certainty even better. Second, and most importantly, the fact of having adopted the perspective of a teacher who tries inculcating a religious certainty contributes to detecting and preventing forms of indoctrination that, arguably, might go unnoticed even when attempting to properly present religious certainty—or rather, this way of being religious—in current schools to foster understanding thereof. (shrink)

This article argues that pseudoscience lacks an adequate philosophical analysis. Using conspiracy theories as a case study, it is claimed that such an analysis needs to go beyond a mere epistemological approach. In the first part, it is shown that the existing philosophical literature shares the assumption that conspiracy theories are primarily deficient scientific hypotheses. This claim is contested, because such an approach can only understand what conspiracy theories fail to be, but not what they are and why people tend (...) to endorse them. To develop an alternative, the second part starts from recent sociology of science, applied to conspiracy theories, that claims that both true and false theories are in need of a symmetrical social explanation. However, this opens the path to relativism because it does not allow for a significant distinction between scientific and conspiracy theories. In the third section an alternative analysis of conspiracy theories is offered, which does not abandon this distinction. Moreover, it is claimed that the most important element of conspiracy theories is not their truth value but rather their symbolic structures of meaning. The aim of conspiracy theories, and perhaps of pseudoscience in general, is then not to know facts about the world, but rather to offer a meaningful framework within which to live. (shrink)

Motivated by recent controversies concerning the relationship between modern mindfulness-based interventions and Buddhism, this article discusses the relationship between mindfulness and dogmatism in general, and dogmatism in ethics in particular. The point of view taken is primarily that of the psychology of judgment and deci-sion making: Various cognitive illusions affect the feelings of righteousness and certainty that tend to accompany ethical and moral judgments. I argue that even though there is some evidence that mindfulness practice im-proves judgment and decision making, (...) thisimprovement is rarely as strong as is implied in various contributions to the above-mentioned controversies. In addition, I reflect on claims that “the original teachings of the Buddha” jus-tify the moral stances taken. I argue that these stances likely arise, at least in part, due to the cultural transmission of cognitive dissonance of early Christianity rather than being inherent in the Buddha’s teachings. (shrink)

What is wrong with ad hoc hypotheses? Ever since Popper’s falsificationist account of adhocness, there has been a lively philosophical discussion about what constitutes adhocness in scientific explanation, and what, if anything, distinguishes legitimate auxiliary hypotheses from illicit ad hoc ones. This paper draws upon distinct examples from pseudoscience to provide us with a clearer view as to what is troubling about ad hoc hypotheses. In contrast with other philosophical proposals, our approach retains the colloquial, derogative meaning of adhocness, and (...) calls attention to the way in which the context of a theoretical move bears on the charge of adhocness. We also discuss the role of motivations implicit in the concept of adhocness, and the way ad hoc moves draw on theory-internal rationalizations. (shrink)