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Alright, first my name’s Matthew Dentith; I’m from the department of philosophy. Don’t
let that put you off; some of us in the arts/humanities are also interested in what it’s rational
to believe, given the evidence of the world around us. I’m currently finishing off my
PhD looking at the epistemology of conspiracy theories. So as an epistemologist, my concern
is: given the evidence, what ought we to believe about the world. Now, a bit of history here:
I grew up in Devonport, over on the North Shore (which is another reason not to pity
me) and in Devonport we have our own home-grown conspiracy theory – we have a conspiracy
theory that the North Head tunnel complex, which is on one end of Devonport, which is
filled with tunnels you can wander through, is said to hide a hidden second tunnel complex
inside of it, and inside of this hidden complex there is either the very first two Boeing
planes ever built, by the Boeing-Vestibald (spelling?) corporation, which are worth a
small fortune, and/or a whole lot of decaying ammunition that the army didn’t dispose
of properly, and this is said to be the two reasons why the tunnels are not completely
accessible to the public, and why there is a government cover-up with the New Zealand
defence forces going on at this time to stop us from getting access to the seven-level
deep tunnel complex in North Head which, depending on who you talk to, goes all the way to Motutapu,
and links up to the tunnel-complex underneath Albert Park as well. So it’s a fairly interesting
conspiracy theory with wide ranging implications, not only for what the government is up to,
but for the hidden ability of Victorian engineers to be able to build massive tunnel complexes
through basalt rock in the Auckland region – which is a history of which nobody seems
to be aware of, and yet the conspiracy theorists would have us believe that the Victorians
are much more advanced than they actually appear to be. So this is basically what got
me into conspiracy theories – growing up in Devonport, in the eighties, with all this
discussion of the conspiracy theory in Devonport ongoing. I sort of became interested as to
why people were ignoring the archaeological evidence, which the Department of Conservation
had engaged in, and why people were ringing up my father saying “but surely you saw
something when you were a child, since you grew up in Devonport at around about the right
time”. So that essentially motivated the PhD. Now this is a very short, probably about
20 minute long presentation, where I’ll just go through some of the ground work that
I’m doing in my PhD and hopefully this will set up for the questions that you’ll want
to ask me. So let me start off by saying what I take a conspiracy theory to be. I take a
conspiracy theory to be merely any explanation of an event that cites a conspiracy as a salient
cause. And the reason why I say this is that it allows us to say that any account of the
events of 9/11 is a conspiracy theory, whether you think it was an inside job committed by
George W. Bush, *** Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and all the other ne'er-do-wells of that administration,
or you think the events were due to hijackers working for Al-Qaeda. Both of these are conspiracy
theories: they are explanations of an event that cites a conspiracy, either by the American
government, or by this organization called Al-Qaeda, to cause a particular event, i.e.
the destruction or at least damage to the twin towers, since presumably if you believe
the Al-Qaeda hypothesis, they probably didn’t expect the twin towers to be destroyed; they
simply thought they would do a great affront to American imperialism by attacking homeland
America. And the reason I want to talk about conspiracy theories in this form is that I
want to get us away from the debate whereby we simply use the term conspiracy theory as
a pejorative term to dismiss theories that we don’t agree with or dislike. Because
so often in literature, people have to run rings about themselves saying “oh, this
is not a conspiracy theory, because I think it’s a warranted argument for a particular
inference to an explanation. But these things *are*, because I disagree with them.” And
so you end up with lots of theorists, like Mark Fenster and Daniel Pipes, who will say
“well I think this is true, so I have to work out why it’s not a conspiracy theory.
But you people who believe these things, you believe in conspiracy theories.” If we simply
admit that conspiracy theories are a species of explanation, and we move away from treating
them as being a prima facie bad case of explanation, it makes it much easier to analyze individual
conspiracy theories in the wild, because as I’m sure will come up in the discussion,
there are a lots of conspiracy theories which have been borne out by history as being the
actual explanation of what occurred at a particular time. It also allows us to say that conspiracy
theories range in plausibility. This allows me to say that there are certain North Head
conspiracy theories that are more plausible than other North Head conspiracy theories.
So some of the fans of Bruce Cathie have suggested that North Head is in fact a UFO-locus point
in the harmonic 242 series. And I take this to be a much less plausible conspiracy theory
than the claim that the government might be engaged in hiding tunnels to stop the discovery
of decaying and explosive ammunition powder. So I think that’s a much more plausible
conspiracy theory than the UFO hypothesis. Now conspiracy theories, of course, cite conspiracies.
And all a conspiracy is is a plot enacted in secret by a group of conspirators or co-conspirators
who want to achieve some end. Now, part of the problem for any discussion of a conspiracy
theory is that conspiracy theories posit conspiracies as an alleged cause of some event. Now, why
am I saying *alleged* cause? Well, part of the problem here is that we can only infer
an individual’s desires from their behaviour. So you can, to a large extent, judge what
people are thinking based on the behaviour that they engage in, so we have some limited
success, psychologically, in being able to judge whether someone is trustworthy or untrustworthy,
in regard to their behaviour in particular circumstances. And importantly, from reports
- so if you look at the history of the assassination of Julius Caesar, all of the Roman historians
talk about what particular individual historical actors thought or felt at the time. Now sometimes,
these reports are good because you’re able to go back to the original letters written
by the co-conspirators. But often you find that these thoughts are simply, well to put
it politely, the made-up machinations of particular historical authors who want to push a particular
agenda. And we don’t necessarily have good ground to accept these inferences. So people,
when they write things down, sometimes make things appear much better than they actually
were. So for example the Ancient Egyptians never wrote about losing any battles – so
they won every battle they fought – even when they lost those battles. All the monuments
dictate that they won those wars abroad, even though rival civilizations concur that winning
was not on the agenda at all. And of course sometimes people, as I said, will actually
assert an intention to someone because it fits their particular agenda and the explanation
they want to put forward. And importantly for the first point, inferring from behaviour,
you can a) train yourself to behave in such a way that people are unaware of what’s
actually going on behind you. I have a quite significant speech defect called a hesitancy,
but I’m a trained speaker, and thus I can speak in this rather flowing, eloquent way,
to disguise the fact that I should actually be t-t-t-t-talking like th-th-th-th-this the
entire time, which would normally be my natural inclination without training. And presumably
behaviourism tells us that this can actually be the case for being able to disguise intention
as well. So we have a problem here – we can only allege to a certain extent, the intentions
of conspirators based upon their behaviour, and reports of their behaviour, but we have
good grounds to doubt the inferential warrant of such a move. But secondly, we’re also
dealing with the wants and desires of mysterious co-conspirators, and this seems like this
should be a bit of a problem because conspiracy theories almost always posit a set of largely
unknown co-conspirators who have known desires to bring about some end. So, you have a large
group of people whose membership is amorphous - they. Sometimes you’ll get a few cases
where people say “Al Gore is one of the principal conspirators behind the myth of
anthropogenic climate change, along with his cronies X, Y, blah blah... But often what
you’ll say is “they” want this or “they” want that. And it’s very hard to allege
intentions or desires to amorphous or mysterious individuals because you can’t test that
attribution of intention to amorphous or mysterious individuals. And also, what counts as satisfying
these rather interesting ends? Because most conspiracy theories are frustratingly vague
about these endpoints, so often what they want to do is create a new world order, or
they want to start a war on terror, or they have decided to dumb down the population.
Now these are vague endpoints. What is a new world order? Is it global taxation? Is it
a lack of global taxation? Is it complete population control, or is it laissez-faire
capitalism? Basically no matter what you think the agenda is, it can fit into the dialectic
of the shadow world government operating in the background. And it’s also hard to work
out what it means to have a “war on terror”. It’s easier to think of there being a war
on the South Island – we know what the South Island is; we can attack it with great ease.
Having a war on terror is actually rather difficult – there’s nothing for me to
actually shoot – presumably I need to engage in some sort of re-education program, which
of course is part of the new world order hypothesis or so some people would have. And starting
to dumb down the population, which is a bugbear for those of us engaged in teaching, given
that actually education standards seem to be going up, not down. And yet the conspiracy
theory says that we’re getting much worse, rather than what appears to be the reality
– we’re getting much better.