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I’m going to go through three very quick examples, then we’ll move onto discussion
time. The first one is trite. A really simple example of conspiratorial thinking is the
left wing-right wing response to whatever is happening in the country. I’m left wing,
I by definition am not particularly fond of National which is a centre-right party, and
I often attribute malicious intentions and motivations to the government when they make
particular claims about cutting early childhood education, not wanting to do anything about
the gender inequality with regard to income, and so forth. And this is a kind of conspiratorial
thinking. I often attribute bad motives or bad intentions toward people of the political
right because they just don’t fit well with me in my political sphere. I often don’t
have good reason for believing they’re being malicious; often people who on the right have
quite sincere beliefs about how the world and economics actually works, and thus I should
accept that there may be good arguments for positions I disagree with. This is a kind
of conspiratorial thinking. A more common kind of conspiratorial thinking which is relevant
to us are the people who claim the peer review system as it exists within the academic world
is biased towards a political rather than truth orientated agenda. Here is a very quick
list of the kind of people who oppose the peer review system. So I’m sort of hoisting
them on their own petard; intelligent designers, anti-vaccine campaigners oppose it, the people
who claim *** does not cause AIDS oppose it, also alternative medicine practitioners, climate
change sceptics and holocaust deniers all claim the peer review system is biased politically
rather than academically. Now it’s not quite clear what the conspiracy in this conspiracy
theory entails. If it’s the allegation that there’s political bias, you do have to wonder
where this political bias actually seems to sit, given that it doesn’t really seem to
matter who is in charge – left or right – the peer review conspiracy theorists continue
to maintain that there’s politics in operation there. And if the allegation is in the direction
of truth, are they claiming that the peer review system isn’t aimed at truth, or are
they claiming that it isn’t aimed at the right kind of truth. Are they being postmodernists
or subjectivists about what the truth actually is? And if the conspiracy theorists are claiming
that the bias in the peer review system is anti-truth, it actually looks as if they don’t
understand what the peer review system actually is. Because we’ve got lots of plausible
rival theories. One, the kinds of people who criticise the peer review system tend to be
people who don’t survive the reviewing system of peer review. These are the kind of people
who are just not suited to interacting in a peer review environment. So often people
criticize the peer review system because their papers do not get published and yet they’re
assured of the righteousness of their position, and so they assume that if you don’t recognise
how good their work is, then obviously you’re either stupid, or you’re part of some massive
conspiracy to stop the publication of their perpetual motion engines, cars that run on
water alone, and so forth, because big oil is out to stop the publication of that sort
of material. And the official theory that the peer review system is not biased actually
fits well with the notion of epistemic authorities. If we think there are such things as epistemic
authorities, then we should acknowledge that the peer review system is aimed towards truth
and interaction in a group level environment, where individuals with controversial claims
will have to satisfy their peers that it’s all worth looking into and breaking with the
status quo. And a famous example, for my last one, of anti-peer review is anthropogenic
climate change scepticism. As some of you may be aware, as of yesterday, the New Zealand
Climate Science Coalition has decided to take NIWA to court, claiming that they’ve fabricated
or misused the climate data in New Zealand. So having failed to have any peer reviewed
papers published showing that climate change is not occurring within New Zealand, they’ve
decided to launch a legal attack upon NIWA instead, which seems a little bit odd if they’re
actually talking about discussing science. Climate change scepticism is the claim that
there’s a conspiracy both within the ranks of climatology, and in the political system,
to advance an agenda, where that agenda is either something like the shadow world government,
or green totalitarianism. Now often many people who are anti-environmentalism say “green
is the new red” because environmentalism is, as we all know, just communism. It’s
just essentially communism (sarcastic). As I said, many of these climate change sceptics
are also peer review sceptics. And if you compare the two theories, the official theory
is non-conspiratory because it makes use of epistemic authorities such as the IPCC, science
bodies, think tanks, NIWA... it is part of what we would expect to see continuing debate
in the science. So when people say that the science isn’t settled, they don’t mean
that there are no facts, they simply say that whilst there is large agreement on core issues,
some of the minutiae still needs to be nutted out and we don’t know what the consequences
of that minutiae will lead to. And this is because they are using the best sciences of
our day which are continuing research projects within the sciences. And we need to contrast
that with climate change scepticism, which alleges peer review fraud and political interference;
presents mere authorities as epistemic authorities – so embarrassingly enough for philosophers
professor Denis Dutton is actually a member of the NZCSC, he’s also a prominent member
of the New Zealand Sceptics which is also I think a little embarrassing, and he puts
himself forward as being an epistemically authoritative source in regard to claims of
climatology, despite the fact that he isn’t and has no formal qualifications whatsoever.
And as we saw, this group sometimes engages in legal rather than scientific attacks to
get their view out there. It is actually strangely akin to the way the intelligent design movement
has been working. I found a great example of the link between these two: Vincent Gray,
one of the prominent members of the NZCSC, gave this very favourable review to Ian Wishart’s
book on climate change – and if you know Ian Wishart you also know that he wrote an
astoundingly interesting book on the fact that science proves that God is the root of
all things and is the designer of the world as we know it. So we have Vincent Gray, who
is an atheist, joining ranks with Ian Wishart whose argumentative skills are... just indescribable.
And there’s a link there for those who want to look at the series of quotes linking climate
change denial and the intelligent design movement. Because conspiracy theories make very weird
bedfellows, even at the best of times. So in conclusion, the chief problems for conspiracy
theories tend to be the attribution of intentionality, and how to work out what the goals of conspirators
are; often conspiracy theories are based upon mere authorities and thus this will make belief
irrational due to the lack of a well grounded notion of justification that the authorities
are able to give. But importantly, and this is the thing I have to keep reminding people,
the irrationality of belief in any given conspiracy theory may be different from whether the conspiracy
theory is actually true. There may be a conspiracy by the IPCC, the UN and the shadow world government
to foist climate change belief upon us, to institute a world government. It may well
turn out the conspiracy theorists are essentially right, and have never been able to advance
a good argument in favour of that position, because their argument doesn’t point towards
the right features of the world, and that the real truth of what’s happening in our
ecology, our environment, and behind the scenes, might be scarier and bigger than any of us
could possibly imagine. Because sometimes paranoid’s are right.