Why Conspiracy Theories Are (Not) Theoretically Interesting

Beskrivning

Recent scholarship by conspiracy theory theorists and philosophers of conspiracy theories has struggled with the question of how to define conspiracy theories (and conspiracy theorists). It has become standard for such literature to signal that, if conspiracy theories are simply theories about conspiracies, then they are unremarkable (e.g. Pigden 2016). This raises questions about what we actually mean when use these terms. We may, as argues Tsapos (2023), even be confronted with a dilemma in which our definition must concede forms of philosophical precision in order to be analytically useful.

In this paper I aim to intervene in this discourse by making two related moves: First, I
gesture to common utterances from popular media such as ‘conspiratorial,’ ‘conspiracy theory, and ‘conspiring’ to argue that the term ‘conspiracy theory’ (as well as its relata) is used equivocally; it can mean either (simply) an account of some phenomenon that appeals to the existence of a conspiracy or an explanatory account of some phenomenon recognized to be difficult to canonize as public truth. (In this latter usage, it means something closer to a ‘fringe belief.’) These two usages are not mutually exclusive. The latter, more closely than the former, captures traditional associations of conspiracy theories with paranoia, rejection of mainstream epistemic authority, and a lack of explanatory parsimony.

Second, I suggest that one reason for the recent academic struggle to define conspiracy theories is that scholars are primarily interested in politically salient variants of the latter deployment of the term. What is interesting theoretically about conspiracy theories, I argue, has very little to do with conspiracies per se; it has everything to do with patterns of narrative explanation that parallel the structure of myths and religious stories, which defy received standards of knowledge, and which – increasingly publicly – consolidate political identity in the context of power differentials. In defining our central terms, we theorists must be weary of trying to fit the big game we hunt into the small cage of conspiracies.

Period	2024 maj 23
Evenemangstitel	CONNOR Inaugural Conference: Conspiracy Theories and the Nordic Countries
Typ av evenemang	Konferens
Plats	Lund, SverigeVisa på karta
Omfattning	Internationell