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Notes on the Rhetoric of Trolling, Part 2, Bernard Wills

SERRC — May 7, 2019 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Bernard Wills, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. bwills@grenfell.mun.ca.

Wills, Bernard. “Notes on the Rhetoric of Trolling.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8, no. 5 (2019): 1-10.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Due to length, the article has been posted in two parts, with the first half published 2 May. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-48B

Image by loloei via Flickr / Creative Commons

I left off Thursday having raised the vexing question of whether and to what degree the troll sees himself as a troll or self-describes as ‘passionate and committed to truth and justice’. The troll may be systematically deceiving himself about this and genuinely believe he is a ‘voice crying in the wilderness’ in which case a heuristic for trolls (if we could find one) might help some people to self-knowledge.

Self-Illusions of Integrity

Now who is the troll? In one sense there is a very direct answer to this question. The troll is Socrates minus the Socratic ignorance! By this I mean that the troll thinks of himself as embodying a basic archetype of western culture: the gadfly. The basic attitude behind trolling may be summed up as follows: the emperor has no clothes. Conversation has congealed into stale conventionality and bad faith. The troll is the person who has the courage and directness to cut this Gordian knot with his plain speaking and blunt integrity. This at least is the persona of the troll.

Western culture reveres the figure of the gadfly, the heroic man who goes against the grain of society to say what needs to be said.^[1] The gadfly is a mode of male heroism and the troll is eager to claim this mantle for himself. That the troll is often ridiculously under-equipped for this task in terms of ability and education matters little because the primary pettifoggers and obscures of truth are traitorous intellectuals. The stance of the troll can thus be fitted comfortably into the democratic tradition of anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism.

This also explains the attraction of blunt positivism and direct realism in epistemology: knowledge is fact and facts are what the troll is in possession of thank you very much. That the troll is also a perspectivalist and relativist will emerge later but that may have more to do with his underlying self and less to do with how he presents online. It is essential to the self-presentation of the troll that truth be not a matter of controversy and that everyone is engaged in the dishonest task of denying the obvious.

If the truth is obvious and not a matter of controversy this determines the rhetorical patterns the troll must follow. In short the troll must begin by shouting, perhaps typing in capitals. In terms of the ‘hotness’ of the internet medium this also conveys the urgency and immediacy of what the troll has to say. Of course ‘hotness’ has its dangers. The troll, usually being a younger male, suffers from the universal failing of young men: no matter how intelligent he is he always rates himself as slightly more so. This, I am told, is called the testicular quotient.

This means the troll can blunder and lose the position of dominance in the conversation. For instance, he can be called out on a gross error of fact. This does not phase the troll one bit however as he has another card under his sleeve and that is self-protective irony. The troll, of course, is trolling and the joke is on you for taking him seriously and getting ‘triggered’. Trolling manages the remarkable feat of being heroic truth telling AND an exercise reflexive irony at the same time!

The Posture of the Hero, the Martyr

The troll also uses a rhetorical technique that, for want of a better term, I call moral posturing. Though the troll is possibly amoral and cynical he will gladly wield morality as a stick with which to bludgeon others. The troll is making (it seems) an impassioned appeal to conscience and integrity.

This is best illustrated by an example drawn from atheist and alt/right atheist trolling. In any argument with an insufficiently atheist person (and that is most of us- true heroism must be rare to be valuable so the troll has to stake out a more extreme position than others) the atheist troll will mention pedophilia. He will especially do this if he is also an Islamophobe (on account of the Prophet’s marriage to Aisha). The impression he is creating is that he is committing an act of moral heroism by calling attention to a profound injustice the rest of us are trying to cover up or ignore.

Does the troll feel deep anguish at the tragedy of sexual abuse in churches and other institutions? Is he actually upset over child brides in Yemen? Is he traumatized by reading about the 7^th Century with its distant, repugnant mores? This is highly unlikely. Examining the troll’s overall behavior, it is plain that he is the very opposite of a sensitive man who deeply feels the pain of the world.

In short, he is in most other instances devoid of empathy so that his appeals to suffering children are, like Ivan Karamazov’s, probably hollow pretention.^[2] They are a prop to his argument, a rhetorical stick with which he bludgeons or ‘owns’ his opponent.^[3] In fact, this aggressive rhetorical ploy is meant to force the interlocutor to either agree with the troll or say she supports pedophilia and his use of it may be compared best to the fallacy of complex question.

Though the troll moralizes incessantly, however, he is not a moralist. For instance, he has few if any firm categories for ethical reflection. Like another archetype, the libertine, he scoffs at the hypocrisy of the pious and good but not from the standpoint of any thought out morality of his own.

This raises the question of the troll’s relation to victim culture in general and to Nietzsche’s analysis of slave morality. People who are traumatized (legitimately) can lash out and display behaviors meant to tear down the life force of others rather than restore the victim’s own. This is lamentable but it is, as Nietzsche might say, all too human and, for me at least, readily forgivable. For us in North America however this problem can be amplified by a culture of victimhood which makes a claim to victimhood a source of power and status as well as an instrument to tyrannize over others.[4]

Troll culture is not victim culture however. The troll may take the side of the victim if and when it gives him an edge but he may equally rubbish and abuse victims as ‘snowflakes’. His relation to the victim is entirely opportunistic. And here we see another side to the troll. He is a dogmatist and a stern moralist but only as it suits him for the Troll also needs flexibility and wiggle room.

Thus the troll needs to be able to deny anything he has said as soon as it becomes a hindrance to him. Here the troll has a couple options, one of which is flat out denial of course. When this is impossible though, when the troll is confronted by his own words (easily done on Facebook) he becomes a subtle hermeneutist! The troll engages in remarkable feats of eisegesis as he explains how you have taken him out of context and completely misunderstood his words.^[5]

The master of this particular technique is of course President Trump or, more properly, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. This is one way in which the troll resembles the Sophist; he always reserves a hiding place and always has an out if the discussion turns against him. Thus we see the same pattern as above. Exactly as the troll is at once utterly serious and utterly ironic so is he also a man of principle though, at the same time, malleable and cynically dishonest.

Again, like the Sophist, he is everything and nothing at once. This is further revealed by the fact that while the troll will pose as an intellectual in some circumstances, he will equally employ the rhetoric of anti-intellectualism, calling out ‘academics’ on their pseudo-intellectual ‘bullshit’ (the troll often resorts to this trope when he is out of his depth in a discussion).

Winning by Performing Having Always-Already Won

There are two other powerful weapons in the rhetorical arsenal of the troll and one is his constant victory dance. The troll is ALWAYS winning. It has been suggested to me that the troll only THINKS he is winning but this is not true. For him victory is radically self-constituting. By constantly saying ‘I am winning, I am winning” the troll actually does win and not just in his own imagination. His constant declaration of victory actually is meant to induce a feeling of paralysis and helplessness in his opponent: the feeling that no matter what one says and what one does the troll will still assert dominance and declare you ‘butt-hurt’ (anally penetrated?)

Of course what the troll does not (perhaps) notice is that he has defined the parameters of the game so narrowly that winning is tautological. The game is also worthless on its face which raises the difficult question of what the troll actually gains from it. Does the troll invest so much energy for the sake of a fleeting feeling of victory? Is the fact that victory is so fleeting and uncertain the root of his desire to keep trolling?

Here one wonders what significance the echo chamber has for the troll: can a troll troll with no one to reward his trolling with ‘likes’ ‘LOL’s’ or laughing emoticons? Is he rather performing in the theater of his own brain for an audience of one?

The second weapon is projection. If there is any heuristic test for a troll it is probably projection. Every troll without exception says “you are the troll not me”! That the troll projects his own hostility and aggression onto others is no doubt well known. What is more interesting is what happens when the troll is called out on his projection. Resourceful trolls will, without missing a beat, accuse you of projecting your own projection thus miring the conversation in a bad infinity.

Now of course the troll will say things like “I trolled you good” but his use of the verb in a positive sense does not bind him. Nothing binds him. He is not beholden to the law of non-contradiction and as such can be genuinely insulted by your ‘trolling’ towards him. Plus, he can always use that move because at some point (almost certainly) he has goaded you into intemperance or impatience which he then uses as evidence of how aggressive and unfair you are.

Still, it is a weakness of the troll that, in spite of doling out dollops of abuse and invective he is hypersensitive himself and one sometimes wonders if he is genuinely wounded by criticism. A hard core cynic, he may also be as innocent as a child. This may be a function of the fact that the troll has no self-awareness and cannot actually see himself trolling. Perhaps too he does not see the contradictions his behavior embodies: sincere ironist, moralizing cynic, anti-intellectual intellectual and so on. Or perhaps, in a Whitmanesque gesture, he embraces all contraries at once!

I suppose I have shown that the troll defies categorical definition as having no fixed nature of his own but is all things by turn and whatever he needs to be in the moment to gain the advantage (the libido dominandi being the closest thing he has to a principle). This is why I think trolling is more a style than anything else and why it crosses ideological barriers otherwise impassible.

There is a further complexity. Pure trolls are probably not as common as one thinks because trolling designates a continuum of behaviors. Some people are probably situational trolls reacting defensively to a perceived threat. Plus, and this is a melancholy reflection, we are probably all guilty of at least some behaviors that lie on this continuum.

Some trolls may simply be people who are poor at reading their own tone and may simply be passionate and overenthusiastic. Some may be assholes to invoke another problematic category or having a bad day.^[6] Plus, I have encountered trolls whose thinking seemed so disordered that I had to suspect that either mental illness or substance abuse was paying a role in their behavior (though I had no way of confirming this).

I have one more observation to make. I, being who I am, an associate professor and a fairly privileged person can shrug off trolling in a way other people cannot. I can keep trolls out of my head though there are some physical reactions to dealing with them like increased stress and fatigue. When trolls call me an idiot or say I am incompetent I have a professional record that tells me I’m not. However, if I were not privileged in this way and I did not have the self-confidence that comes with privilege I cannot imagine how devastating it would be to interact with such toxic people.

Can the Madness End?

This raises the question of ‘de-trolling’ the internet. There is probably a core of committed trolls who must simply be ignored or banished (i.e. the ones who are sadists and psychopaths). A heuristic for identifying trolls, if we could find one, would be helpful in allowing us to identify such people before we have spent time and energy talking to them. I’m not sure I can offer such a test though irony and multi-layered projection (used in combination) may come close. I will say that to the extent that the pressures of the internet medium shape trolling behaviors something can no doubt be done to alleviate if not eliminate them.

This is also true if some of the techniques of trolling reflect not inherent viciousness but helplessness in the new to many people task of arguing in the digital/print medium. Better logic and better rhetoric may well have some civilizing influence though the history of print controversy since the Reformation should lead us to be cautious and restrained in our expectations. Reading the dreary theological controversies of the Early Modern period reveals that bad intellectual manners is not the contemporary thing it may seem.

Here a new medium (print) combined with the stress of a new social and religious situation produced some of the most abusive exchanges between scholars in recorded history. Are we facing a similar challenge today? Is the troll an inexpungable feature of our current environment? Can we do more than try and de-troll ourselves by identifying habits we may have that are triggering to others (especially people who don’t know us)?

This raises the moral quandary that the result of trolling should not be tone policing for its victims (especially for categories of victims who legitimately seek empowerment). Still, the lack of face to face contact with social media interlocutors has probably led many of us to be sharper than we need to be and, to adapt a line from Phillip Larkin, “Something troll-like squats in all of us.”[7]

What’s worse, dealing with trolls may make us less not more sensitive to others which would be a tragic result indeed and one that gives the troll the final victory. I leave this up to further discussion however as philosophers are probably better at diagnosing problems than solving them.

Contact details: bwills@grenfell.mun.ca

References

Ahmad, Asam. “A Note on Call-out Culture.” Briar Patch Magazine. 2 March 2015. Retreieved from: https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/a-note-on-call-out-culture

Buckels, Erin E.; Paul D. Trapnall, Delroy L. Paulhaus “Trolls Just Want to have Fun.” Personality and Individual Differences 67 (September 2014), 97-102. Retrieved from: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886914000324.

Grey Ellis, Emma. “Nobody Knows What ‘Troll’ Means Anymore, Least of All Mueller.” Wired. 26 April 2019. Retrieved from: https://www.wired.com/story/nobody-knows-what-troll-means-anymore-mueller/.

Gorman, Ginger. Troll Hunting: Inside the World of Online Hate and Its Human Fallout. Richmond, Australia: Hardie Grant Books, 2019.

Kerr, Euan; Jeffrey Bissoy. “Inside the World of an Internet Troll: How Users Can Protect Themselves Online.” MPR News. 24 April 2019. Retrieved from: https://www.mprnews.org/story/2019/04/24/miller-inside-the-world-of-an-internet-troll.

Plato, The Sophist in Collected Dialogues ed. Hamilton and Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.

Wills, Bernard. Believing Weird Things. Montréal: Minkowski Institute Press, 2018.

[1] I suppose one source for this ‘archetype’ is comedy. Comedians like George Carlin or Ricky Gervais trade in biting, satiric commentary on politics, society and religion. These individuals, and others like them, perform a useful ‘gadfly’ function. I wonder, however, if some internet trolls are taking this style for substance. Individuals like the aforementioned are no doubt very funny. However, I suspect some younger male trolls think that being a caustic, biting comedian also makes one an intellectual and an omni-competent one at that. Young males want the shortest, easiest path to respect and a scoffing manner is one of several forms of cheap grace now on offer. Certainly it is easier than problem solving or other forms of intellectual labor. At any rate the satirist and heckler are two functions the troll seems to combine and however inept we think his efforts are in this vein he does seem to please his audience: the echo chamber which witnesses his performance. “Joker” and “trickster are two other archetypes that have been suggested for the troll. (Buckels, Trapnell and Paulhaus: 97)

[2] Ivan, in The Brothers Karamazov, denounces God for the suffering of children but unlike his brother Alyosha he never nurtures an actual child. Dostoevsky here is brilliantly contrasting abstract moralism with practically effective love.

[3] ‘Owning’ someone, with its suggestion of rape and enslavement, seems to come from the culture of computer hacking though it has spread to gaming (where one can ‘rape’ an opponent). One thing at play in trolling may well be the agonistic culture of video games: combative display transferred to the sphere of verbal sparring. Plato distinguished eristics (martial display in the form of argument) from dialogue but even many academics impose a culture of male display on what ought to be a common quest for truth. This is a particular problem for academic philosophy which remains male dominated partly for this reason.

[4] People who don’t talk regularly to evangelical Christians may not realize the degree to which they appropriate the ideology of victimhood for themselves, particularly in the form of a persecution complex. White Evangelicals have suffered a significant loss of cultural status since the high-water mark of the Moral Majority days. This is part of the reason they are so bitterly resentful of gays and especially Muslims as they perceive these people as being granting privileges denied to them. Though this perception is not quite founded in reality (it’s not like being gay or Muslim in North America is so great) it no less deeply felt for that. Evangelicals have always had an inferiority complex towards mainline churches and now they have an even deeper one towards secular ‘liberal’ culture. When events like mosque shootings occur one will always find friends and acquaintances in those communities proclaiming that Christians are the ‘real’ victims and that sympathy should be directed towards them. Victim-envy is a significant motivating factor in Evangelical Islamophobia which is now a virtual article of faith in Evangelical communities ranking just below the Trinity and atonement.

[5] Here is where the fact that the troll does not use the edit function plays surprisingly to his advantage. The troll often eschews grammar and punctuation particularly in longer posts. Indeed, he often produces world salad that makes one wonder if his thought processes are disordered. However, this has the happy result for the troll that, as his words are often unclear, he can force any construal on them he needs to.

[6] It is difficult to say whether the troll is an asshole or not as it is hard to tell whether his online persona is a reflection of his offline one or embodies its suppressed tendencies. I have in fact managed to talk trolls down to a normal conversational level but only by the extraordinary means of revealing to them that I was writing a paper on trolls. The troll always wants to fix his opponent as an object, essentialize her and dismiss her as a ‘regressive leftist’ say or some other tag. This rite of naming and dismissing is basically the rite of exorcism. When the troll is revealed to be himself an object being ‘essentialized’ he is certainly (in my experience) wrong footed, at least briefly.

[7] We all like to win and part of the fun of winning is glee at discomfiting one’s opponent. In a healthy culture of competition these feelings are suitably sublimated though they sometimes rear their head. My own participation in the (very male) culture of war gaming has had the useful function of educating me in the nature of such reactions. I found that culture (though far from perfect) reasonably healthy because most people had the capacity to recognize when they had crossed a boundary and ‘man up’ and apologize. Those who didn’t were in various ways ostracized. For the troll however winning is clearly a pathological aim pursued in a scorched earth fashion.

Notes on the Rhetoric of Trolling, Part 1, Bernard Wills

SERRC — May 2, 2019 — 1 Comment

Author Information: Bernard Wills, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. bwills@grenfell.mun.ca.

Wills, Bernard. “Notes on the Rhetoric of Trolling.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8, no. 5 (2019): 1-10.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Due to length, the article has been posted in two parts, with the second half arriving Tuesday 7 May. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-48y

Image via Kai Schreiber via Flickr / Creative Commons.

The following notes are from my personal observations on the internet phenomenon of trolling. I don’t know what a troll is and is not any more than other people do but I’ve dealt with them enough to see some common patterns.[1] I cannot remember when exactly I started encountering breathtakingly insolent people on the internet but I now feel I have known them forever. At one point I went from being gob smacked to being curious.

Seriously, Who Are These People?

Who are these people? Do they have mothers? Kids? Are they bitter, lonely singletons? Abusive partners? Are they drunk or insane? Unfortunately, the internet gives little opportunity to investigate the matter. In very few instances have I been able to peer behind the trolling mask and glimpse an actual person. My comments then are confined to what I can observe of the troll mask and how that mask functions.

Of course, they represent only the section of the trolling community that I myself have been exposed to. There are many styles of trolling (like in fashion, pop culture and gaming) that I have no significant exposure to simply because of my age, gender and professional interests. I do, though, have an interest in argumentative and rhetorical styles this is the area on which I can comment most usefully (as opposed to motivation which I can only speculate on).

If I am correct about trolling a good deal of what I say will be familiar to the reader though some of it will not: we have probably constructed our own individual, hopefully overlapping, portraits. I invite readers from different disciplines to compile their own notes as many snapshots of the troll may add up to a more coherent picture.

Certainly I have more questions than answers and hope others at SERRC can instruct me. Whether philosophers or literary critics, political or social scientists we have all encountered this figure at some point and no doubt have our own disciplinary ‘takes’ on the problem.

Before I begin though let me note one important thing. Women experience far more vicious trolling than men. I have at worst been insulted. No one has threatened me with rape or death as in the case of Australian journalist Ginger Gorman or Anita Sarkeesian. These women (and many others) have encountered trolls who go to the edge of psychopathy and beyond and I must say I have never had an encounter of that kind.

Some might (perhaps) reserve the word troll for such extreme cases (I am open to that argument) but for now I will leave it as a family resemblance term covering a continuum of behaviors from mildly annoying to genuinely terrifying.[2] As a philosopher I no doubt encounter ‘opinion based’ trolls more than others and, as I like arguments, I probably interact with them far longer than I would with any other kind. As ideological or ‘opinion based trolls’ are probably not the worst of the worst I thus have to make the proviso that I am most concerned here with what may be only the middle range of the trolling spectrum.

Fortunately for the utility of my inquiry this may be the range in which, to adapt a phrase from Plato, the ‘curables’ rather than the ‘pure tyrants’ lie. Thus, I will focus my attention on how the troll presents, and particularly the argumentative and rhetorical tricks he uses rather than trying to compete with psychological approaches which are more concerned with underlying personality traits. Thus I will keep my comments on the latter to what I hope is a decent minimum.

The Most Powerful Forces of Irony

My friends in social science no doubt have a good deal to say about the internet phenomenon of trolling. As a philosopher I have a few observations on it myself and in this paper I will follow Plato in hunting the troll. I refer of course to Plato’s dialogue The Sophist (218-30) in which Plato goes hunting the sophist, seeking by the method of division to smoke him from his hiding place and fix his nature.

Alas I am not sure I can follow Plato fully here. I have, if you like, a sketchy phenomenology of the troll but no sure grasp of his nature. I use the masculine pronoun here partly because it is male trolling I find most interesting (it seems part of the broader phenomenon of ‘toxic masculinity’) and because I have no exposure to female troll cultures such as TERFS.

I simply have encountered too few female trolls to say much about them (the ones I have encountered don’t differ appreciably from their male counterparts). A consideration of trolling of course will consider, at some point, the relation of contemporary trolling to what Plato called sophistry. My emphasis at the moment though is on the thing I find most interesting which is the rhetoric and style of trolling.

Trolls, I have observed, have a very small rhetorical arsenal though they can employ this arsenal in a surprising variety of ways. Of course they rely on the ad hominem fallacy and sometimes the fallacy ad baculam. This is not what interests me however as these techniques are well known already and fairly crude. I am much more engaged by two techniques (among several I identify) that I think are much more revealing and these are the techniques of hyperbole and irony, the latter usually used in a self-protective mode.

I point them out because I think they reveal something at the heart of trolling that has not been much commented on: which is that trolling is a failure of rhetoric and part of the solution to trolling may be the teaching of rhetoric. People not only need argumentative skills but rhetorical and persuasive skills. Trolling is something people who have to make decisions on the fly about how to express themselves may fall into (and it may then harden into a habit).

In other words, key elements of trolling may be (as a colleague suggested to me) jury rigged (at least in the milder, less nakedly sadistic cases). The immediacy of the web no doubt plays some role here. Social media conversations, even with the edit function (which by the way the troll never employs, perhaps because it could never occur to him to correct himself) are always in the now and in the ‘hotness’ of the moment trolling may be an easy crutch to fall back on.

This is especially the case as the lamentable features of trolling, the invective and ad hominem attacks, may be a natural consequence of the hyperbolic reflex in the troll’s discourse. To be blunt: having pitched his language at 11 (ignoring all the rhetorical registers below it!) the troll may simply have no place to go but insult and abuse. Rhetorically, he has no technique for intensifying his expression and as the discussion heats up so does he.

Venator de Troglodytara / Hunter of Trolls

First off though we need a rough taxonomy. Trolls I have observed come in a fairly small number of shades almost invariably related to some cultural or political stance. I don’t think I have ever encountered a troll who was not staking out an ideological position though the troll’s actual relationship to ideology is somewhat vexed (it is not clear to me if the troll actually has any real beliefs).

Male trolls (the kind I know best) fall readily in the following categories: conservative/libertarian, conservative evangelical, alt- right, new atheist alt-right, new atheist/secularist and campus leftist (whether so-called ‘SJW’ or unreconstructed Stalinist). These are wildly opposed ideological stances but part of my thesis is that these differences are superficial.

Beneath all these ideological masks there is a set of common patterns; a gestalt if you will. It would not surprise me in fact if ideological conversions between these groups happen easily and swiftly for all these people use the same rhetorical techniques and even the same insults. That people with such diverse points of view fall into near identical behaviors may indicate that there is indeed something ‘jury rigged’ about troll discourse as persons facing common problems tend to converge on common solutions (though of course, by an iron law of dialectic, people also come to resemble their opponents).

Here, though, I must confront an issue that has come up again and again. Progressive friends often get upset at me if I suggest trolls are denizens of the political left as well as the political right. Ironically, left wing trolls troll me ferociously when this issue comes up. This is because they think I am asserting moral equivalence between themselves and Fascists which I am absolutely not.

Let me clarify then: right wing trolls are dangerous to others (even physically) where left wing trolls are (with some exceptions) merely exasperating. It is, I must add, a feature of ideological trolling that my ‘side’ (however defined) never trolls: trolling is what the other side does. This is what I tell progressives who deny to me (in spite of the direct evidence of my senses!) the existence of a left leaning troll culture: you don’t see the trolling on your own side in the exact same sense that a fish does not see water.[3]

This raises the vexing question of whether and to what degree the troll sees himself as a troll or self-describes as ‘passionate and committed to truth and justice’. The troll may be systematically deceiving himself about this and genuinely believe he is a ‘voice crying in the wilderness’ in which case a heuristic for trolls (if we could find one) might help some people to self-knowledge.

Contact details: bwills@grenfell.mun.ca

References

Ahmad, Asam. “A Note on Call-out Culture.” Briar Patch Magazine. 2 March 2015. Retreieved from: https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/a-note-on-call-out-culture

Gorman, Ginger. Troll Hunting: Inside the World of Online Hate and Its Human Fallout. Richmond, Australia: Hardie Grant Books, 2019.

Plato, The Sophist in Collected Dialogues ed. Hamilton and Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.

Wills, Bernard. Believing Weird Things. Montréal: Minkowski Institute Press, 2018.

[1] On some of the confusion on this question see: https://www.wired.com/story/nobody-knows-what-troll-means-anymore-mueller/.

[2] On Gorman’s story see her eloquent TED talk ( https://www.mprnews.org/story/2019/04/24/miller-inside-the-world-of-an-internet-troll?fbclid=IwAR0GwNbdwqgpxSOqsB90uQeGUREUz1Lhb5rCEqFioAVi-HHP_yKJqXoGtX8. Gorman has actually encountered some trolls in person and attributes to them a so called ‘dark tetrad’ of narcissism, psychopathy, ‘Machiavellianism’ and sadism. As I say I don’t think I have encountered anyone this bad but were I to go online under a female persona or as a person of color I would likely access layers of depravity I cannot as a middle aged white male. Most of the trolls I encounter are, as far as I can tell, putting on a display for another male and not trying to victimize me. This darker end of trolling has been studied by Buckels, Trapnell and Paulhaus in “Trolls Just Want to Have Fun” (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886914000324 These authors have been able to peer behind the mask more than I have though trolls who respond to surveys about trolling may be select group only. Plus, questionnaires may be, to a surprising degree, a medium in which people construct alternate pictures of themselves rather than deliver unvarnished, direct ones. It is their view (101) that anti-social individuals seek out the internet to troll on though they admit the causality may go the other way: the internet may make us more troll-like. One issue I have with this study is that the authors’ operating definition of trolling “Online trolling is the practice of behaving in a deceptive, destructive, or disruptive manner in a social setting on the Internet with no apparent instrumental purpose.” (97) designates only a subset of troll behaviors: some trolls seem to me to have an instrumental purpose or at least to be furthering an instrumental purpose whatever their actual motivations and that is the furtherance of a political or social aim.

[3] On the general problem of toxicity among progressives see Asam Ahmad: https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/a-note-on-call-out-culture. Mr. Ahmad has the virtue (rare in our day) virtue of being brutally honest with his own side.

Refusing Evil by (Sociotechnical) Design (Revised), Kelly Moore

SERRC — April 9, 2019 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Kelly Moore, Loyola University Chicago, kmoore11@luc.edu.

Moore, Kelly. “Refusing Evil by (Sociotechnical) Design: A Comment on Martin (Revised).” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8, no. 4 (2019): 19-23.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-483

Image by Philip Leara via Flickr / Creative Commons

This article is a substantial revision to Moore’s original work, available here. The article responds to Martin, Brian. “Technology and Evil.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective8, no. 2 (2019): 1-14.

In March 2019, 50 Muslims were killed and 50 injured in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. In 2015 in Charleston, South Carolina, USA, 9 Black worshippers and three were injured while attending church. And in 2011, 77 young people were killed in Norway at a summer holiday camp. The worshippers in South Carolina were killed with a pistol, the others with semi-automatic rifles.

Mass murders have also been carried out using hatchets and machetes, airplanes (including the German pilot who drove the plane into a mountain because he was frustrated about going blind), bicycles with bombs on them, and at a larger scale, complex technologies that take many actors and integrated systems to operate them, such as atomic weapons and drones.

In his essay, Brian Martin, one of the most prolific and thoughtful analysts of technology, warfare, and of projects for peace, draws on psychology, histories of genocide, and science and technology studies to call for a social epistemology of evil technologies that analyzes and condemn them. Evil technologies are not an ontological category per se. In Martin’s view, what makes them evil is that they embody the purposeful capacity to harm and maim other humans and the bios writ large.

Thus, the semi-automatic rifle would qualify, even though it might have other potential uses, such as such as an art object or a component of a table. Hatchets, on the other hand, while used to kill and maim, are mainly created to and used for cutting wood for productive purposes, and thus are not the sort of technology that concerns Martin.

Beginning With What Technology Is

The (de) ontological) starting point of his essay is compelling. Drawing on science studies, he views all technologies flexible objects that might be used in different ways, but insists that that this does not mean that they are morally neutral in their formation, taking on moral valence only when they are used, as other approaches insist. For Martin, understanding technologies of evil requires another approach, which is to understand why they were made in the first place. And, Martin is on the mark in asserting that there are fewer scholarly studies of technologies of destruction and harm (my phrase) than there are of technologies deemed to have a positive influence on enabling people to thrive.

Studies of the origins and use of technologies for evil purposes (e.g., the machine gun, atomic weapons, drones that deliver weapons, some torture devices) tend to tell rich stories that capture the excitement and problem-solving that go into their development, and either sidestep the moral questions of their development and use, or treat the technologies as perhaps morally difficult but necessary inventions that led to greater efficiencies of killing and more safety and security for users (Richard Rhodes’ Pulitzer-Prize Winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1987) and Donald MacKenzie’s Inventing Missile Accuracy are two examples).

There are, however, important exceptions, such as Hugh Gusterson’s Drone: Remote Control Warfare (2016), and a wide range of blogs that do the work that academics—particularly in the field of science studies–have not done in making plain the harms that inhere in and are produced by particular kinds of technologies.

The Human Roots of Evil Technology

Yet the causal starting point for Martin’s essay—how we get these technologies in the first place—relies on hypotheses about why and how individual people make and use evil technologies that are either untenable, or direct attention to questions that have already been answered. He bases much of his analysis on Bartlett’s The Pathology of Man (2005), and amplifies two conclusions from the book.

The first is that humans are unique because they are the only animal that attacks its own kind. This is not supported by evidence. Some non-human animals kill members of their own species when they are under threat or as a matter of mating or kin protection, including in situations where parents neglect or kill some of their offspring to ensure that others live. Animals, like humans, can also be made to fight under [human imposed] duress, such as with dog fighting.

Humans-as-animals also live in highly complex social systems, in which most of the time, people are not busy killing each other. The same is true of animals: they spend little of their time killing each other.

This grand theory of “man” [sic] avoids grappling with the fact that historically only some people–men, particularly young men–have done most of the direct killing of other humans, and that to get them to do so, there is a wide range of organizational and social labor that has to be done. In situations where there is little sense of status or material threat, people are, apparently, less likely to attempt to kill each other, unless the killing can be routinized through banality or through concerted social labor to make killing pleasurable or necessary for survival.

[Martin also favorably cites Bartlett’s assertion that the “cult of motherhood” and an infatuation with children are somehow related to mass murder or harm to others, a framework that is underdeveloped, to say that least, but wrongly disparaging of mothers’ role in the survival and thriving of their children.]

Martin proposes, too, that humans are planetary parasites, a claim that is perhaps less illuminating than understanding which groups of people, at which historical moments, are most implicated in the destruction of life through technological means. If we are to understand how technologies associated with evil are made and deployed, we must take into account of social variation rather than treating it as the result of human nature.

Martin does consider human variation in the essay, identifying rage, jealousy, fear, excitement, boredom, pleasure, numbness, righteousness, ambivalence, and splitting and dissociation, among others psychological and physical states, as associated with mass and individual killing. With the exception of compassion and love, killing is probably associated with just about every other feeling that humans have ever categorized. Martin and Bartlett conclude from this that humans are essentially killing animals.

To conclude that these varied emotions are the result of some kind of internal logic of the human animal is indeed one conclusion that could be drawn. But another is to understand the social situations that produce these feelings, and perhaps even more helpfully, to follow Martin’s suggestion that we learn more about the people who don’t kill in situations where others do.

This method would avoid starting with interior psychological states and enable attention to the social relationships and biographies of people who are non-participants. Religious objectors, for example, might be a good starting point. My own and others’ scholarship (Moore 2008) shows that some scientists find excitement, pride, and creativity in making weapons, but that during periods of political mobilization against wars, a not insignificant number of scientists have mounted opposition to weapons production, based not on their psychologies, but on their relationships to antiwar movements. I suspect that we would learn little about the production of evil technologies from finding out more about the interior mental states of these people.

Exploring the Figure of the Citizen-Soldier

The latter part of the essay is where there are more promising epistemological approaches to how we might understand how technologies embody evil and to condemn them. What might be called the “commitment to militarism” at a national and transnational level is a promising starting point. As a long-time student of war, Martin recognizes that we no longer live in a world in which warfare simply legally declared and then legally ended.

Instead, we live in a world is which militarized life is normalized, made exciting in mass media, through metaphors such as the “war on…”, through languages of threat and the need for protection that are marshalled by political actors to galvanize hatred, and the use of war technologies on civilians, to name but a few of these tendencies that are visible in many places across the globe. The at-risk citizen, called to prepare for battles for jobs, education, health, and many other things, has emerged as a dominant cultural form.

The normalization of citizen soldiering, argues Cowan (2008), is part and parcel of the drumbeat, in neoliberal countries, of ensuring living with insecurity. Outside the economic realm, leadership around the world, most notably in the USA, rules by threat and instability, and fires up the furnaces of xenophobia in order to justify the suffering of others; these broader social processes must also be understood as part of the context in which produce evil technologies is normalized.

Martin is not only interested in how and why evil technologies are made and deployed, but in arguing against the usual ways that science studies scholars understand technologies (actor-network theory, political economy, and innovation studies), which he deems ill-equipped to understand evil technologies, in part because they rarely condemn them. As a discipline that has historically drawn on the European tradition of dispassionate scholarship, this is in part true.

Innovating Our Way to Peace?

Innovation studies are particularly pernicious, for the concept can brings forth an Enlightenment optimism about progress that is now connected with technologically-based entrepreneurial projects and their spin-offs. “Innovative technologies” such as more efficient weapons, can get morally folded into an echo chamber that limits critique.

Of the three ways of thinking about technologies in science studies, analysts of the political economy of science have been perhaps the most attentive to the connections between technologies of killing and destruction, and of profit making. Martin is right in arguing that condemnation is not always at the center of any of these schools of technological analysis, and nor, perhaps, are facts such as that in the USA, the Department of Defense is the largest employer in the country, or that Israel, Russia, the United States and Great Britain supply most of the weapons that people around the world use to kill each other.

It is worth repeating that studies of the workers in most of the production systems would probably turn up little new information about why people are doing what they do: most people take for granted that we need weapons, they are not the direct users of them, they get paid, and they are not in a position to object too strongly.

The social epistemologies that Martin proposes to show the existence of evil technologies and to oppose them are excellent and particularly promising for students to undertake. One is to trace out motivations for making these weapons. The routinization of their creation seems a less promising starting point, but how engineers, business leaders, and political figures come to take up these jobs, and whether they have been exposed to alternatives, is a promising approach. “Studying up” is much harder than studying soldiers or those who work in a bullet factory.

Studies that expose the biographies of weapons creators might shining a highly critical light on the normalization of this kind of work. A second proposed method, action research, is also promising, for it would allow scholars and communities to learn more about technologies and be critical of them.

Action research projects have typically focused on health harms from weapons manufacture; other studies might be more focused on the social harms that are caused by making guns, not only using them. Finally, give “tracing” projects, such as where foods come from are popular among students, journalists, and general audiences, genealogies of a given evil technology, which included moral evaluations of the harms that were done as a result of production and use, is also promising. None of these epistemologies necessitates knowing about the internal mental states of individuals.

Martin sounds a pessimistic note throughout the essay, and given the embeddedness of evil technologies in systems ranging from profit making, to racism, to religious prejudice, to environmental destruction (consider military “proving grounds”) this is not an unreasonable position.

Conclusion

Yet in the immediate aftermath of the Christchurch killings, the Australian Prime Minister called for a ban on semi-automatic weapons, and legislation has been drafted that will make that happen. Martin’s field of science studies has become a discipline engaged in “making and doing” projects with clear justice aims, rather than a field that imitates the style of neutrality in scientific claim-making.

Young people around the world are pleading with those with political power to save the bios; I read little about their enthusiasm for war. Far from being uniform psychological subjects bent on killing, they and people from many other age groups and walks of life, are also moving in this direction. These efforts would be strengthened by the implementation of Martin’s epistemological suggestions for how to study and condemn evil technologies, a program that continues his long standing and important analyses of warmaking, peacemaking and technoscience. The essay is thus both timely, and indeed, hopeful.

Contact details: kmoore11@luc.edu

References

Cowan, Deborah. Military Workfare: The Soldier as Citizen in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.

Gusterson, Hugh. Drone: Remote Control Warfare. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016.

MacKenzie, Donald. Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Study of Missile Guidance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.

Moore, Kelly. Disrupting Science: Social Movements, American Scientists and the Politics of the Military, 1955-1975. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

Refusing Evil by (Sociotechnical) Design, Kelly Moore

SERRC — April 2, 2019 — 1 Comment

Author Information: Kelly Moore, Loyola University Chicago, kmoore11@luc.edu.

Moore, Kelly. “Refusing Evil by (Sociotechnical) Design: A Comment on Martin.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8, no. 4 (2019): 14-18.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-47Y

A NATO reconnaissance drone.
Image by Anguskirk via Flickr / Creative Commons

This article responds to Martin, Brian. “Technology and Evil.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective8, no. 2 (2019): 1-14.

In March 2019, 50 Muslims were killed and 50 injured in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. In 2015 in Charleston, South Carolina, USA, 9 Black worshippers and three injured while at church. And in 2011, 77 young people were killed in Norway at a summer holiday camp. The worshippers were killed with a pistol, the others with semi-automatic rifles.

In his essay, Brian Martin, one of the most prolific and thoughtful analysts of technology, warfare, and of projects for peace, draws on psychology, histories of genocide, and science and technology studies to call for a social epistemology of evil technologies that analyzes and condemn them. Evil technologies are not an ontological category per se, but in Martin’s view, what makes them evil is that they embody the purposeful capacity to harm and maim other humans and the bios writ large.

Thus, the semi-automatic rifle would qualify, even though it might have other potential uses, such as such as an art object or a component of a table. Hatchets, on the other hand, while used to kill and maim, are mainly created to and used for cutting wood for productive (rather than purely pleasurable) purposes, and thus is not the sort of technology that concerns Martin.

Beginning With What Technology Is

The ontological starting point of his essay is compelling. Drawing on science studies, he views all technologies flexible objects that might be used in different ways, but insists that that this does not mean that they are morally neutral, such that they take on a moral valence only when they are used. Understanding why and how technologies of evil requires another approach, which is to understand why they were made in the first place. And, Martin is on the mark in asserting that there are fewer scholarly studies of technologies of destruction and harm (my phrase) than there are of technologies deemed to have a positive influence on enabling people to thrive.

As Martin recognizes, we have many studies of the origins and use of technologies for evil purposes (e.g., the machine gun, atomic weapons, drones that deliver weapons, some torture devices). Most tend to tell rich and interesting stories that capture the excitement and problem-solving that go into their development, and either sidestep the moral questions of their development and use, or treat the technologies as perhaps morally difficult but necessary inventions that led to greater efficiencies of killing, and more safety and security for users (Richard Rhodes’ Pulitzer-Prize Winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1987) and Donald MacKenzie’s Inventing Missile Accuracy are two examples). There are, however, important exceptions, such as Hugh Gusterson’s Drone: Remote Control Warfare (2016), and a wide range of blogs that do the work that academics have not done.

The Human Roots of Evil Technology

The starting point for Martin’s essay, however, establishes hypotheses about why and how individual people make and use evil technologies that are either untenable, or direct attention to questions that have already been answered. He bases much of his analysis on Bartlett’s The Psychology of Man (2000), and amplifies two conclusions from the book.

Yet humans-as-animals also live in highly complex social systems, in which most of the time, people are not busy killing each other. The same is true of animals: they spend little of their time killing each other. This grand theory of “man” [sic] avoids grappling with the fact that historically, men, particularly young men, have done most of the direct killing, and that to get them to do so, there is a wide range of organizational and social labor that has to be done. In situations where there is little sense of status or material threat, people are, apparently, less likely to attempt to kill each other, unless the killing can be routinized through banality or through concerted social labor to make killing pleasurable or necessary for survival.

Similarly, likening humans to planetary parasites is perhaps less illuminating than understanding which groups of people, at which historical moments, are most implicated in the destruction of life through war and through other means. If we are to understand how technologies associated with evil are deployed, we must take into account this social variation rather than treating it as human nature.

Martin and Bartlett also identify rage, jealousy, fear, excitement, boredom, pleasure, numbness, righteousness, ambivalence, and splitting and dissociation, among others psychological and physical states associated with mass and individual killing. With the exception of compassion and love, killing is probably associated with just about every other feeling that humans have ever categorized.

Peacefulness As an Innovation

It thus raises questions about why tracing affect itself would reveal much about the making of evil technologies, or even their use. Martin’s suggestion that we learn more about the people who don’t kill in situations where others do is a stronger position, and we might avoid starting with interior psychological states as the major reason for these positions, and ask, as Martin does later in the essay, about the social relationships and biographies of people who are non-participants. Religious objectors, for example, are a good starting point.

My own and others’ scholarship (Moore 2008) shows that some scientists find excitement and creativity in making weapons, but that during periods of political mobilization against wars, a not insignificant number of scientists mounted opposition to weapons production, based not on their psychologies, but on their relationships to antiwar movements. I suspect that we would learn little about the psychology of evil from finding out more about what motivates these people.

The latter part of the essay is where there are more promising epistemological approaches to how we might understand how technologies embody evil, and to condemn them, starting with what might be called the “commitment to militarism” at a national and transnational level. As a long-time student of war, Martin recognizes that we no longer live in a world in which warfare is that which is legally declared and then legally ended.

We live in a world is which militarized life is normalized, made exciting in mass media, through metaphors such as the “war on…”, through languages of threat and the need for protection that are marshalled by political actors to galvanize hatred, and the use of war technologies on civilians, to name but a few of these tendencies. In the 1980s in the USA and in other countries, worker who produced goods at a steady state faded away, with factories, as a model citizen.

The new model is the soldier who anticipates and prepares for battle through a variety of technologies, including military-derived exercises such aerobics, Pilates, and boot camps of various kinds, and the drumbeat, in neoliberal countries, of ensuring that each of us is prepared for the upcoming battles we have to fight for ourselves (health, education, children). Leadership around the world that rules by threat and instability, and fires up the furnaces of xenophobia in order to justify the suffering of others must also be understood as a vehicle through which the need for nations to produce evil technologies is normalized.

The Ideas Which Fall Short of the Task

Martin argues that the usual ways that science studies scholars understand technologies—actor-network theory, political economy, and innovation studies—are ill-equipped to understand evil technologies, in part because they rarely condemn them. As a discipline that has historically drawn on the European tradition of dispassionate scholarship, this is in part true.

Innovation studies are particularly pernicious, for the concept can brings forth an Enlightenment optimism about progress that is now connected with entrepreneurial development projects. But among all of these options, it is analysts of political economy who have been most alert to the connections between technologies of killing and destruction and of profit making.

Martin is right, though, in arguing that condemnation is not always at the center of such studies, and nor, perhaps, are facts such as that in the USA, the Department of Defense is the largest employer in the country, or that Israel, Russia, the United States and Great Britain supply most of the weapons that people around the world use to kill each other. Studies of the workers in most of the production systems would probably turn up little new information about why people are doing what they do: most people take for granted that we need weapons, they are not the direct users of them, they get paid, and they are not in a position to object too strongly.

Martin’s Promising Methods

More promising are the social epistemologies that Martin proposes. One is to trace out motivations for making these weapons. Again, the routinization of their creation seems less promising, but the engineers, business leaders, and political figures whose job it is to make existing weapons better at killing and less risky for users might be a place to start. “Studying up” is much harder than studying, say, soldiers or those who work in a bullet factory. But studies that expose the accounts that these people give might also be a means of shining a highly critical light on how it comes to be that we have more and “improved” weapons.

An action research approach is also promising, for it would allow scholars and communities to learn more about technologies and be critical of them. Action research projects have typically focused on health harms from weapons manufacture; other studies might be more focused on the social harms that are caused by things like guns. Studies that trace foods are popular among students and journalists. Genealogies of a given evil technology, which included moral evaluations of the harms that were done as a result of production and use, is also promising.

Yet in the immediate aftermath of the Christchurch killings, the Australian Prime Minister called for a ban on semi-automatic weapons, and legislation has been drafted that will make that happen. Science studies has become a discipline engaged in “making and doing” projects with clear justice aims, rather than a field that imitates the style of neutrality in scientific claim-making. Young people around the world are pleading with those with political power to save the biosphere; I read little about their enthusiasm for war.

Far from being uniform psychological subjects bent on killing, they and people from many other age groups and walks of life, are also moving in this direction. These efforts would be strengthened by the implementation of Martin’s epistemological suggestions for how to study and condemn evil technologies, a program that continues his long standing and important analyses of warmaking, peacemaking and technoscience. The essay is thus both timely, and indeed, hopeful.

Contact details: kmoore11@luc.edu

References

Gusterson, Hugh. Drone: Remote Control Warfare. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016.

MacKenzie, Donald. Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Study of Missile Guidance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.

Moore, Kelly. Disrupting Science: Social Movements, American Scientists and the Politics of the Military, 1955-1975. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

Why ‘Healthy Conspiracy Theories’ Are (Oxy)morons, Part Two, Pascal Wagner et al

SERRC — March 19, 2019 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Pascal Wagner-Egger, University of Fribourg, pascal.wagner@unifr.ch.

Gérald Bronner, Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire des Énergies de Demain

Sylvain Delouvée, University of Rennes

Sebastien Dieguez, University of Fribourg

Nicolas Gauvrit, École Pratique des Hautes Études

Wagner-Egger, Pascal; Gérald Bronner, Sylvain Delouvée, Sebastian Dieguez, Nicolas Gauvrit. “Why ‘Healthy Conspiracy Theories’ Are (Oxy)morons: Statistical, Epistemological, and Psychological Reasons in Favor of the (Ir)Rational View.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8, no. 3 (2019): 50-67.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references, and consists of the full text of the article. Shortlinks: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-47v (part one), https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-47z (part two)

One must never forget the ideological aspects of conspiracy thinking. Image by Adam Riggio

The Psychological Arguments: The Conspiracy Mentality

Next, a psychological characteristic of conspiracy theorists worsens the epistemological judgement of their “theories”: Many surveys on conspiracy theories found that the beliefs in various conspiracies are correlated. It means that the adherence to one theory is associated with the adherence to another (even invented) one, and conversely that a refusal of one conspiracy theory is associated with the refusal of another conspiracy theory[1].

This has been called “monological belief system [38]” or “conspiracy mentality [39]”[2]. This is not only a phenomenon based on statistical results on wide samples of students and general population: you will find many “qualitative” examples on the internet (see also [94]). As an academic working at University on conspiracy theories, one is very likely to be approached by members of Reopen 9/11 or similar associations, as some of us have been in the past years.

After some lengthy discussions about the 9/11 case, the leader of the French Swiss association told the first author that global warming was denied by some scientists (which is true, but what is also true is that 95-98% of the climate scientists do not [42]).

Another Facebook friend of friends with whom one of us discussed at length the 9/11 case was posting conspiracy suspicions to nearly every sociopolitical event (all terrorist attacks were false flags, the willingness of Catalonia to be independent was a conspiracy of the European Union against Spain, etc.).

The conspiracy mentality, a psychological tendency to explain a lot of complex socio-historical events in terms of conspiracies, is readily explained by a “logical” consequence of believing with no high enough level of proof in one conspiracy theory: If the CIA organized and covered the assassination of its own president, why would they not organize a huge false-flag attack against their own population, and then why all other Western countries (France, UK, Spain, Suede, Germany, etc.) would not do the same? The belief in one conspiracy theory renders lots of others — if not all — conspiracy theories more plausible [19]. Conspiracy-proneness is thus almost doomed to lead to bias (given the statistical argument proposed above), driven by a general distrust in institutions (political, scientific, and media) [5], [25]-[28], [38].

At the epistemological level, the propensity to suspect conspiracies in every significant event with no serious inquiry is very similar to the numerous predictions of astrologists. According to the law of large numbers, some very rare predictions will be “hits”, whereas a huge majority will be false alarms (still due to the statistical argument). This is the reason why one of us recently equated conspiracist ideation as “bullshit” and wrote that “conspiracy theories do not exist” [43].

There are no theories in what we call conspiracy theories, but only conspiracy suspicions (i.e. multiple suspicions of conspiracies, supported by only errant data, or even not supported by any data, such as in the Catalonia example above). This is also what one of us told 9/11 conspiracy defenders some years ago: If a serious journalistic inquiry manages to bring proofs of the conspiracy (confessions, official documents proving the conspiracy, etc.), you could be retrospectively “right” about the 9/11 conspiracy, but by pure chance.

You would be “right” for the wrong reasons (the law of large numbers, pseudo-inquiry based on errant data, disrespect of Occam’s razor and burden of proof principles), and this is equivalent to be wrong, as we would say to the astrologist[3].

The Psychological Arguments: The Irrationality

Finally, the last argument against the healthy view on conspiracy theories is indirect and psychological. Numerous researches show that believers in conspiracy theories are, on average, less rational than non-believers. People who adhere to conspiracy theories will tend to embrace a wide range of irrational ideas, such as belief in paranormal phenomena, magical ideation and superstition [24]–[29], [34], [44]–[47] , anthropomorphism or animism [5], [24], [48], [49], [58], “bullshit” receptivity [50], [51], and creationism [24].

Moreover, conspiracy believers are more prone than nonbelievers to various cognitive biases: conjunction fallacy[4] [20], proportion bias [53]–[55], hypersensitive agency detection [58], and teleological reasoning [24]. Other studies directly showed that conspiracy believers display more intuitive (i.e. often incorrect) and less analytic (i.e., often correct) thinking than non-believers [24], [57]. These results are consistent with the observation that nonbelievers score higher on intelligence scales [25], [30], [31], [57]. Moreover, most studies found a negative correlation between conspiracy beliefs and educational level [7], [38], [58]–[67]. In addition, adherence to conspiracy theories is often related to psychological disturbance (i.e., schizotypy and paranoia) [26]–[28], [46], [51], [65], [69]–[73].

Two last elements have not been yet empirically demonstrated, but are easily illustrated in conspiracists’ discourses and methods on their websites and in online discussions with them: (1) extreme conspiracists are very skeptical about the official version (and sometimes even paranoidally, in an excessive distrust of all official sources), but on the other side believe in a quasi-religious manner — without apparently considering that they could be wrong — to the existence of the conspiracy theories. Often, they do not detail the conspiracy “theory”, but only express a conspiracy suspicion, which is so restrained from falsification. This striking differential cognitive treatment of official versions and conspiracy theories has been called “cognitive asymmetry” by one of us (as reported in [74]).

As we mentioned above, Chomsky sarcastically enjoined 9/11 conspiracists not only to study nano-thermite and extremely complicated details of the official version, but also to fully consider the extraordinary complexity that such a large-scale conspiracy would require to be successful. Moreover (2), conspiracists exhibit the “primacy of conclusion” fallacy, a common characteristic of socially shared knowledge, such as rumors (e.g. [75], [76]).

The Psychological Arguments: Reason Running in Reverse

Whereas science follows the hypothetico-deductive method (testing hypotheses to reach a conclusion) [77], conspiracists start from the conclusion, select and interpret the facts that fit with the conclusion. When an errant data is explained by an official account, they simply move to the other dozens of errant data in order to keep their faith in the conspiracy. One of us defined the “argumentative mille-feuille” used by conspiracy believers — and producers —, an accumulation of a very high number of errant data apparently in favor of a conspiracy theory, as in the 9/11 case [93]. Whatever the plausibility of each element in isolation (explained versus unexplained errant data), this accumulation produces a feeling of global truthiness, like “everything may not be false”, or “no smoke without fire”. It also sometimes creates some kind of intellectual intimidation, for those who would challenge all the numerous technical arguments.

At the final stage of conversion, conspiracists will also take every explanation of errant data coming from experts as additional proofs of the conspiracy, the experts being part of the conspiracy (as some paranoid conspiracists accused one of us in online discussions about the 9/11 affair) [19] [78]. Besides, the fact that the conspiracy may not be proved is taken as a proof of the powerfulness of the conspirators, who managed to delete any traces. The conspiracy theory becomes then irrefutable [90] or unfalsifiable [19], because of what some of us called the “ultimate confirmation bias”, also present in extreme religious faith [91]. For example, creationists may say that dinosaur fossils were put by the Devil in order to deceive humans (or even by God himself, in order to show that scientific research cannot reach the truth).

To Sum Up

All these arguments — statistical, epistemological, and psychological — very strongly advocate for us in favor of the “unhealthy” or “pathologizing” view on conspiracy theories, and against the “healthy” view. We propose here to rename this “unhealthy” or “pathologizing” view as (ir)rational view on conspiracy theories — a rational analysis of conspiracy theories concluding at their irrationality —, which states that:

(1) At the statistical level, proved conspiracy theories are so rare compared to unverified and delusional conspiracy theories, that considering all conspiracy theories as false is true at a very high level of certainty (probably more than 99%, which is a quasi-certainty, notably higher than the 95% used in statistical inference).

Next, the remaining 1% of the conspiracy theories that could potentially turn out to be right are currently defended for the wrong reasons (errant data), unlike conspiracy inquiries, which do not affirm the existence of conspiracies without strong evidence. As we would do for “correct” predictions of astrologists, which will appear for statistical reasons (the law of large numbers), we will consider all conspiracy theories, as all astrological predictions (even the ones that turned out to be true), as false. A simple suspicion based on previous cases of real conspiracies, errant data, or even the purported benefit to some categories of people (“who benefits from the crime”) will be dismissed as a (false) conspiracy theory.

(2) At the epistemological level, advocates of conspiracies will have to pass Occam’s and Hanlon’s razors, and follow the burden of proof principle. As conspiracies are less parsimonious than official versions, they should be only supported with a high level of proofs (once again, confessions, and declassified documents) and not only errant data about the official version (burden of proof on the shoulders of challengers of the official version, not on its defenders).

At the individual level of believers (3), believing in one conspiracy theory may engage to believe in another one, and to many others. Large number of unverified hypotheses constitute an irrational way to get at a time one hypothesis seemingly corroborated: this would be for wrong reasons (law of large numbers instead of a serious inquiry). Finally, believers in conspiracy theory have lower cognitive abilities, suffer more than nonbelievers from several cognitive biases, embrace many irrational ideas, and this does not, indirectly, advocate in favor of the rationality of their beliefs.

Some defenders of the “healthy” view have gone so far to argue that scholars who adopt the “pathologizing” view, as we do, are themselves pathological, as they would suffer from a “conspiracy theory phobia” [86]. Given the statistical, epistemological and psychological evidence summarized here, we let the reader conclude about the rationality of each side of the debate.

To Broaden the Debate

This controversy is not only of interest for scholars who study conspiracy theories, but also for sociology, as critical or Marxist sociologists were accused by Karl Popper of conspiracist tendencies, by excessively attributing intentions to dominant groups, sometimes coupled with historicism (teleological view of history, as in the Marxist framework) [77]. As our analysis of conspiracy theories suggest, critical sociologists and journalists also have to be prudent in their claims about the intentionality and the internal organization of the “dominant classes” (e.g., the existence of a “worldwide oligarchy”), thus to prove with proper investigations the collusions of leaders in society, and not only exhibit suspicions of collusions [87]. Alliances, and even more secret alliances are less parsimonious explanations than side-effects of social structures (that could be of benefit to some high-status groups, without having been created by them), and in turn less parsimonious than some unintended “perverse effects” of the aggregated wills of individuals [89].

The present (ir)rational view on conspiracy theories is not surprising for psychologists who study beliefs in general, because it is highly consistent with other domains of beliefs (religious, paranormal, rumors, etc.) [79], [88]. The function of beliefs is not truth-seeking. They may of course also fulfill epistemic functions, but distinct from scientific knowledge acquisition: to simplify complexity by (1) giving simple explanations, (2) rendering concrete abstract concepts, (3) assimilating new knowledge to existing social representations, (4) justify behaviors (e.g., stereotypes) [84]. Beliefs and ideologies also serve psychological or existential functions, for example restoring a sense of control in an uncontrollable world [80]–[82] or coping with death anxiety [83]. Social functions have also been identified, such as reinforcing ingroup cohesion and social identity of believers. Finally, beliefs also pursue pragmatic aims, such as the proposition of action modalities (strikes, boycott, etc.), mobilization of individuals and groups for a cause [84] [85].

A Proposition of Convergence

To conclude, in order to solve the controversy between the seemingly untenable “healthy” view and the far more reasoned (ir)rational view, we would like to encourage defenders of the former to abandon the Sisyphean idea to epistemologically rehabilitate conspiracy theories, and rather to distinguish them from, and encourage healthy conspiracy inquiries (e.g., with journalistic safeguards, such as the triangulation of data sources, confessions, official documents, possibility of disconfirmation, etc.), which should bring proofs instead of errant data[5]. As Stoke [68] and Dentith [45] acknowledge, the potentially dangerous accusation of conspiracy — in addition to be less parsimonious — should be the a posteriori consequence of an inquiry, and not the a priori product of irrational suspicion.

This suggestion could solve a true problem evoked by the supporters of the “unhealthy” view on conspiracy theories, the political use of accusation of conspiracy theory: any government or powerful group would not anymore be able to dismiss opponents’ arguments as conspiracy theories, because opponents would not defend conspiracy theories any more. They would support only the results (and not the announcement) of serious journalistic or judicial inquiries bringing positive proofs of the conspiracy[6].

Hence, our proposition could be an epistemic solution to the longlasting problem of defining warranted versus unwarranted [19], real versus bogus [90], or healthy versus unhealthy conspiracy theories, what we may call the “conspiracy demarcation problem”: The formers do simply not exist, because conspiracy theories may in our view be defined as irrational suspicions of conspiracy based on errant data about the official version (“negative” clues). They are opposed to (conspiracy) inquiries, which possibly prove the existence of a particular conspiracy (with once again sound journalistic or judicial investigations, and positive proofs of the conspiracy such as confessions, official documents, leaks, whistleblowers, etc.; note that these proofs could be also in principle brought by non professionals, but perhaps with less likelihood).

We are glad at the end of this paper to read in a recent article by Dentith that he also seems to abandon the concepts of conspiracy theory (and theorizing) in favor of “communities of inquiry”, which is close to what we called here conspiracy inquiry [32]. The proper term should however simply be “inquiry”, or “ongoing case” [43], as the conclusion of the inquiry will be “strong proofs” or “no strong proofs” for the conspiracy.

We would only add, as we mentioned above, that such communities have to — at least publicly, in order not to manipulate public opinion — consider their own unparsimonious hypothesis of conspiracy as false, until they are able to provide strong and unequivocal evidence (and not errant data) to prove them as true. This is exactly what happened to the inquirers of the Watergate affair: Byford reports that there was at that time a concern even in the team of investigators of the Washington Post to cross the boundary between journalism and “fantasy”. And when they first reported the illegal tapping at the Watergate hotel, the White House tried to discredit the Washington Post by accusation of… conspiracy theory [90].

We can see with this edifying example that the positive proofs brought by the inquiry eliminated both the epistemic weakness of the irrational accusation from the conspiracy theories, and the possibility for authorities to rule out any opponents’ accusations as conspiracy theories. Dentith also admits that communities of inquiry could or should do it secretly, at least in the beginning of the process [32].

This is for example what members of Reopen 9/11 associations are not doing, who only try to widely publicize their doubts on the official version. This recommendation may seem weird, but it could be similar for the announcement of the discovery of a wonder drug or vaccine, which should be made only after a long and hard validation procedure. So ironically, we probably need some conspiracies in order to reveal real conspiracies.

Contact details: pascal.wagner@unifr.ch

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[1] See for example [24]–[37].

[2] The idea that the conspiracy mentality could be strong enough to lead to agree with two contradictory conspiracy theories has indeed not been proved by Wood, Douglas and Sutton [40], contrary to what they claim in their paper (i.e., that some people believe for example that Oussama Ben Laden was dead before the intervention of the US Army in 2011 in Pakistan, AND is still living somewhere). First, as Basham correctly notes, to agree partially with two contradictory claims could mean that people envisage that the two possibilities are not jointly possible (as the belief that my lost keys are probably in my car or in my bag). Moreover, reanalysis of the data showed that the correlations are due to the refusal of the two contradictory conspiracy theories, and not their acceptance. See [41] and future research for the update.

[3] This consequence of the law of large numbers is commonly illustrated by the cases of a random generator of words producing a sensible sentence, or when an infinite number of monkeys during an infinite time will randomly generate Shakespeare’s complete work on writing machines.

[4] It is certainly possible, as Basham does about this study [52], to criticize some methodological points of some studies, but certainly not all. And we would add — following the scientific epistemology described above — that Basham has the burden of empirically proving the effectiveness of his criticisms (by showing a disappearance of the effect by some changes in the method, for example), and not only sharing his conceptual or methodological disagreements.

[5] It seems to us worthless to try to distinguish healthy from unhealthy conspiracy theories, or conspiracy theorizing from conspiracy narratives, as Dentith proposes, because the term conspiracy theory is now very negatively connotated, for all the good reasons we listed in this paper.

[6] We may indeed think that the confessions about the US/UK WMD were not obtained because of the existence of conspiracy theories, but more certainly due to the reasoning from the US army that it was impossible to cover up the “error” they made.

Why ‘Healthy Conspiracy Theories’ Are (Oxy)morons, Part One, Pascal Wagner et al

SERRC — March 14, 2019 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Pascal Wagner-Egger, University of Fribourg, pascal.wagner@unifr.ch.

Gérald Bronner, Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire des Énergies de Demain

Sylvain Delouvée, University of Rennes

Sebastien Dieguez, University of Fribourg

Nicolas Gauvrit, École Pratique des Hautes Études

The pdf of the article gives specific page references, and consists of the full text of the article. Shortlinks: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-47v (part one), https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-47z (part two)

One must never forget the ideological aspects of conspiracy thinking. Image by PJ Nelson via Flickr / Creative Commons

Since 2016, Basham, Dentith and colleagues have, on several occasions, reacted in the Journal Social Epistemology to our call “Let’s fight conspiracy theories effectively”, published in a French daily. There, we worried about French governmental and local initiatives aimed at fighting the proliferation of conspiracy theories (CT) among youths, in a context of terrorist attacks, and subsequent ethnic and religious tensions [1]. We once responded to their critics [2], and we would like here to add some additional arguments, in order to evaluate the relevance of the concept of “healthy conspiracy theories”.[1]

From this discussion, and other debates about the nature and definition of conspiracy theories, it seems that the disagreement may be very simply put: It opposes the “healthy” view on conspiracy theories held by Basham and Dentith (and others; Basham cites Peter Knight, Gina Husting, Martin Orr, Kurtis Hagen, David Coady, Jack Bratich and Charles Pigden, plus some European social psychologists[2]), and the “unhealthy” or “pathologizing” view held by the majority of psychologists (Viren Swami, Robert Brotherton, Jan-Willem, Van Prooijen, Karen Douglas, our team in France and Switzerland, etc.) and some sociologists (Jovan Byford, Joseph Uscinski, Véronique Campion-Vincent, Gérald Bronner, Pierre-André Taguieff, etc.) working in the field[3].

Healthy and Unhealthy Views on Conspiracy Theories

According to the “healthy” view, we should consider each conspiracy theory on its own merits (particularism), and not discard all of them as non-rational beliefs (generalism), given that some conspiracies have been uncovered in history (Watergate, MK-Ultra, Tuskegee experiments, etc.). Its main argument is that the conspiracy theory about US/UK Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) has finally been proven true. This conspiracy theory accused US and UK armies to have invaded Iraq in 2003, not as they claim because of the alleged presence of weapons of mass destruction — which were finally not found, and led the US and UK governments to recognize their “error” — but in reality, to gain control on a strategic region for oil industry.

For the “unhealthy” view, conspiracy theories are mainly false, often delusional, having negative social consequences[4], and favored by faulty reasoning (cognitive biases).

In this paper, we will evaluate these two positions at a (1) statistical, (2) epistemological, and (3) empirical (psychological) level. We will see how the three levels unambiguously advocate in favor of the “unhealthy” view.

The Statistical Argument

First, at the statistical level, most conspiracy theories are false[5]. If we did not miss any other, Basham and Dentith cite only one (!) conspiracy theory that turned out to be true: the US/UK Weapons of Massive Destructions. Conspiracists and defenders of the healthy view also add some dozens of proved conspiracies (Basham & Dentith enumerate for example the beginnings of holocaust, Stalin, US army in Vietnam, the Watergate, or Litvinenko case [14]; We may add the MK-Ultra project, Tuskegee experiments, the Tobacco conspiracy, etc.). As Popper underlined, successful conspiracies are rare in history [16]. Moreover, and this is a crucial point, all these proved conspiracies did not rely on preceding public conspiracy theories. They were discovered by genuine journalistic, police or judicial investigations. Thus, at best, we know very few conspiracy theories that became true.

By contrast, thousands of conspiracy theories flood books, and nowadays the internet. It would be impossible to build an exhaustive list, but let us only mention some categories: (a) from secret groups (the illuminati, the templars, the freemasons, the Jews, the communists, etc.), (b) about the death of celebrities (JFK, MLK, Lady Diana, John Lennon, Michael Jackson, etc.), and living celebrities (Barack Obama, Emmanuel Macron, Miley Cyrus, etc.), (c) after natural catastrophes (Tsunamis, earthquakes, etc.), (d) about plane crashes or disappearances, (e) after terrorist attacks, (f) about political organizations or meetings (UNO, WTO, IMF, Bilderberg group, etc.), (g) following disease outbreaks, (h) about vaccines, (i) about science and technology (moon landings, chemtrails, CERN, climate change, satellites, etc.), (j) following accidents (bridge collapse at Genoa, fires, etc.), (k) in sports, (l) about alien “visitations”, etc., etc.

Concerning for example the sole Barack Obama, Mother Jones, an independent magazine, identified more than 40 conspiracy theories organized in 5 clusters (about him being Muslim, pervert, dictator, radical leftist or Kenyan) [15]. As another edifying example, Peter Knight’s Encyclopedia of “Conspiracy Theories in American History” is nearly two 1000 pages volumes long.

To be still more precise about the statistical argument, let us think about the numerous JFK’s assassination conspiracy theories. According to former Los Angeles District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi, no less than 42 groups, 82 assassins, and 214 people had been accused in the various conspiracy theories [16]. For the sake of the argument, let us say that there are 50 different conspiracy theories, which is below reality. There are only two epistemic possibilities. Either the official version is true, and the fifty conspiracy theories are false, or one conspiracy is true, and the forty-nine others and the official version are false. In any case, the huge majority of conspiracy theories are false. In view of this statistical argument (one CT that turned to be true against thousands of false or at best unverified CTs), when considering all conspiracy theories to be false, we will be correct at a very close rate of 100%.

Second, at the epistemological level, the official version and the conspiracy theories are not equivalent hypotheses to consider, contrary to what conspiracist often claim. We will rely here on scientific reasoning. Such reasoning can be used to evaluate any kind of hypotheses and beliefs (paranormal beliefs, pseudo-scientific theories, etc.), including socio-historic hypotheses (such as Marxism, and thus, conspiracy theories) [17].

The Epistemological Arguments: Occam’s and Hanlon’s Razors, and the Burden of Proof

First, by virtue of the scientific principle of Occam’s razor, simpler hypotheses have always to be preferred to more complicated ones in order to explain any phenomenon. Considering that every conspiracy theory implies an interpretative extra step compared to their corresponding official versions, every conspiracy theory will be epistemologically more demanding than its official version counterpart. For example, to explain Diana’s death by an accident due to alcohol consumption is, whether true or false, far simpler than the explanation by a plot organized by the secret services. The assassination of a celebrity by a lone and mad person is a more parsimonious explanation than the same assassination by an alleged lone and mad person, in reality being part of a vast and covert plot including many other powerful people.

Even terrorist assaults, that Basham and Dentith describe as “official conspiracy theories”, are simpler than the “alternative conspiracy theories”: the 9/11 conspiracy theory involves an “extra” conspiracy, the (false) terrorist plot and the extra plot in order to conceal the “real” conspiracy (by Al Qaeda). It would engage far more people, and would entail far more organization than the action of a small terrorist cell. Then, the official versions are always simpler (i.e., more parsimonious) than conspiracy theories to explain any event [6].

Second, by virtue of the burden of proof principle, advocates of conspiracy theories must give strong reasons in order to abandon the official version. As conspiracy theories are epistemologically demanding hypotheses, they necessitate high levels of proof to be accepted (such as declassified documents, documents leaks, confessions of leaders, whistleblowers, etc.). This principle is summarized by skeptics as “extraordinary claims require extraordinary levels of proof”, a principle widely used for judging paranormal hypotheses. As they contradict the current view of science, they would be accepted only with a wide and compelling array of evidence[6].

Apparent incongruities in zoomed pictures, slow motion looped videos may not be taken as good reasons, or evidence, to abandon even a seemingly unsatisfying official version. These pseudo-proofs are overused by conspiracy theorists to dismiss official versions (as their only “empirical arguments”) but can often be explained by simpler causes than a conspiracy. They have been called errant data [19].

During the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015 for example, conspiracists pointed at the flak jackets worn by the people who were filming the assault from the rooftop of the building. For every spectators of the video, the presence of these flak jackets became very strange. The fact that those people wear these flak jackets was taken as a proof that the attack was planned by the authorities, and not a sudden attack from terrorists. It is well known in cognitive and social psychology that the presence of incongruities and coincidences trigger an appeal for explanations [20]. Conspiracy hypotheses will readily fulfill this need.

In reality, the bureau of an investigative journalists’ agency was in front of Charlie Hebdo’s office. The journalists wore flak jackets used in the war zones they regularly cover. Most if not all errant data have been similarly explained, for example by the NASA about Moon landing, or in the numerous debunking arguments about the 9/11 case. Reliance on errant data, sometimes on blurred pictures or videos, or isolated testimony, is reminiscent of paranormal videos and pictures of ghosts or other strange phenomena (such as the Loch Ness pictures of the “monster”) and is of course far from a rational mode of reasoning.

Errant data must be first kept unexplained, and corroborated by other sources, in order to become a clue (but still not a proof) against the official version. A second razor has to be passed through: Hanlon’s razor, which states: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”. This may be seen as a kind of “psychosocial” version of Occam’s razor.

Potential inconsistencies (i.e., clues, that are errant data kept unexplained) in the official version must be first explained by stupidity (error), which is more parsimonious than malice (plan). In the case of conspiracy theories, stupidity would refer to incompetence, expediency (and some add defense secrets[7]). But even when incompetence, expediency and defense secrets may be ruled out, the presence of unexplained errant data is still insufficient to refute the official version. Let us see why.

Where Burdens of Proof Must Achieve

In science indeed, even recognized elements of disconfirming evidence (what errant data are often not, as we mentioned above) have never been sufficient to disprove a theory. As philosophers of science such as Irme Lakatos [21] and Thomas Kuhn [22] argued, contrary to a strict Popperian view, any theory or hypothesis will not be refuted by a conflicting result. The latter may be explained by ad hoc hypotheses (measurement errors, etc.), unexplained results (“anomalies”), or even ignored.

In Lakatos’ terms, every theory is always surrounded by an “ocean of anomalies”. Purely epistemic refutation of a theory by contradicting elements never happens. Contradicting results must increase and be replicated by independent researchers, but even in that case, no refutation occurs. In Thomas Kuhn’s terms, the scientific field enters in a “revolutionary” state, where original ideas are requested (scientists will turn to philosophical ideas, old theories, etc.). Revolution (i.e., refutation of the old theory) will only occur when a new paradigm is proposed, in replacement of the ancient.

In Kuhn’s relativistic account, the new paradigm is incommensurable with the ancient, and thus there is no scientific growth. But in Lakatos’ model, the new research program must explain what explains the ancient, and bring some new hypotheses, some of which having been corroborated in Popper’s sense (i.e., not having been refuted through some experimental tests). In simple terms, to be considered as false, or being disconfirmed, an old theory or hypothesis must be replaced by a new and better one.

Then, in order to refute the official version, a conspiracy theory cannot only raise (even legitimate) doubts on the official version; it must specify how and why and when the conspiracy occurred. Conspiracy theorists should not only try to find negative clues or “proofs” against the official version, but positive clues or “proofs” in favor of the conspiracy hypothesis.

In order to ascertain the less parsimonious claim of a conspiracy, conspiracists must give strong arguments (confessions, papers leaks, etc.) proving the conspiracy, and not only apparent incongruities in the official version (errant data), because once again, extraordinary claims require extraordinary level of proof. Concerning the 9/11 case, Chomsky noted that a fully covered plot had to include thousands of people in the head of various domains of administration (aviation, army, secret services, etc.), and thus was simply nearly impossible[8]. In a nutshell, conspiracy theories, which are more exactly suspicions about the official version, must be replaced by conspiracy inquiries, as was done for example in the Watergate affair.

Note that until the day that the inquiry has reported its results, the conspiracy hypothesis has to be considered as false, and not potentially true, because everything may be considered as potentially true. In science, what is not currently proved has to be considered as false, until strong evidence leads to consider it as (temporarily) true.

The same epistemological argument has been raised by Michael Shermer against creationism and revisionism [23]. Both creationists and revisionists repeatedly point at seemingly inconsistent or unexplained facts or details, in order to dismiss the whole theory/official history. Even if these highlighted errant data were real inconsistencies (which as for conspiracies are very often not), this would not prove that the “official version” is false (and it should first be explained by error before malice).

The opponents would have to build a new theory that explains all the known facts AND the purported inconsistencies, thus bring positive clues or proofs of their claims, what would necessitate a massive level of proof. Instead, creationists and revisionists gesticulate about (often only apparent) errant data. They have nothing more to offer, as conspiracy theorists.

The Inversion of the Burden of Proof

Note that conspiracy theorists, just as revisionists and creationists, regularly use the fallacy of the inversion of the burden of proof. Creationists and revisionists sometimes ask scientists and historians to give “proofs” of evolution and the Holocaust, whereas such “proofs” cannot exist (so refutation is always possible). In Shermer’s terms, there are a huge number of converging evidences — positive clues, and not errant data about a rival hypothesis — in favor of evolution and Holocaust, such as experimental tests, predictions with respect to evolution, and numerous official documents, confessions, testimonies with respect to the Holocaust.

Similarly, members of Reopen 9/11 associations ask defenders of the official version to prove this version, which they consider as extraordinary, with extraordinary proofs. But this is not how science works: the official version already explains a lot of (if not all) events, is supported by a considerable amount of converging evidence, but as any theory, it can never be considered as definitively true.

It may be considered as temporarily and plausibly “true”, until a more parsimonious theory explains the same data, or until a new theory is consensually viewed as explaining the same amount of data, plus some new data (thus being supported by new converging evidence) [21]. No defender of any theory can be asked to prove that his/her theory is definitely true [19] [77]. The burden of proof is obviously on the shoulders of the defenders of the new, less parsimonious, potentially revolutionary theory, and the higher the novelty — or non-parsimony —, the higher the level of proof needed.

Moreover, defenders of the official version cannot prove the absence of a given conspiracy, contrary to the defenders of the conspiracy who can — and have to — prove its presence. This is what posits the ad ignorantiam fallacy, according to which we can never prove the absence of something (such as a unicorn or extraterrestrials), contrary to its presence. For example, it is impossible to definitively prove that Lee Harvey Oswald was acting alone (as nearly every known event in his life could be related to a conspiracy), but it is in principle possible under investigation to prove that he was related to a conspiracy, with recordings or documents. Thus, the burden of proof becomes still heavier for the conspiracy theory, as it is less parsimonious and more “provable” than the official version.