Can knowledge claims be used to attack? Yes. What should be done about it? That depends. These questions are inspired by Adam Riggio’s article “The Dangers of Intellectual Honesty in a World of Lies” (2022). There is quite a bit… Read More ›
conspiracy theories
An Autopsy of the Origins of HIV/AIDS, Lee Basham
Abstract This note introduces to a wider audience the hypothesis that global HIV infection is, on an inference to the best explanation model, a result of mistakes made in the production of the Hilary Koprowski (CHAT) Oral Polio Vaccine that… Read More ›
But There Is No Here Any Longer Anywhere: Review of Phillips and Milner’s You Are Here, Adam Riggio
There is arguably no issue of greater urgency than the subject matter of You Are Here: the epistemic breakdown of public life. This is an ongoing crisis snowballing far faster than the sluggish pace of academic publishing. Whitney Phillips and… Read More ›
Reply to Neil Levy’s “Is Conspiracy Theorising Irrational?” David Coady
Neil Levy says that he rejects something he calls my “solution to the problem” (2019 fn 3). This is doubly wrong, since I not only don’t advocate the so-called solution he ascribes to me, I also don’t think the so-called… Read More ›
Intellectual Vice and Social Networks? Cailin O’Connor
In “Fake News, Conspiracy, and Intellectual Vice” Marco Meyer (2019) presents findings from an investigation of the role of intellectual vices—intellectual arrogance, intellectual vanity, boredom, and intellectual fragility—in the uptake of conspiracy theories and fake news. Using online survey tools,… Read More ›
When Is it Right to be Wrong? A Response to Lewandowsky, Kozyreva, and Ladyman, Neil Levy
In “Is Conspiracy Theorising Irrational?” (Levy 2019) I argued that conspiratorial ideation—defined as the acceptance (not the generation) of conspiracy theories—might be much more rational than we tend to think. I suggested such ideation might be subjectively rational—rational for the… Read More ›
What Rationality? A Comment on Levy’s “Is Conspiracy Theorising Irrational?” Stephan Lewandowsky, Anastasia Kozyreva, and James Ladyman
Neil Levy (2019) provides several new angles on the long-standing question about the rationality, or lack thereof, of people who accept objectively unwarranted conspiracy theories. Levy’s position rests on two arguments. First, accepting conspiracy theories is subjectively rational for many… Read More ›
What Evolutionary Biology Can Tell Us About Cooperation (and Trust) in Online Networks, Toby Handfield
In their introduction to this special issue, Alfano and Klein (2019) pose two neatly contrasting questions for social epistemologists who want to take our epistemic networks seriously. First, what sort of individual epistemic properties should we cultivate, given the social… Read More ›
An Interview with Steve Fuller on Conspiracy Theories and Post-Truth, Chantelle Gordon
I am a year 12 high school student from Sydney, Australia. For one of my subjects, ‘Society and Culture’, I am currently completing a large scale major work, called a ‘Personal Interest Project’. For this project I have decided to… Read More ›
Is Conspiracy Theorising Irrational? Neil Levy
Conspiratorial ideation—as I will call the disposition to be accepting of unwarranted conspiracy theories—is widely regarded as a product of irrationality or epistemic vice. I argue that it is not: the dispositions that underlie it are not rationally criticisable. Some… Read More ›