The Epistemological Status of Conspiracy Theory
Excerpt from Chapter 18, The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty
The term conspiracy theory is one of the most potent epithets that can be hurled at a writer or speaker. Originally, the phrase simply meant a theory … of a conspiracy—theories ranging from the speculative, plausible, likely, to the absurd. Today, the phrase is almost always used to delegitimize and dismiss its target. The phrase represents a condensed, shorthand means of labeling a claim negatively and humiliating the claimant, disqualifying the claimant and the claim a priori.
In the United States, the term “conspiracy theory” is often credited to a disinformation or deflection campaign of the CIA in connection with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy—to discredit and dismiss all but the official narrative concerning that event.
But the Oxford English Dictionary finds the first known usage of the term in a 1909 review of a doctoral dissertation in The American Historical Review.[1] The reviewer, Allen Johnson, used the phrase to describe a theory that P. Orman Ray, the author of the dissertation, revived to explain the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise is unimportant here. But I decided to track down this text to check its use of the term conspiracy theory. I found that nothing in Johnson’s review of Ray’s dissertation suggested that the claim made by Ray should be dismissed because it was a conspiracy theory. In fact, Johnson suggests that Ray made good use of the existing materials in support of his theory: “No new manuscript material has been found to support the theory, but the available bits of evidence have been collated carefully in this volume.”[2] Allen only takes Ray to task for not providing sufficient evidence to back his claim, but he does not reject it for being a “conspiracy theory.” That is, the term “conspiracy theory” has not always served to discredit those who proposed such theories.
More recently, the conspiracy theory question has become a subject of a growing scholarly debate including historians, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and, within the last twenty years, philosophers. It is curious that philosophers are latecomers to this debate because discussions of the conspiracy theory question began with a philosopher. While most if not all the psychological research on conspiracy theorists and conspiracist thinking is worthless,[3] a review of the philosophical literature should prove rewarding.
Karl Popper was arguably the first major thinker to treat conspiracy theory. In The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), the philosopher introduced the conspiracy theory as a type of explanation that should be excluded from the social sciences.[4] In volume 2 of The Open Society, Popper defined the conspiracy theory of society as follows:
It is the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon (sometimes it is a hidden interest which has first to be revealed), and who have planned and conspired to bring it about.[5]
Popper called the conspiracy theory of society “a typical result of the secularization of a religious superstition,” an explanation of historical causality that replaces the causal agency of the gods or God with that of “sinister pressure groups whose wickedness is responsible for all the evils we suffer from—such as the Learned Elders of Zion, or the monopolists, or the capitalists, or the imperialists.”[6]
Popper’s problem with the conspiracy theory of society was not that conspiracies do not happen but rather that they seldom succeed. Conspiracy theory, he suggested, grants too much credence to the power of the human actors involved. Instead of drawing on conspiracy theory, Popper argued that the main task of the social sciences should be to explain why intentional human actions (including conspiracies) often result in unintended outcomes, or why conspiracies fail:
Why is this so? Why do achievements differ so widely from aspirations? Because this is usually the case in social life, conspiracy or no conspiracy. Social life is not only a trial of strength between opposing groups: it is action within a resilient or brittle framework of institutions and traditions, and it creates—apart from any conscious counter-action—many unforeseen reactions in this framework, some of them perhaps even unforeseeable.[7]
Actions have unintended as well as intended consequences because they take place in a social context that cannot be fully predicted or controlled by social actors. The conspiracy theory of society is wrong, Popper claimed, because it holds that the results of actions are necessarily those intended by the actors interested in such results. For this reason, as Popper would see it, we should reject “conspiracy theories” about the Great Reset.
Popper defined the conspiracy theory of society as a thoroughgoing explanation of all outcomes:
The conspiracy theory of society cannot be true because it amounts to the assertion that all results, even those which at first sight do not seem to be intended by anybody, are the intended results of the actions of people who are interested in these results (emphasis mine.)[8]
It’s clear from this statement that Popper’s charge does not apply to all conspiracy theories. It only includes conspiracy theories that purport to explain everything. Popper admitted that conspiracies “are typical social phenomena.”[9] He claimed that most conspiracies fail, but that implies that some conspiracies succeed.
Conspiracy theories, or better, conspiracy hypotheses, it would seem, merely explain some outcomes in terms of attempted conspiracies. Theories that don’t aim at explaining every outcome in terms of a singular, overarching conspiracy are based on an acknowledgement that conspiracies do transpire and that some outcomes are the results of conspiracies. An attempted bank robbery involving more than one person is technically a conspiracy. An explanation of the plot, without first-hand knowledge of details, is technically a conspiracy theory. It seems that nothing in Popper’s definition of the conspiracy theory of society suggests that conspiracy hypotheses should be dismissed in advance. Likewise, it appears to be reasonable to conclude that conspiracy theory should be retained as one of the explanatory modes for understanding social outcomes.