Factual, But Not Truthful
Here at the Philosophy Carpark, I have been busy writing about conspiracy theories for the Fortean Times — which is definitely an unlocked achievement as far as I’m concerned. In particular, I have been writing about the recent flurry of books that seek to examine why conspiracy theories have become so popular in recent years.
It is of course something of a loaded question, and many of these books come across as just an attempt by the intellectually self-righteous to dismiss opinions they don’t like on the grounds that they are guilty of some kind of epistemic error. They tend to have a lot to say about why people come to believe these absurd claims — the pressures of groupthink, a naturally tendency towards confirmation bias, the desire for social capital — but offer no explanation as to how rationally respectable people like themselves manage to transcend these otherwise universal features of human cognition. It raises the suspicion that the study of conspiracy theories has become something of a conspiracy theory in itself …
Part of the problem is that it is very difficult to define what makes something a “conspiracy theory” beyond the fact that it is something believed by the wrong sort of person. And so one usually ends up gesturing feebly towards some outdated philosophy of science and some superficial claims about the scientific method, and trying to show why the purported conspiracy theory fails to satisfy some highly abstract logical principles dimly recalled from that seminar you didn’t take at college. It’s usually Karl Popper’s (1934) The Logic of Scientific Discovery, and the claim that a genuine scientific theory is one that is falsifiable — that it makes a concrete prediction about the world and therefore runs the risk of being conclusively shown to be false. A good conspiracy theory by contrast can always be amended to fit any evidence to the contrary. After all, the lack of physical debris at the Roswell crash-site just proves that the Government is trying to cover it all up.
Popper grew up in Vienna during the interwar period, and had his fair share of exposure to conspiracy theories. He was initially attracted to Marxism, but became suspicious of its rather lacklustre predictions. Are the workers miserable? Well, that is because they are being exploited by the systematic injustices of western capitalism. Are the workers happy? Then that is because they are suffering from “false consciousness” and are being brainwashed by the systematic injustices of western capitalism. Popper suggested that if your favorite theory can explain everything, then it doesn’t actually explain anything at all — but then again, he also had to flee Vienna in the 1930s to escape precisely the sort of people who shoot you in the street if you don’t listen to them about the systematic injustices of western capitalism.
Popper had a similar problem with psychoanalysis, which was all the rage at the time. He noted that if an individual doesn’t act in accordance with their diagnosis, this is not because they doesn’t have such a condition, but only that they are “in denial” about their situation. It is interesting to note that neither Marxism nor psychoanalysis tend to feature in recent discussions about conspiracy theories, presumably because they are believed by the right sort of people.
For Popper then, the fundamental feature of good scientific thinking is that theories must be rigorously tested against the evidence, and that any falsified theories must be summarily abandoned. Early critics noted however that it is very difficult in practice to conclusively falsify a scientific theory, as any potential test will always involve a great deal of additional theoretical assumptions. A failed experiment therefore can just as easily be blamed on the scientific theory in question, the reliability of the equipment, or on any other of the theoretical assumptions involved. Popper disagreed — and argued that his critics had failed to take into account his broader views on how scientists evaluate their theories.
Other critics pointed out that science doesn’t really work the way that Popper suggests, since a falsified experiment is usually taken as impetus to refine a theory rather than simply to abandon it. A lot of scientific progress has been made by tweaking a problematic theory. Popper disagreed — and argued that what he really meant was that one should always prefer the theory that ran the greatest risk of falsification, since that offered the greatest chance of reward.
It was finally proved that there is no meaningful way to compare the falsifiability of different scientific theories, as they all make an infinite number of specific predictions about the world. Popper disagreed — and spent the remainder of his career studiously ignoring the problem. He remained adamant however that the willingness to accept the falsification of a favorite theory in the face of contrary evidence was the hallmark of good scientific thinking, and something to which we all should aspire.