Pol Pardini Gispert

According to a recent account of disinformation, disinformation is content that “generates ignorance” (Simion in Eur Rev 32(4):321–34, 2024a; Episteme 21(4):1208–1219, 2024b). The view improves upon previous accounts that focused primarily or exclusively upon the potential for disinformation to induce false belief since these views ignored a further functional connection to inducing doubts that generate ignorance. While this proposal gives us a broader understanding of what disinformation can be, it retains the idea that disinformation functions as evidence that provides incremental confirmation for falsehoods. Thus, this approach implies (in line with previous views) that disinformants need to capture the attention of agents, present these agents with content that will be treated as evidence, and hope that this content will change an agent’s belief state in epistemically undesirable ways. Certainly, this is an apt description of some disinformation tactics, but it is not an adequate definition of what disinformation is. In some successful real-world disinformation campaigns, a disinformant wants the audience not to gather and process evidence. In some cases, evidence that provides incremental confirmation for falsehoods will also provide the audience with the knowledge they seek. After arguing that there are documented disinformation tactics and campaigns that don’t fit with Simion’s approach, I shall offer an alternative pragmatic approach. On this view, disinformation can come in the form of evidence that’s misleading in ways that the agent doesn’t see, but it can also come in the form of content that makes it evident that the evidential resources the agent might need to advance her inquiries is corrupted. Rather than think of disinformation as essentially epistemic (e.g., functioning to increase the inaccuracy of attitudes), we should see it as essentially pragmatic, used by disinformants to minimise the probability that agents pursuing threatening ends will succeed in their efforts. In the special case (which is our focus here) where a disinformant is threatened by an agent’s inquiry, it is content that’s used to minimize the probability that the inquisitive agent achieves her ends by coming to know the answers to questions. This includes both misleading first-order evidence to lead agents away from the truth, but also accurate higher-order evidence that confirms that evidential resources have been degraded.

Why do people persist in commitments that threaten their happiness, security, and comfort? Why do some of our most central, identity-defining commitments resist the effects of reasoning and critical reflection? Drawing on real-life examples, empirical psychology, and philosophical reflection, this book argues that these commitments involve an ethical stance called devotion, which plays a pervasive—but often hidden—role in human life. Devotion typically involves sacralizing certain values, goals, or relationships. To sacralize a value is to treat it as inviolable (trade-offs with ordinary values are forbidden), incontestable (even contemplating such trade-offs is prohibited), and dialectically invulnerable (no rational considerations can disrupt the agent’s commitment to the value). Philosophy of Devotion offers a detailed philosophical account and defense of these features. Devotion and the sacralization of values can be reasonable; indeed, a life involving meaningful, sustained commitment depends on these stances. Without devotion, we risk an existential condition called normative dissipation, in which all of our commitments become etiolated. Yet devotion can easily go wrong, deforming into the individual and group fanaticism that have become pervasive features of modern social life. The book provides an alternative to fanaticism, investigating the way in which we can express non-pathological forms of devotion. We can be devoted through affirmation and through what is termed the deepening move, which treats the agent’s central commitments as systematically inchoate. Each stance enables a wholehearted form of devotion that nevertheless preserves flexibility and openness, avoiding the dangers of fanaticism on the one hand and normative dissipation on the other. (The attached file contains the introductory chapter.)

In much of the current academic and public discussion, conspiracy theories are portrayed as a negative phenomenon, linked to misinformation, mistrust in experts and institutions, and political propaganda. Rather surprisingly, however, philosophers working on this topic have been reluctant to incorporate a negatively evaluative aspect when either analyzing or engineering the concept conspiracy theory. In this paper, we present empirical data on the nature of the concept conspiracy theory from five studies designed to test the existence, prevalence and exact form of an evaluative dimension to the ordinary concept conspiracy theory. These results reveal that, while there is a descriptive concept of conspiracy theory, the predominant use of conspiracy theory is deeply evaluative, encoding information about epistemic deficiency and often also derogatory and disparaging information. On the basis of these results, we present a new strategy for engineering conspiracy theory to promote theoretical investigations and institutional discussions of this phenomenon. We argue for engineering conspiracy theory to encode an epistemic evaluation, and to introduce a descriptive expression—such as ‘conspiratorial explanation’—to refer to the purely descriptive concept conspiracy theory.