Most people are suspicious of conspiracy theories. The claims that water fluoridation is mass poisoning, that the UN deliberately released the COVID-19 virus, and that George Bush was responsible for 9/11 are, to many of us, obviously absurd. Nevertheless, it has proven surprisingly difficult to explain why we should be suspicious of conspiracy theories as a class, in any general way.
In this article, I present a solution to this problem. I identify a general feature of conspiracy theories and …
Read moreMost people are suspicious of conspiracy theories. The claims that water fluoridation is mass poisoning, that the UN deliberately released the COVID-19 virus, and that George Bush was responsible for 9/11 are, to many of us, obviously absurd. Nevertheless, it has proven surprisingly difficult to explain why we should be suspicious of conspiracy theories as a class, in any general way.
In this article, I present a solution to this problem. I identify a general feature of conspiracy theories and argue that this feature makes it impossible for high credences regarding conspiracy theories to be rationally justified. More specifically, I argue that conspiracy theories are claims that, if true, imply that certain skeptical-hypothesis-like claims (“cover-up claims”) are extremely likely to be true. As a consequence, if we think that high credences regarding skeptical hypotheses cannot be rationally justified, we should also think that high credences regarding conspiracy theories cannot be justified.
