Thinking about Conspiracy Theories with Wittgenstein
What are we to make of the egregious claims typical of the conspiracy theories that seem to have exploded in recent years, especially since the development of social media: e.g., that birds are not real, that Australia doesn’t exist, that history has all been a lie, that the Earth is not a globe, and so on, ad abundantiam?
In his notes published posthumously as On Certainty, Wittgenstein reminds us of the different ways we may go wrong. In particular, he draws our attention to the difference between mistakes, which exist in the space of reasons and which may be corrected, and what we might call unhinged errors, which are non-rational and may be cured (or not, depending on the source) rather than corrected. The former are unwitting deviations from settled learning, unintended missteps in the execution of a procedure, or the making of poor decisions. What he has in mind when it comes to the latter is the sincere—i.e., made without philosophical intent—denial of basic truisms; that is to say, “empirical claims which we affirm without special testing … [and] which play a peculiar logical role in the system of our empirical propositions.”
The fact that claims made with philosophical intent too often sound unhinged, when set in an everyday context, should alert us to something philosophically interesting about such claims—at least, this is Wittgenstein’s specifically philosophical focus. However, an interesting aspect of Wittgenstein’s discussion is that it covers a broad number of cases ranging from those where a denial would mean we would rightly be concerned for someone’s cognitive capacity to others where we might dismiss it as simply wacky—something that raises questions about what errors count as mistakes or, conversely, what claims count as truisms.
So, what about conspiracy theories? Are these unhinged errors, in the sense above, even if they just deviate from settled learning? Or are they mistakes that can be corrected by better epistemic practice and better understanding? The answer is that it depends on what is being claimed, by whom, and in what context. Most are unhinged errors but may occupy an uncanny liminal space between the denial and ordinary empirical claims and those we affirm without special testing, which is why they throw us off balance. They are unreasonable challenges to what Wittgenstein calls a ‘world-picture’, a holistic cognitive framework for understanding, that are mostly motivated by value differences and non-epistemic considerations, and which resist being straightforwardly addressed by reasoned argument.
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